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South Africa just joined a short and unflattering list of countries facing individual US visa restrictions, and Freedom Front Plus leader Corné Mulder says he saw it coming from a manifesto launch stage days before it happened. He tells Alec Hogg why he thinks Cyril Ramaphosa's habit of avoiding decisions has left the country exposed to an American administration that has run out of patience, why the ANC seems willing to simply wait out the Trump presidency, and why he believes ordinary South Africans, not the "comrades" benefiting from ANC patronage, are the ones now pushing back. He also lays out his read on the coalition scramble coming after 4 November, throws down a direct challenge to the DA over Tshwane and Johannesburg, and explains why he thinks South Africa's next real change of government could arrive well before 2029.

South Africa's townships are not a side economy. According to GG Alcock, author of the Kasinomics book series, they're a trillion-rand-plus market that the country's biggest listed companies are already quietly fighting over, from Shoprite's cash-and-carry pivot to Capitec's entrepreneur accounts to Pepkor's handset financing. Alcock, who grew up in a mud hut in Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal, and never went to university, sat down with Alec Hogg to explain why the xenophobic crackdown on foreign traders barely dented the spaza sector, why Pick n Pay's QualiSave format misread who actually shops in a township, how a social grant became one woman's ten-year start-up fund, and why an entire generation of township entrepreneurs is quietly building wealth in bread, eggs, hardbody chickens and handset finance while the formal economy stalls.

In their latest weekly chat, Chris Steyn and Political Commentator Solly Moeng talk about both President Cyril Ramaphosa and Deputy President Paul Mashatile having been declared unfit - because they are too ill - to perform official duties; the US the visa restrictions for certain - still unamed -government officials; the performance (or lack) of US Ambassador Roelf Meyer; the 181 lost candidate crisis for the African National Congress (ANC) ahead of the Local Government Elections (LGEs) in November this year; the body tally of raped and murdered women in Ekurhuleni rising to 9 as Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi gives criminals a heads-up of a lockdown; the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) dropping charges against National Commissioner Fannie Masemola; and a year of sittings of the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry into Police and Political Capture.

Washington stopped talking about South Africa in the abstract this week. Marco Rubio named individual officials for visa restrictions over land seizures, race-based discrimination and incitement, and the US ambassador in Pretoria called it only the first move. Hudson Institute's Joshua Meservey explained why Washington chose a scalpel over a sledgehammer, and why South Africa's own dealings with Tehran, Moscow and Hamas made this outcome close to inevitable. Denker Capital's Kokkie Kooyman weighed in on how South African banks are quietly benefiting from the same Iran war that's rattling oil markets, even as FirstRand heads for the exit in the UK and the country drifts closer to Beijing and Moscow. AfriForum's Jacques Broodryk laid out a disturbing new report on the patterns of torture behind 47 farm attacks. And on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to fight an oil-driven inflation spike, sending stocks lower.

The night before this interview, Marco Rubio picked up a weapon Washington has never used against South Africa before: visa restrictions aimed at individual officials, not the country as a whole. Hours later, the US ambassador in Pretoria said it was only the start. Joshua Meservey of the Hudson Institute had spent months arguing publicly for exactly this approach, and told Alec Hogg why the scalpel beats the sledgehammer, why AGOA is not off the table whatever the ambassador implies, and why South Africa's own record with Tehran, Moscow and Hamas made this outcome close to inevitable. He also had a hard question for South Africans weighing in on BEE and land expropriation from here: does it matter that Washington agrees with you, if agreeing with Washington is now politically radioactive.

FirstRand just put its UK business up for sale after a motor finance mis-selling scandal turned an eight-year-old acquisition into a multi-billion-rand headache, and analyst Kokkie Kooyman of Denker Capital walked Alec Hogg through what it's actually worth. He explained why Capitec is quietly trying to build six versions of itself across Eastern Europe and Latin America, why South Africa's big three banks keep poaching each other's executives, and why a punishing war between Iran and the United States is, oddly, good news for bank profits and bad news for everyone else. He also weighed in on Washington's new visa restrictions on South African officials, what a strong DA showing in the upcoming local elections would mean for the rand, and why he thinks South Africa's own BEE rules are capping the entrepreneurial growth the country badly needs.

