Podcasts from the Edge

Largely hidden by the desperate public discourse over the future of Eskom and electricity in South Africa, Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe has been patiently building not only a case for supplanting coal with another fossil-fuel, LNG, but has now begun to lay down plans and actual tenders for an entire new cast powered infrastructure. It is all still a bit disjointed but in prospect is a vast new industrial undertaking, with new infrastructure and new rules. Peter Bruce talks to amaBhungane journalist Susan Comrie in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge — she has doggedly and brilliantly stuck with the unfolding gas extravaganza in a series of revealing reports over the past three years. What she reveals is staggering.

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Peter Bruce talks to trade and industry expert Donald MacKay in this first edition of Podcasts from the Edge for 2024. Why are our grand master plans failing? Because we’re trying to pick winners, says Mackay, and where you make winners in a market economy, there’ll also be losers. Steelmaker Arcelor Mittal, just two years ago the centre-piece of ANC government’s promised new re-industrialisation dream, founded on localisation, has just announced it is shutting down half its business. At the department of trade, industry and competition the process of creating or extending or rebating import duties is now almost completely off the rails and no longer trusted by business. Is it just a case of good policies being smothered by a State unable to implement them. Or is it plain bad policy? Listen to hear the answer...

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As former First Rand Chair Roger Jardine launches his new political party-cum-movement, Change Starts Now, quite how this is converted into him making a run for the Presidency in next year’s general election, as his funders hope, is about as clear as mud. Tony Leon, former Democratic Alliance leader, tells Peter Bruce in this entertaining final 2023 edition of Podcasts from the Edge that while he wishes Jardine well he was underwhelmed by the Change Starts Now (awful awful name) launch last Sunday. Can he possibly be manoeuvred into a position where established parties offer him a secure shot at at least becoming an MP. Only MPs can be elected president by parliament. And then how does he turn his late launch into a mobilising event for the rest of the (non-EFF) opposition? Leon says DA leader John Steenhuisen has opened up a small chance of success for Jardine — always assuming the ANC fails to form a government after the elections — by declaring during the creation of his "moonshot pact” of like-minded opposition parties that he does not insist on getting the top job, as leader of the biggest opposition party, should his election coalition succeed in winning a majority. That is itself a slim prospect but its a gap. How Jardine slips through it is another question entirely.

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Can big business really parachute its own candidate into the coming 2024 election and get him elected president? That’s the ambition, it seems, behind a bid to find a political home for Roger Jardine as revealed in the Sunday Times last Sunday. There’s up to a billion rand to back a new horse but is the circle of possible funder being too picky? “Business needs to cross its own Rubicon,” Freedom Front Plus chief whip Corne Mulder tells Peter Bruce in this gripping edition of Podcasts From the Edge. It needs, he says, to understand the opportunity before it and while putting R1bn into an election. Does all the money get behind Jardine or can all “good” opposition (presumably excluding the EFF) share in it and get behind Jardine when parliament meets to elect a president after the election? Mulder also deals with the need to include the Patriotic Alliance in the Charter before it becomes a “kingmaker” after and wonders whether, just possibly, the Democratic Alliance might be lured into a Grand Coalition with the ANC if the ruling party vote slips below 50%.

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Rise Mzansi is the new kid on South Africa’s heaving political block. Its founder and leader, former Bus9ness Day editor Songezo Zibi, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the new party is “onboarding” 20 people a week — they’re not members but people promising electoral support. If he keeps that up until an election between mid-May and mid-August next year he could collect 7% of the vote. And more if the rate of onboarding increases. Zibi says he isn’t joining the Multi-Party Charter, triggered by DA leader John Steenhuisens “Moonshot Pact” last April. But he will talk to them after the election. Meanwhile, he says, Rise is not trying to become an opposition to the ruling ANC, but an alternative to it. South Africa, he says, desperately needs time out from the ANC.

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The Springboks won an almost impossible rugby test match on Sunday, beating Rugby World Cup hosts France in what many commentators have called the greatest game of rugby ever played. But as Peter Bruce warns in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, there is a dark side to winning that cannot safely be ignored. As tempers flare and as war and death spreads in the Middle East following the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7, there is a danger that Europe, and perhaps Paris in particular, becomes a dangerous place to be. The State de France, where the ‘Boks play at least one more game, and possibly two, has been targeted by Muslim extremists in the past. Both the Louvre museum and the Palace of Versailles Paris were closed and evacuated after terrorist threats last weekend. We must be careful...

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A gigantic flood smashed through the village of Stanford in the Western Cape last week, leaving Podcasts from the Edge presenter Peter Bruce in awe of the silent power of water. Fortunately no-one lost their life but there were some close calls. Its hard, and probably foolish to apportion blame for the rain but, he argues, management of the Klein River and possibly others in the province needs attention. If reeds and other vegetation is damming flood waters near homes, and if municipalities are content to allow residential construction on flood planes then someone’s going to get hurt.

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The General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill is an attempt to rewrite what South Africa’s national interest it. On a first read it turn out to be almost exactly the government interests as well. So opposing government policy, advocating for it to fail or funding legal challenges to literally anything the government wants to do could have to running into trouble with the intelligence agencies. It is’t funny, says Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts From the Edge. If we are not careful, the next target, after the NGOs are beaten back, will be opposition parties and the media.

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President Cyril Ramaphosa told the country on television on Sunday night that the recent Brics summit in Johannesburg was all about creating “a fairer and more inclusive world order”. New World Orders are the stuff the Russian and Chinese leaders dream about. To hear them slip so easily from a potential new vassals lips must be satisfying. No more work involved! But Peter Bruce argues in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that expecting dictatorships, autocracies, tyrannies, monarchies and one party states to change the world for the better is just plain bonkers. The more power they are handed by naiive leaders like Ramaphosa the more the world will begin to look like their countries. Then they’ll chew him up and spit him out.

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The Brics summit in Johannesburg last week has left a simmering argument among South Africans in its wake. Was it a good thing or bad. Who have we become involved with and does it even matter? For some the Brics summit represented an historic turning point but most proponents of that view are too young to have witnessed a turning point before so how do they know? What is clear is that the original five Brics which numbered three democracies, are now, following the expansion of the group to 11 members, are now overwhelmingly undemocratic and that has to be a pity. At some stage, argues Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, it will matter.

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