Podcasts from the Edge

Former Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon has harsh words for the Independent Electoral Commission and praise for ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa and ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula following last week’s tumultuous election results. As he heads off to join the DA’s post-election negotiating team he tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the Constitution wasn’t designed to deal with a collapse in the ruling party vote that occurred last week. It gives political leaders precious little time to stitch together a government of different parties that can guarantee stability for a long period. The Germans take months. The Belgians once took more than a year. We have two weeks.

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Trade specialist and CEO of XA Global Trade Advisory Donald MacKay is unimpressed with the good press trade, industry and competition minister Ebrahim Patel has been getting (and giving himself) lately. At his lyrical best in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge he tells Peter Bruce that far from kick starting a re-industrialisation of SA, Patel's industry master plans have created a subsidised elite trading at the expense of the public and smaller competitors who can't afford to join the club.

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The sun will rise after the May 29 election, an ANC/EFF coalition is highly unlikely and there are real signs that some of President Cyril Ramaphosa's reforms are beginning to find traction, economist and analyst Peter Attard Montalto tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts From the Edge. A big problem on both sides of the election though is the continuing failure of industrial policy to even begin to re-industrialise the economy, Attard Montalto says and repeats the description of ANC industrial policy he used in his Business Day column on Monday. It is he says, "a smouldering radioactive waste pile".

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They have an economic policy at last!! After years of chiding and goading the official opposition, in his newspaper columns, to produce an economic policy it has one at last, thanks to new policy chief Mat Cuthbert, Peter Bruce was so shocked he forgot to look at the time in this special edition of Podcasts from the Edge. It’s pro market rather than pro-business, says Cuthbert, but they’ll cut the minister of trade, industry and competition and the president from any involvement in big company mergers. That would be a start…

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In 2020 young Mbali Ntuli took on the might of the Democratic Alliance establishment and ran for the leadership of the party against John Steenhuisen. Not unexpectedly, she lost and not long afterwards branched out on her own — not, like many of the black leaders who left the DA after the last general election, to start her own party or to join another one but to start her own civil society organisation. She founded the Ground Work Collective and started simply doing what she loves — civic work in communities around the country and mainly her native KwaZulu-Natal. So successful has she been that Ground Work has found the funding to put 4000 election observers in place for the May 29 poll. “A lot of the stuff that I said when I ran for the DA leadership was what I wanted to do anyway,” she tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. “It would have been great to do it with a big institutions and a big machine because I think it is the kind of stuff South Africans really want … I didn’t join another party and I didn’t start one. I wanted to show that I could go back into communities and continue the work that I’ve been doing for two decades. And I put a lot of my own money in initially because people don’t really believe politicians and obviously a big part of the criticism I received the I ran for the DA leadership was that I was young and inexperienced which was absolutely not true so for me this was also a big Fuck You. I could do it!” The discussion centres on how politics works in KZN. These are Ntuli’s streets after all….

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The ANC will win the forthcoming elections, the DA will come second and the EFF third, former ANC exile intelligence leader Oyama Mabandla tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. “Even if the ANC misfires,” he says, “there is still no alternative to it. In South Africa black people vote for black parties.” Mabandla came home to a business career that has seen him make deputy CEO of SAA and chairman of Vodacom and, more recently, a widely recognised public intellectual. His new book, Soul of A Nation is, says Bruce, the best and most easily digestible recording of the first 30 years of democracy available. In the book Mabandla argues that under ANC rule, or the last half of it, things have gone so badly wrong that the only way out is a new Codesa, a new national convention to hammer out a new consensus and a new future. Otherwise citizens have become so alienated from our politics the only certain result is a repeat of the 2021 violence…

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Peter Bruce talks about being a columnist in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge. He approves of the notion that while columnists are nominally journalists they are driven by their own opinions and a powerful drive to grab the attention of their audience. Citing London Times columnist Matthew Parr’s he describes writing a column for a living as “striking poses which will only convince others if you yourself can temporarily inhabit the belief … (you) take a brief, elbow ambiguity aside, an go full pelt”.It also means trouble. Bruce reads a letter about him in The Sunday Times from foreign minister Naledi Pandor in which she suggests the editors remove him. This after she felt, after months of praise directed at her, that she was on the wrong end of a column he wrote a week earlier. His response? “Well done minister, fire the journalist. You’d be perfectly comfortable among your friends in Moscow and Tehran.”.

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Most of the import tariffs protecting South African companies in their home market have been in place for more than 20 years, trade expert Donald Mackay tells Peter Bruce in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge. That implies that in two decades the protected companies still have not become competitive enough to stand on their own two feet. It is given the trade instruments in the hands of trade, industry and competition minister Ebrahim Patel a bad name and business is increasingly loath to use them. If you do Patel will protect you if you promise to create jobs. And if you want to import something that isn’t made in South Africa, he’ll give you permission provided you undertake in writing to buy from a local producer if someone starts making the product you want. And all the while the minister to “creating” heavily subsidies black industrialists who will one day substitute all your imports for you. The State doth wheel and deal in South Africa and by the looks of it a swathe of business has had enough.ends

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On July 1 2026, just more than 28 months from now, a vast swathe of South African industry — from manufacturers of car windscreens, beer bottles, industrial powders and even bakeries — will grind to a sudden stop unless the government rapidly intervenes to encourage the construction in Mozambique of a new liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal. Jaco Human, CEO of the Industrial Gas Users Association of Southern African tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts From the Edge that now that Sasol, for the last 20 years the monopoly supplier of LNG to industry for heating has given notice that it will stop supplies from its Mozambique fields in 2026, industries using gas in their furnaces don’t use enough to justify the construction of a new import terminal. They need Eskom or something like it to guarantee an off take from a new terminal of at least 50 petajoules (that’s roughly 50m 19kg LPG bottles in volume of LNG). The industrial users already use 50 petajoules a year. They employ 100 000 people. But the scary thing is that Eskom has no gas-fired power plants and the debate about using gas-to-power as a transition from coal in SA is still raging. Critics argue that new installing new LNG infrastructure now would quickly leave it stranded as other greener technologies become more efficient and cost-effective. Human says work needs to start on a new terminal in the next four months! Two years from then, gas-laden Floating Storage Regasification Unit (FSRUs) Ships which transport, store and regasify Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) on board would need to dock at a new terminal at Maputo’s Matola port and pump it into the existing Romco pipeline that Sasol has been using. There is literally no time and there is literally no chance of the SA government making a decision in time.

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Opinion polls giving the ANC just 45% of the vote ahead of the coming general election are “good for the ANC”, veteran political writer and keen observer Sam Mkokeli tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. Just wait until the ruling party’s election machine gets going. At 45% percent (or 40% 0r 48% depending on the poll) given its performance in government the only way forward when it actually starts campaigning is up. Mkokeli takes a dim view of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address last week but sees no threat from the established opposition. He says the Multi-Party Charter, the centre-right election “coalition” of the Democratic Alliance, Inkhatha Freedom Party, Freedom Front +, ActionSA and smaller parties may not even survive the campaign intact, let alone threaten even if it manages to stay intact.

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