In this interview with Chris Steyn, Jacques Broodryk, the Chief Spokesperson for Community Safety at AfriForum, hails the announcement by the Trump administration of visa restrictions for those “responsible for, or complicit in, the enactment or implementation of laws or policies that enable uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination, and/or the incitement of imminent violence against members of minority ethnic or racial groups in South Africa.” In his reaction, Broodryk says: “We've been asking for direct sanctions against these political leaders for quite some time now, publicly and as well as in discussions with the US…we hope that the work that we've been doing has had some kind of an impact on the steps that the US has now taken. Because this is what we've been asking for, for international pressure so that the South African government can stop dismissing minorities' complaints and concerns the way that they have been doing for the last 30 years.” Broodryk also unpacks a new AfriForum report – focused on 47 separate violent farm attacks - that reveals a recurring pattern of torture. He says AfriForum will now continue to expand and strengthen its 178 neighbourhood and farm watches and invest in volunteer training as well as the expansion of its specialised response capabilities, technology, and communication networks.

Washington has stopped talking about South Africa in the abstract. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced a new visa restriction policy aimed not at the country, but at named officials inside the Pretoria government, over land seizures, race-based discrimination and incitement. No names were published, but the bar for inclusion is deliberately low, and family members with a US visa, a green card, or a child studying in America could be caught up in it too. Within hours, US Ambassador Brent Bozell was on X calling it "only the first step in a series of escalatory measures." Alec Hogg traced the arc from Trump's February 2025 executive order through the Oval Office ambush, where a 2020 roadside memorial became "over a thousand" burial sites on camera, to this week's announcement, and laid out what it actually changes for anyone with capital, a career, or a conscience invested in South Africa.

Action Society's Juanita du Preez tells BizNews six bodies in Kempton Park finally forced a multidisciplinary task team, years after the Gaby Ndaba case stalled on DNA backlogs, while the station tops the country for kidnappings with 76 in three months. DA eThekwini mayoral candidate Haniff Hoosen says the ANC is finished in the city and rates his chances against MK at 50/50. Leon Kluge recounts how Cape storms nearly sank South Africa's Chelsea Flower Show display. Plus Amodei, Altman and Musk's AI slowdown call, and a Wall Street selloff as the Senate blocks Trump's crypto bill.

Leon Kluge pulled off a hat-trick no South African had managed before: three straight gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show, the world's most prestigious garden show. But this year's win very nearly didn't happen. Storms and flooding tore through the Western Cape days before the harvest, cutting farmers off from the airport and leaving Kluge with no backup plan and no government funding to fall back on if the flowers didn't land in time. He sat down with Alec Hogg at the Chelsea Flowers exhibition in Stanford to explain why fynbos, the smallest and strangest of the world's floral kingdoms, cannot survive without fire, why a single protea sells for twenty-five pounds in the London flower market, and what a plant that farms its own assassin bugs reveals about survival in the wild.

Haniff Hoosen made the trip from Durban to BizNews's Hermanus studio with a blunt message: the ANC is finished in eThekwini, and what replaces it could be worse. The DA's mayoral candidate walked through how a metro that once out-drew Cape Town for tourists now loses 65% of its water to 13,000 active leaks, why he believes MK is running a placeholder candidate to make way for a scandal-tainted former mayor, and why he isn't arguing with The Economist's description of South Africa drifting into a "mafia state." He also put a number on his own chances in November: five out of ten, a coin flip between the DA and a party he says is already broke.

In this BizNews interview, Chris Steyn and Juanita du Preez, the national spokesperson for Action Society, talk about the killing spree of a suspected serial rapist (or group of rapists) in Ekurhuleni. By yesterday (Monday), five bodies had been found, four in Kempton Park, one in Olifantsfontein, and this morning (Tuesday), another one in Kwa-Thema. Four of the bodies were found in Kempton Park where the police station has a 0.4% success rate in solving crimes. Kempton Park is also the kidnapping capital of South Africa with 67 reported kidnappings between April and June this year (2026). Among the victims identified so far is Elizabeth Tsontso Moselakgomo, who disappeared while out running. Many women reported missing are still unaccounted for as Ekurhuleni sits on thousands of cold cases. SAPS has now dispatched specialist investigators, but Du Preez fumes: “Now that the bodies are piling up, now all of a sudden we get a multi-disciplinary task team investigating. Why now? Why must we have six bodies for things to start moving around? We are in a national disaster for GBV if I'm not mistaken.”

