Podcasts from the Edge

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Podcasts from the Edge episodes

September 13, 2025 Can Cyril get a US trade deal over the line?
President Cyril Ramaphosa goes to the US in the next few weeks to address the United Nations General Assembly. But will his trade negotiators currently in Washington have made enough progress by then to allow Ramaphosa to fly from New York to Washington to sign a trade deal that significantly reduces the crippling 30% tariffs US President Donald Trump has imposed on imports from South Africa? Former South African newspaper editor Phillip van Niekerk, now living in Washington, thinks a deal may be on the cards. “But, you know, South Africa has really dropped the ball (diplomatically in the US) And this goes back a long way. This doesn't, doesn't start with the Trump administration. It doesn't start now, in 2025. There's deep relationships between South Africa and the United States that back a long, long way.,” Van Niekerk tell Peter Bruce in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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57 min
September 02, 2025 Jumping Jack Flash just wants gas gas gas
“I do not see imported liquified natural gas as a long-term solution for South Africa or even a base power solution. I see it as a, as a peaking and a balancing solution,” energy analysts Chris Yelland tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. But gas is all the rage. Minerals minister Gwede Mantashe wants to spend a fortune building new infrastructure and South Africa has built its urgent new trade proposals with Donald Trump around a huge new standing order for imported LNG. "Gas base supply is an option for South Africa. Base supply becomes an option when you've got significant indigenous gas resources where you drill a hole in the ground and natural gas comes out. You don't have to drill a hole in a foreign country, take out the gas, turn it into a liquid, transport it thousands of kilometres across the sea, convert it back into a gas, compress it, and pipe it to where it's needed.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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1 hr 3 min
August 21, 2025 People, we’re tired
South African researcher, author and analyst Prof Richard Calland tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge “ are fatigued by a weak government, by extremely precarious socioeconomic conditions and by a sense of going backwards of not making progress. But it's easy to criticise our president. It's easy to say he's not ruthless enough, not decisive enough, not strategic enough but we have to maintain a sense of perspective and balance in our commentary.” And the voters and upcoming elections? “The ANC appears now to be in terminal decline, and I've long held the view that once the breach was broken and the a ANC lost its majority, that it might well enter a free fall period [and] I think we're in that. And of course once Ramaphosa goes and, and he's the last of that generation of serious politicians, then you are in a sense, you're dropping down a division.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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52 min
July 24, 2025 Shooting the Messenger
The DA’s spokesperson on foreign affairs, Emma Powell, found herself at the wrong end of a powerful assault by the State last week after she notified the country that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Special Envoy to the US (and, subsequently, to North America), Mcebisi Jonas, had done little or no work trying to heal our battered relationship with the Donald Trump White House in the 90 plus days since he was appointed. In fact, the Americans wanted nothing to do with him and had declined his request for a diplomatic visa. The National Security Council, which reports directly to Ramaphosa alerted The Sowetan to a report it has done on Powell and accused her of running the country down during a trip to the US in February. The newspaper splashed the story as the Presidency put out a statement calling her part of “a right wing nexus” acting against South Africa’s interests abroad. Powell tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that this is nonsense. "It's an empirical fact that the ANC had done nothing of value or meaning in order to shore up and rebuild trust with the United States in order to safeguard South Africa's interests in regards to our continued inclusion in Agoa beyond September,” she says. “We were trying to do our part and waving South Africa’s flag”.

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49 min
July 18, 2025 When a Trillion Rand might not be enough
President Cyril Ramaphosa said recently the State would spend more than a trillion rand over the next three years on building and repairing infrastructure. It sounds like a lot but it’s slightly more than just R300bn a year. Is that it? Public Works Minister Dean MacPherson tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge the R1trn is just what the State has at the ready to spend with private sector partners. If the take-up is strong – across rail, ports, water, health, education -- it could double the State’s contribution and get the country to where we are investing the equivalent of more than 25% of our GDP – that finally breaks the growth barrier and gets people working. But government is slow and disjointed and MacPherson wants to see more spending coming through Infrastructure South Africa, which reports to him. Eskom’s transmission business, for instance, is buying land for the 14000km of new lines we need. Yet a lot of the land it needs to acquire already belongs to the government. So why pay for it?

