Podcasts from the Edge

The Brics summit in Johannesburg this week is a giant talk shop. Go back to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in the late 1950s and you’ll find much of today’s grand talk about a New World Order lying, word for word, under decades of dust. So why should things be different now? It is hard to find anything concrete, or even interesting, in any of the rhetoric in the lead-up to the summit. There’ll be no new currency to trip up the dollar. And how will the BRICS decide on new membership? What are the rules? Do human rights play a part? If the do how are the Chinese and Russians members? And what about trade? Ramaphosa said on Sunday night we had exported R450bn worth of goods to China, the US, Germany, Japan and India. What he didn’t say is that the Brics members in that list trade like they were our new colonisers — they take a minerals and send us back the finished goods. Still, lets hope they all have a great party.

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Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen has pulled off something of a coup by getting author, commentator and scholar William Gumede to chair his Moonshot Pact gathering of opposition party leaders in Johannesburg next week. Well done him, says Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from The Edge. People, including Bruce, were sceptical when the idea to launch a multiparty coalition-type effort ahead of next year’s coalition was first announced in April. But the Gumede appointment signals something important has happened to DA thinking about how this might all be done. It lends next week’s gathering real credibility and whether or not the pact is able to topple the ANC next year — an ambitious target — our politics might actually be coming back to life. The opposition, once comatose, is suddenly sitting up in bed again.

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This time, business is not trying to fix, like, everything. This time it is just trying to fix three things. It is sort of a lesson learned in trying to tie up with government, but will greater focus — a new business partnership focusses only on electricity, logistics and crime — mean better, or any, outcomes? That remains to be seen, says Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, because at some stage when you do business with the ANC, you end up in the mud with the real boss, the ANC itself, and not many people survive that intact.

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Eskom’s Energy Availability Factor a week ago was 56.3%, a long way from where Eskom and the government keep telling it is or jolly well should be. The cold plays havoc with good intentions and the result seems to be a spiralling diesel bill. Who is paying it?, asks Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. The bigger question is this: The democratic state bounced back from a deep apartheid-induced recession after 1994. Can it do it again now? Is the state strong enough? Are the skills still there? Why are we waiting?

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For the past 10 years Nicola Harris has built up, under the radar, a stunningly successful NGO helping children in poor township schools transition from mother-tongue tuition to English. Using easily adapted computer software her NGO, Click Learning maintains some 18 000 tablets in 296 schools nationwide. In this edition of Podcasts from the Edge she tells Peter Bruce she aims to expand the number of learners using her carefully-knitted support system of funders, and infrastructure providers, from a current 212 000 to 240 000 by the end of September. Bruce visited one of her labs in the sprawling Mdantsane township outside East London and says he was blown away by the experience. But the secret isn’t in the software, he says. It’s management.

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President Cyril Ramaphosa’s complaining press conference on Sunday about how much harder his job is than any other ANC head of state has Peter Bruce struggling to contain his despair. Sure, State Capture, but he was inside it. Yes, Covid was a surprise but nowhere near as big a surprise as Ramaphosa’s rough-hewed handling of it. The shock of the rioting two years ago this week was all the greater because, typically, Ramaphosa doesn’t have the right people doing the difficult jobs. So stop whining, make better policy choices and learn how to choose. You can’t fix everything at once. Be braver…

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Either he doesn’t know what an economic mess we are in or he does and is hiding it really well, but President Cyril Ramaphosa has a spring in his step at the moment. It must be all the flying he has been doing in that 20 years old Boeing 737 Thabo Mbeki ordered way back. Warsaw, Kyiv and St Petersburg, back to meet the prime ministers of Denmark and the Netherlands and then back off to France for a roundtable with world leaders on the future of finance before flying back to Cape Town at the weekend to close the first serious attempt in years by the ANC to form a coherent party in the province. Is he ready to lose the elections next year? “That’s just silly,” he says, before flying off to goodness knows where. He’s a moving target. Gwede Mantashe is a problem but the list of Ramaphosa’s defeated enemies is, by now, impressively long….

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It is not only too early to tell whether or not President Cyril Ramaphosa’s peace mission was a success or not, there may be a case for not even trying to tell. He made a few points, his staff sadly made more than they should have and, all in all, a not very good time was had by all. Ramaphosa is surrounded by mediocre people, all chosen by his good self, so he is almost constantly badly advised, says Peter Bruce in this new episode of Podcasts From the Edge. Going to Russia and Ukraine would have been his idea though and you can see the politician in him kicking in. Its election time — let’s go save the world! A bit early in the election cycle but you take your chances as they come. Back home though, the actual business of saving an economy is slightly harder and slightly more beyond his grasp.

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How long will the new “partnership” between the Government and business last? Once the election next May is past, will the government still need it? Right now business is helping lower load shedding and promises to get trains running and the judicial authorities working again. But these partnerships come and go depending on the pressure the State is under. In this Edition of Podcasts from the Edge, Peter Bruce doesn’t hold out much hope for a lasting affair. Ideally, the ANC will lose the election and the need to get outside help to fix a tap or repair a broken window won’t be so acute. The way to make that happen is for business to give its time now to the government and, come the election, give its money to the opposition. Living in hope is a South African speciality.

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A New Democratic Alliance policy document, possibly out this week, threatens to do the impossible and to make the party interesting as a place of progressive ideas again. Given the state the country is in, not a moment too soon. For years the official opposition has been selling “good management” as its chief political weapon but with the arrival of a new policy chief, Mat Cuthbert, come signs that the party appreciates the hunger in the electorate for something new. In this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge, Peter Bruce hopes the DA not only finds a creative and attractive way for ward for South Africa, but that it stays true to its liberal roots while doing it.

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