Nineteen times out of twenty, the man Cape Town's police catch red-handed with an illegal gun walks free. JP Smith explains why, and why he's taking national government to court over it. Intelligence analyst Jasmine Opperman lays out something most South Africans haven't clocked: 14 active Bitcoin wallets linked to Hamas, offices operating in the open, and Islamic State using our own organised crime networks as a door into the country. Then, at the close of BNC#9, David Shapiro and Piet Viljoen make the case for staying, both with their money and their outlook: undervalued JSE stocks paying investors handsomely just to hold on, and a reminder that South Africans, whatever else is going wrong, are still hopeful, resilient and friendly to strangers. And on Wall Street, an AI-fuelled selloff runs straight into a Federal Reserve decision this week.

JP Smith has spent years being told his city is one of the world's most violent. He didn't dispute it. He explained why. Nearly every gun his officers pulled off the street came back to bite them: nineteen times out of twenty, the man caught red-handed walked free, because Cape Town cannot investigate its own arrests. That fight over investigative powers, now heading to court against national government, ran alongside almost everything else that landed on his desk this fortnight: a pet bylaw row that briefly convinced half the city it was about to be taxed for owning a cat, a cabinet minister repeating a gangster's phone call on camera, a R3 billion construction site with a 28s gang boss's family on the books, and a straight answer to the question everyone keeps asking him: would he help Helen Zille fix Johannesburg. Alec Hogg sat down with the MMC for safety and security to get all of it on the record.

Retired senior advocate Chris Marnewick spent six years on the Pistorius trial record and tells Alec Hogg the conviction should have been culpable homicide, not murder, blaming social media groupthink for a "big lie" of gender-based violence. Analyst Jasmine Opperman reveals 14 active bitcoin wallets in South Africa channelling funds to Hamas. Financial Mail's Rob Rose unpacks how the Competition Commission wrongly named salesman Bryan Brownrigg in its rand-rigging case, wrecking a decade of his life. TymeBank's Coenraad Jonker says AI will enable bankers, not replace them, and Sakeliga's Piet le Roux takes employment equity quotas towards international courts.

In this week's NdB Sunday Show, intelligence analyst Jasmine Opperman of Fulcrum Analytics, reveals to Chris Steyn that there are 14 active cryptocurrency wallets linked to Hamas in South Africa. “We know that Hamas has offices in South Africa. We know that they allowed freedom to move…And that there are definite financial streams going to Hamas, going to Hezbollah.” Opperman also shares the latest information on the South African recently kidnapped by ISIS in Mozambique, and further describes how ISIS-trained operatives take part in criminal operations in South Africa. “...the door for ISIS in South Africa is organised crime.” As for why the South African government would allow terrorist organisations to operate here, Opperman says: “...our government is ideologically blinded by the history of support they gained…it is as if the South African government is confusing their past with foreign policy.” Meanwhile, Opperman warns that US President Donald Trump has made a “fatal mistake” and that “we have entered fast and furious radicalisation…my concern is that the next generation of violent extremists, violent terrorists has already been generated.”

At the close of BNC#9, Alec Hogg sat down with David Shapiro and Piet Viljoen to unpack the conference. Viljoen made the numbers case for South Africa: bar the two big banks, every stock in his portfolio trades at a discount of thirty percent or more to what he thinks it is worth, and the market is effectively paying investors fifteen percent a year just to stay put. Shapiro made the human case, and the uncomfortable one, running through what three days without power does to a family in Johannesburg, and why he still believes America out-competes an ageing Europe on sheer will to win.

Piet le Roux runs the organisation that has taken on the South African state more than any other business group this year, and he came to BNC#9 to explain why. Sakeliga beat the government on foot and mouth disease vaccines, international airline licensing and estate agents' BEE certificates in 2026 alone, and it wasn't finished. In this Q&A with Piet Viljoen, le Roux traced Sakeliga's strategy back four hundred years to a merchant alliance most people have never heard of, explained why the organisation deliberately avoids chasing individual officials into court, and previewed an AI system built to read every government gazette so his team doesn't have to. He also took audience questions on a minister's response to Sakeliga's court wins, on personal accountability, and on what a self-funded, twenty-person team can realistically take on next: the Reserve Bank.

Bryan Brownrigg was never a currency trader. He sold foreign exchange to Standard Bank's institutional clients for 23 years. But when the Competition Commission decided that 28 banks had run a single conspiracy to rig the rand, his name went into the complaint anyway, and it took a decade and a Constitutional Court ruling to get it out again. Financial Mail editor Rob Rose told Alec Hogg how one wrong assumption metastasised into a case that dragged banks, courts and taxpayers through ten years of litigation, and why Brownrigg is only one entry on a longer list. A tribunal sat on a merger decision for six years and then gave a reason for the delay that turned out not to be true. A R14 billion Vodacom fibre deal collapsed. A black-owned retailer was blocked from selling its own business. Rose's argument is blunt: South Africa's competition watchdogs have stopped policing competition, and started doing something else.