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55 min
July 09, 2025 "The Americans Really Want to Trade With Us"
As US President Donald Trump sends final notice to the South African government that he will impose a 30% tariff on its exports to the US on August 1, an Afrikaner delegation to the US, fronted by Freedom Front Plus leader Corne Mulder, has returned with a short list of points it says were given to them by senior White House officials when they met last week. "They really want to trade with us,” Mulder tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. "But the Trump administration feels very strongly about these political hurdles that need to get out of the way.” The four principles — that the ANC denounce the singing of Kill the Boer, that all expropriation of property is fairly compensated, that all US investment into South Africa be free of BEE regulations and that farm attacks be classified as a priority crime — are, for the most part, almost impossible to comply with. But then again President Cyril Ramaphosa has nothing substantial on the table which which to beat back the Trump tariff assault. Still, he has wriggled his way out of tougher puzzles than the one the Afrikaners returned from Washington with. Would he consider even trying? Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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42 min
May 06, 2025 Why Enoch and the Treasury are fair game
There’ve been voices raised around the failure, twice, of finance minister Enoch Godongwana to pass a 2025 budget through parliament, each time trying in vain to slip in a VAT increase to cover for the ANCs inability to grow the economy. We should not, the argument goes, be flinging mud at an institution so central to our democracy, actually mentioned in the Constitution, whatever the politics may be. That’s just nonsense, veteran financial journalist and former Treasury spokesman Jabulani Sikhakhane tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. “To whom much power is given, much is expected,” says Sikhakhane. “We criticise the judiciary so why would you not criticise the Reserve Bank or the National Treasury? The judiciary is a creation of the Constitution too. I don’t think they should be protected. To disagree with the Reserve Bank or the Treasury about policy or the decisions they makes very healthy for democracy.”

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46 min
April 29, 2025 Is Helen Zille bad for the DA brand?
Former DA leader Tony Leon, in his new book, Being There, says DA Federal Executive chair and former party leader Helen Zille may have many positive qualities but that “I doubt the party brand is enhanced by her continued presence at the top of the organisation”. Peter Bruce asks him in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge whether he still believes that and whether he thinks the DA is right to fight to stay in the Government of National Unity despite being the principle cause of failure of the National Treasury’s two attempts to increase the rate of VAT. How does it fight coming local and national elections as part of a government run by the ANC?

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41 min
April 11, 2025 "Putin stole too much..."
“Over 20 years,” writer, investor and campaigner Bill Browder tells Peter Bruce in this Special Edition of Podcasts from the Edge, “Vladimir Putin and his friends have stolen a trillion dollars from Russia.” He has to distract his people or they’d lynch him and It’s why he can’t stop his invasion of Ukraine. Russia today, Browder says, is a much more totalitarian state than apartheid South Africa ever was. In this wide ranging discussion the author of Red Notice and, more recently, Freezing Order, reveals his favourite country in the world is South Africa. He has a home in Cape Town but dare not visit for fear that Putin would ask the South Africans to arrest him and hand him over. And he worries that they would.

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33 min
April 09, 2025 What Business Wants from a GNU
Business for South Africa chairman Martin Kingston tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that business would prefer the current Government of National Unity to stick together despite the current crisis over the DA’s decision not to support the budget. Business is deeply involved in Operation Vulindlela, the reform process inside the Presidency but, says Kingston, they’re not going to interfere in the politics.

"It’s much better in our view to stay the course,” he says. "We are deeply concerned that ... there is going to be either a minority government or a change in the composition of the GNU that undermines certainty and predictability, that undermines confidence, and confidence levels are now very thin, or where we can’t see the reforms that are taking place then of course we’re allow to express our opinion. What we’re not going to do is apply pressure, as has been suggested, to any of the parties. That would be wholly inapprpropriate. We work with the government of the day.”.

"What the investor community require is the certainty that key policies are going to be the subject of appropriate structural reform and that where decisions are taken they are subsequently implemented."

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37 min

About Podcasts from the Edge

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Peter Bruce, veteran South African newspaper editor and commentator, interviews the country's social and political leaders and experts in a weekly effort to explain what is actually going on in this…