In this interview with Irakli Rekhviashvili, Tyme Group co-founder Coenraad Jonker gives his take on what actually protects a digital bank once the competition catches up, and why he thinks the old rules of banking no longer apply. On competitive advantage, he says: "I'm saying to my guys increasingly, I don't think there is a moat. I liken it to the time when people lived in walled cities with trenches dug around them. And then airplanes arrived, and people could fly over cities, and those walls became totally irrelevant." On why so many banks still fail to serve the poor profitably, he states: "It's not the customer that's the problem, it's the banks that's the problem." Jonker, whose group counts Brazil's Nubank among its backers, also puts a number on the group's New York listing ambitions, revealing: "I think it's more likely we'll be ready in 2030 than in 2028." He traces it all back to Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital, which he read during his MBA at GIBS in 2001. "I read the book in 2001 when I was busy with my MBA at GIBS... it lit a fire. It sort of started me thinking completely differently about the challenges of financial inclusion and financial exclusion."

For six years, retired senior advocate Chris Marnewick worked through the 3,000 page record of the Oscar Pistorius trial, line by line, against the judgments that decided his fate. His conclusion, set out in a new book, is that the Supreme Court of Appeal got it wrong: Pistorius should have been convicted of culpable homicide, not murder. Marnewick argued that the cross-examination crossed lines an American or Canadian court would not have allowed, and that the picture the public built from social media, of an hour-long argument ending in a killing, was never supported by what was actually heard in court. He spoke to Alec Hogg about the witness who pointed in the wrong direction, the three words that changed Pistorius's sentence on a second appeal, and why he says the public became a victim of what he calls the big lie.

A Cape Town councillor who admitted to faking his medical degree is reportedly still in line for a promotion, and political commentator Solly Moeng says the DA cannot say no to this one without starting to look like the ANC it built itself against. Meanwhile, a police dog named Sky died after being left injured and unattended overnight at a facility Parliament's police portfolio committee chair Ian Cameron says has been covering up animal neglect for years. And South African sport had its worst week yet: the bosses of Swimming SA and SASCOC both suspended, Olympic swimmer Roland Schoeman naming names, and journalist Graeme Joffe, run out of the country over a decade ago for reporting on exactly this, explaining why he still isn't celebrating. Plus Stafford Masie on the spare power Eskom is sitting on and what it could mean for African AI, and the latest from Wall Street.

Stafford Masie says the AI industry is not actually running out of electricity, it is running out of places to plug in. The real bottleneck for OpenAI and Anthropic in the United States is grid connection points that can absorb the violent power swings inference computing demands, without blowing transformers or blacking out whole regions, as happened in Portugal last year. His argument at BNC#9: South Africa, sitting on a stable grid with gigawatts of curtailed surplus power, is unusually well positioned to host that compute for the rest of Africa, the way it once became a base for telcos and banks. He also spoke about why he thinks autonomous AI agents will out-transact humans within months, the regulatory framework he is helping build with the Reserve Bank to govern them, and the security risks of prompt injection and data poisoning that come with it.

Graeme Joffe started digging into South African sports administration back in 2012, and it cost him his career, his safety, and, he says, his ability to ever go home again. Talking to Alec Hogg, Joffe walked through everything that has unravelled since: the presidents of SASCOC, Athletics South Africa and Swimming South Africa all suspended within weeks of each other, the entire executive of Karate South Africa suspended by its world body, and Olympic swimmer Tatjana Smith's prize money held back for over a year. Joffe named the people he has spent more than a decade chasing, from Danny Jordaan to Mark Alexander to Jurie Roux, and explained why, in his telling, so little ever actually changes at the top of South African sport. He also revisited what it cost him personally: a R21 million defamation suit, death threats, and a criminal charge that means he still cannot safely set foot in the country he reported on for most of his career.

In this interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, the Chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, exposes a huge cover-up over many years of animal maltreatment at the SAPS Roodeplaat Veterinary facility. Speaking following the death of the arson-detection dog Sky, he said: “That hospital, if this is the way that they look after animals, is as good as a morgue for animals. It's almost a case of if you, as a dog handler, have to send your dog to Roodeplaat, in many cases, you can say your goodbyes because you're not guaranteed that you would get your dog back. And I don't say this lightly. I say this because of the amount of cops that have called me over the last two days, pleading their cases about their dogs previously sent there, came back worse, or didn't come back at all. So, in the coming days I am going to expose even more since as far back as 2019 about criminal investigations that were made to go quiet, disciplinary processes that were not followed and just ignored at Roodeplaat, and how a lot of the animals that have died over the last few years could have still not only lived but lived prosperously.”

At BNC#9, veteran stockbroker David Shapiro told delegates that AI had roughly tripled his own output, and he is not slowing down at 78. He argued that South Africa's real obstacle is not regulation but ideology, and that it is costing the country a venture capital industry, a functioning collateral-free lending market, and a mining sector he believes is sitting on far more gold than it is using. He also explained why he cannot make a living from the JSE alone, why he sends most of his clients' money offshore, and the one signal he trusts more than any headline: what the share price is actually doing while the story is still being told.

In his latest weekly chat with Chris Steyn, Political Commentator, Solly Moeng urges action from the Democratic Alliance (DA) over reports that the party is considering promoting Cape Town councillor - and fake doctor - Abdulkader “AK” Elyas to either Parliament or the Western Cape legislature despite guilty findings relating to the falsification of his qualifications. “If it doesn't act against him, it's going to be in trouble. Then… it's slowly, slowly becoming the ANC…. it's an accumulation of things that are happening in the DA space that are making it harder and harder to distinguish from the ANC.” Moeng also comments on the biggest ever pre- by-election crisis facing the African National Congress; President Cyril Ramaphosa's impeachment inquiry stalling - yet again; the president's failure to act against Special Leave Police Minister Senzo Mchunu; the dirt on Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) CIC Julius Malema emerging at the Madlanga Commission; and the court room altercation between tenderpreneur “Cat” Matlala and his fiery Advocate.

Roland Schoeman won three Olympic medals for South Africa. In this interview with BizNews editor Alec Hogg, Schoeman says that didn't buy him any protection from Swimming South Africa: he describes being flown home from the US at the federation's own expense just to hear a second doctor confirm what the first had already told them, and being blocked from a World Cup he'd already paid his own way to attend. Days after the federation's president and CEO were provisionally suspended by World Aquatics over alleged abuse of power and fake documents, Schoeman tells Hogg that two suspensions don't fix twenty years of it, and names the swimmers he wants to see speak up next.

Fifty four days out from South Africa's local government elections, Geordin Hill-Lewis told BizNews nobody else is even campaigning yet, and made his case for why the DA could end up governing seven of the country's eight big metros. Sam Montsi, whose memoir Defying Barriers charts a career from exile in Lesotho to running businesses on two continents, told Chris Steyn where the politicisation of state-owned company boards went wrong. Dr Duarte da Silva made the case that South Africa isn't running out of gold, it's sitting on 48,000 tons of it, and explained why almost nobody in Pretoria seems to be listening. And at BNC#9 in the Drakensberg, value investor Piet Viljoen answered a delegate's question about executive pay, incentives, and what he calls his investing North Star. Plus the latest from Wall Street, via Reuters.

Editorial note: This session was recorded at BNC#9 on Thursday 13 August 2026. In the days after this Q&A, the FSCA announced 20-year debarment orders against Warren Wheatley and two colleagues over share trading in Altvest Capital (Africa Bitcoin Corporation's predecessor) in September 2022, along with a combined R10 million in administrative penalties. Wheatley has resigned from the board; Stafford Masie, referenced throughout this session, is now interim CEO. All three dispute the findings and are seeking reconsideration from the Financial Services Tribunal. Nothing in this Q&A relates to that matter, which concerns trades from roughly four years before this conversation, but readers should have that context. See the flags section of the publish package for detail and sourcing. At BNC#9, Warren Wheatley told David Shapiro that Bitcoin has become boring, and he meant it as a compliment. The Africa Bitcoin Corporation founder walked through the mechanics: borrowing dollars from a European bank at 3%, using the money to buy Bitcoin, then lending to South African SMEs at 18%, less than half what most of them pay elsewhere. He explained the loan-to-value discipline that keeps it safe, why he'd rather fund a farmer hiring 80 people than a two-person AI unicorn, and what he thinks the Reserve Bank's draft crypto rules would do to the industry if they pass as written. He also covered how Bitcoin miners quietly became a buffer for AI data centres, what Eskom missed out on, and his own advice on keeping Bitcoin safe.

Piet Viljoen doesn't read the news, doesn't watch the Fed, and thinks most of what the investment industry sells you is jargon designed to make simple things sound complicated. In his Q&A at BNC#9, he went after executive pay, looked at private equity's real return profile, explained why he avoids AI stocks entirely, and unpacked the regulations that let his fund own crash-prone stocks but cap it at 10% gold. Then the floor opened up to questions: offshore allowances, Bitcoin, HCI, and whether the asset management industry is about to consolidate.

Cape Town created 418,000 jobs in five years while the rest of the country's economy shrank last quarter. Its new DA leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis, thinks that number is the party's best argument for why voters should hand it six or seven of South Africa's major metros on 4 November, from Johannesburg to Durban. He talks to Alec Hogg about the jobs data, the ANC's Gwede Mantashe getting caught on camera implying a voter's grandchild's grant comes from the ANC, a pet permit bylaw row he calls misinformation, and a Bloemfontein court fight that could keep the ANC off the ballot in Mangaung altogether. Fifty four days out, he says nobody else is even campaigning yet.

In this interview with Chris Steyn, business icon and author Sam Montsi, gives his take on revelations at the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry, as well as the worldwide impact of US President Donald Trump's actions. On political and police capture by crime cartels, he says: “It's frightening what has happened in the leadership of some of the organs of State where people have infiltrated and tried to make money very unscrupulously - and they were facilitated and helped by some of the very senior people in the leadership of these institutions.” On Trump, he states: “I can't believe that the United States of America could allow such a person not only to emerge as their leader, but to allow him to do what he's doing throughout the world…it means we really need to be very careful and cautious who, in our little country here, we allow to…lead the country. And we also have to put measures in place to make sure that there are checks and balances so that you don't have crazy people that come into power who will tear the country apart or create problems with our relationships with other countries.” Montsi, whose memoir is titled “Defying Barriers” - also dissects the problems surrounding BEE and SOEs, and shares words of advice for both entrepreneurs, as well as politicians. He declares himself optimistic about the future of South Africa. “I think we are beginning to see the ship of State being pointed or being moved to point in a different direction, which is constructive and positive for the economy and the country.”

South Africa has already mined a quarter of all the gold ever pulled out of the ground, and it still has 48,000 tons sitting under the Witwatersrand. So why has annual output collapsed from 1,000 tons to 88? Dr Duarte da Silva, once South Africa's go-to tech guru and now a gold analyst, tells Alec Hogg why central banks are dumping dollars for gold, why he thinks the Witwatersrand's "death" has been declared four times and been wrong every time, and why he calls the way mining majors offload worked-out shafts onto smaller players "nothing short of criminal." He also doesn't hold back on Stilfontein, on JP Morgan's call for 20% gold portfolios, and on why, despite everything, he's not touching crypto.

A parliamentary watchdog says someone inside SAPS management is lying about missing vehicles, and the good cops are paying for it. A CEO who once got locked out of his own email explains how he turned around a company that had defaulted on its debt for sixteen straight months. A veteran gold fund manager weighs up whether Bitcoin can ever do what gold has done for centuries. An investor who bought into a business after it lost 99.5% of its value tells you exactly how he made the board earn its keep. And overnight, OpenAI's newest model wiped billions off software stocks while oil climbed on Middle East tensions. All of it on today's BizNews Daybreak.

Rhys Summerton bought into a company that had lost 99.5% of its market value and told the independent directors their pay was being halved on day one. At BNC#9, the Milkwood Capital founder and iOCO joint CEO laid out how a fund manager turned operator actually runs the acquisition game: why control of the cash flow matters more than a board seat, why he thinks South Africa's King Code has been "not net positive" for corporate governance, why US executives paying themselves 4% of market cap is a warning sign, and why he wants nothing to do with companies burning billions on AI capex.

Carl Neethling didn't set out to run Ascendis Health. A small, almost accidental shareholding tripped a JSE disclosure threshold, and not long after that he was locked out of his own email on the day he took the company over. What he found inside: nineteen accountants who, in his words, spent their days counting money that no longer existed, a head office costing more each year than the whole business was worth, and a regulator that ruled his takeover consortium had broken the law, only for a high court to tear the ruling up. He calls it the most painful experience of his life, and he's adamant Ascendis will never go anywhere near the JSE again.

Old Mutual almost closed its gold fund in 2019. A ballot most clients ignore drew a 13% response, and that was enough to keep it alive. Six years later it has gone from R400 million to R4 billion, and the fund's manager, Meryl Pick, was at BNC#9 taking questions on everything that got her there. Speaking to delegates, she explained why Warren Buffett's scepticism on gold is a product of the era he grew up in, why she thinks the past 80 years of globalisation were the anomaly rather than the norm, and what she's actually watching in central bank buying to know if this time really is different. She takes on gold versus Bitcoin, why Canada might be fine without reserves while New Zealand should worry, and how a country inflates its way out of a debt trap.

In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, the Chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, has a very direct message for Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia who - at the SAPS National Commemoration Day for fallen heroes - introduced him to the Free State MEC as “Chairperson Cameron, the one that always lambasts the police in the media” . Cameron says: “I thought to myself, you know what? I bleed with the police, I cry with the police, I absolutely live for the police. And every single question and every single matter that I take on is a matter based on information that the good cops shared with me, the cops that actually had the guts to come forward and speak…So I take it very personally when a comment is made that disregards the hard work that we put in. So the message is very, very simple: whether the Minister likes it or not, and whether we get pushback or not on the questions that we ask, we will keep asking. We will keep highlighting and we will keep exposing.” Furthermore, Cameron speaks about his long battle to hold accountable Major-General Feroz Khan who has finally been sacked. He shares details of epic battles to deal with shortages of vehicles (and even R5s) at various police units and stations. He also shares photos of horrific injuries suffered by an arson-detection dog at the SAPS Veterinary facility at Roodeplaat, prompting him to lay criminal charges.

Ten years after Brett Redelinghuys was banned for trying to expose problems from the inside, World Aquatics has provisionally suspended Swimming SA's president and CEO over abuse of power allegations, vindicating his years-long fight. Elsewhere, IRR pollster Hermann Pretorius tells Chris Steyn why South African women, not men, are the ANC's real firewall against the DA. At BNC#9 in the Drakensberg, constitutional expert Paul Hoffman makes the case for the DA's devolution plan and a police overhaul, while Afrimat's Andries van Heerden argues Transnet's turnaround is the proof South Africa's negative narrative needs correcting.

Paul Hoffman has sued Jacob Zuma so many times that he calls him his "number one sponsor," because every case Zuma lost came with a costs order. At BNC#9, the Accountability Now advocate took questions on the private member's bill that could finally give South Africa an independent, Chapter 9 anti-corruption commission, why he thinks IDAC is structurally doomed and headed for a constitutional challenge, and who he expects to be first up for investigation once a proper body exists. He also made the case for the DA's fight to take policing powers away from national government in the Western Cape, explained why greed rather than ideology drives most corruption, and said why he doesn't buy the idea that Patrice Motsepe wants the presidency.

Afrimat's Andries van Heerden bought a struggling cement business for its quarries, not its cement, and is now watching a Chinese buyer take on the part he didn't want. In this Q&A from BNC#9, he tells Alec Hogg what actually scares him in a takeover, why Transnet's turnaround is the best he's seen in years, and why he still won't chase lithium at today's price. Along the way: fixing a Free State town without handing over a cent, the gold South Africa has left in the ground since 1886, and why doing business with Chinese contractors is a lesson his own team is still learning.

In this interview with Chris Steyn, Hermann Pretorius of the Institute for Race Relations (IRR) unpacks his polling results on South Africa's women voters from 2021 to 2026, including the key finding that women voters are keeping the African National Congress (ANC) ahead of the Democratic Alliance (DA). “..all the years from 2021 till now, the ANC has an advantage among women voters.. if only men voted in an election in South Africa in 2026, the ANC and the DA would be essentially tied at 26-27%. If only women voted, the DA would be on 26% and the ANC would be on 37%.” Asked for his predictions of the outcome of the November Local Government Elections, Pretorius estimates that the ANC could get as much as 50% in Mangaung, while DA in Johannesburg could get between 42 to 44% and the ANC between 20 to 23%; the DA in Tshwane between 44 to 47% and the ANC between 24 to 27%; the DA holding Cape Town with between 58 and 61% of the vote; the DA in Ekurhuleni garnering as much 43% of the vote with the ANC down in the mid-low 20s and the Freedom Front Plus at between 9 and 11%; and in EThekwini the DA and MKP possibly tying at 30%, with the IFP at about 14%, and the ANC at around 10%. “But I think the number to watch is MK versus DA. Those I think in an urban-suburban setting are the two parties that are likely to be at each other's throats for that first spot.”

Brett Redelinghuys was banned for ten years by Swimming South Africa for trying to fix it from the inside. This week, the two men who banned him, president Alan Fritz and CEO Shaun Adriaanse, were provisionally suspended by World Aquatics itself, over allegations of abuse of power and fake documents. In between: a R111 million high-performance swimming centre in Franschhoek that has never held a swimmer, its pools filled with stagnant water instead, a school stripped of the facilities it signed away, and a breakaway water polo body formed because, in Redelinghuys's words, there was no way to fix this from within. He lays out what he says actually happened to the money, why South Africa's water polo team walked away from the 2024 Olympics without most of the country knowing, and what he thinks needs to happen next.

Three senior executives are gone from one of South Africa's flashiest bitcoin bets this week, and the company's new interim boss won't say how big the alleged share manipulation was. An intelligence analyst says the crime bosses everyone is fixated on are just middle management, answering to people we never hear about. Andrew Smith explains what it actually costs to hand your company over to outside money, years after he thought he already knew. A DA mayoral hopeful with a Hawks case behind him makes his pitch on infrastructure over show ponies. And the minister sitting on thousands of empty government buildings explains why the state still pays R6 billion a year to rent from someone else. Plus the latest from Wall Street.

What really happens after the entrepreneurial dream comes true? Andrew Smith, co-founder of Yuppiechef, opens up about building a business from a side hustle into a retail powerhouse, taking venture capital, navigating rapid growth, surviving Covid, and ultimately selling the company. Drawing on years of handwritten journals, he shares candid lessons about ambition, control, investors, partnerships and the emotional cost of letting go. It's an honest, thought-provoking look at entrepreneurship - and a powerful reminder that success doesn't always mean getting everything you wanted.

In this edition of the NdB Sunday Show, Chris Steyn and intelligence Analyst Alwyn Swart of Fulcrum Analytics talk about the instrumentalisation of the intelligence apparatus by administrations across the ideological spectrum; as well as the links between high-ranking officials and external parties using South Africa as a proxy, not only for political influence but also to do business in the international crime space. As for the fixation on the so-called Big 5, Swart says: “I would say the Big Five are merely line middle managers. They are connected to their influencers outside the borders of South Africa and it is difficult to arrest one and think the problem is gone.” Asked whether there are links between the international crime cartels and the international influencers of South African politics, he says: “Definitely. Although something like that has been viewed as very politically sensitive - and I do not think that will be exposed in the media. I do not also think that will be stated in high-end inquiry reports due to the threat that it has for stability in South Africa.” Swart also gives his take on the relationship between the United States and Israel amid the Iran War, and South Africa's post-Cold War significance in the event of World War III.

Three weeks after BNC#9 in the Drakensberg, Stafford Masie is back in the interview chair, this time as interim CEO of Africa Bitcoin Corporation. His predecessor Warren Wheatley, founder of Africa's first listed Bitcoin treasury company, along with his wife Tatum Keshwar-Wheatley and chief investment officer Akshay Karan, have just been handed 20-year debarments by the FSCA, longer than the ban handed to Gupta-linked Transnet figures Eric Wood and Niven Pillay. Masie insists the ruling has nothing to do with the business itself, and that operations, funders and the loan book are unaffected. But he won't say how big the alleged share manipulation was, and he can't say whether Warren Wheatley is coming back.

Sasol's oil hedges are built for a $50-a-barrel world, its Qatar plant has been switched on and off every three weeks by fighting near the Strait of Hormuz, and its biggest customer market just hit it with a 30% tariff. CEO Simon Baloyi sits down to unpack how a company this exposed to global chaos stays standing, what a $12 billion bet on Louisiana is actually returning, and why he thinks South Africa is about to miss out on its own offshore gas boom.

He's a businessman with eight companies and 400 staff who says politics was the last thing on his mind, until the DA picked him to take Overstrand's top job from its first black executive mayor. Clinton Lerm has already survived a Hawks investigation, a standing court interdict with a rival party leader, and a question about political stability he still calls "strange." In this conversation with Alec Hogg, Lerm opens up on why he says he'll "never sell his soul," what he actually asks his municipal manager for, R100 million houses going up next to families who can't afford a daily meal, and whether Helen Zille can pull off the rescue of Johannesburg.

At BNC#9 in the Drakensberg, Public Works Minister Dean Macpherson sat down for a wide-ranging Q&A on why R100 billion in municipal infrastructure grants gets sent back to Treasury every year, unspent, and what he's doing to stop it. He unpacks the layered structure of the construction mafia, explains why his department is about to auction off nearly a thousand state properties, and lifts the lid on a R6 billion-a-year office leasing bill that once let a fraudulent tender through the back door. Along the way, he makes a case for why the 4 November local elections could reshape South African politics from the ward up, not the top down. Watch for his read on Cape Town's infrastructure model, the uMngeni turnaround, and why he thinks a Durban by-election result is a preview of what's coming.