Podcasts from the Edge

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.”

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?

“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.

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."

South Africa's steel industry is in the crosshairs once again, and once again for all the wrong reasons. Itac, the department of trade, industry and competition's trade regulator, has been instructed by minister Parks Tau to conduct arguably the widest tariff review in its history, of imported steel. This as Arcelor Mittal SA (AMSA), the country's only integrated steelmaker, is being rescued by the State. The review threatens widespread price increases on imports — everything steel-related is included — from iron ore to wheelbarrows. The problem, as trade expert Donald MacKay tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, is that while literally hundreds of imported products will be reviewed, Itac normally takes 27 months to complete just one review. Parks Tau wants the review done by July! “The unintended consequences can be existential to some companies,” says MacKay, “You can't do all of this and expect some companies to not fail. So maybe its not Mittal but there's no way everyone comes through this… I think this review is too big. It should have been broken up.”

Joel Pollak, probably the next US ambassador to South Africa, tells Peter Bruce in this revealing edition of Podcasts from the Edge, that President Cyril Ramaphosa and his senior officials got it hopelessly wrong when they responded to US President Donald Trump's attacks on South Africa with personal criticism of him. ”When Trump commented on South Africa,” says Pollak, “you don't accuse him of misinformation. People in the media can do what they want but the President of South Africa and senior officials and so forth — you just don't accuse Trump of misinformation and you don't say he was acting irrationally. That's exactly the wrong thing to do. You try to understand where he's coming from, you offer compromises and you get to a better place … But it was absolutely necessary for him to behave that way.”

If he were a young Afrikaner, former Gauging Premier Mbhazima Shilowa tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, he wouldn't take up Donald Trump's offer of refuge in the US, expropriation act or not. For a start, “as a young Afrikaner I would be educated enough to be able to read between the lines. Trump is offering refugee status; in reality if you look at the laws and the executive orders he has passed on refugees .., it is to stop everything. He will simply have many Afrikaners hyped up… in reality they have it better here." As for Trump and South Africa, rushing to Washington makes no sense. President Cyril Ramaphosa needs to wait until his ambassador in the US, Ebrahim Rasool, tells him he can sit him down with Trump. Otherwise you risk making a fool of yourself.

Industrial strategy consultant Jake Morris enters the hot topic of industrial policy and tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that localisation has its place in industrial growth strategies and shouldn't be automatically written off as many of its critics do. But they are only a part of many bigger and older success stories. “We have no choice but to follow a manufacturing-led growth path and yet our manufacturing is in decline, not just in terms of output but more worryingly in terms of investment and especially in terms of investment in new as opposed to replacement capacity. We have to follow this path and we're currently going the other way.”

In the space of a week DA leader John Steenhuisen has moved from threatening legal action against the Expropriation Act signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa to defending the Act following US President Donald Trump's astonishing attack on the country. Can Steenhuisen survive his flip-flop? Can the GNU survive the obvious neglect of the DA's interests and red lines. Former DA leader tell Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that something will have to give. "I think there only so much one way traffic that any self-respecting party or organisation can endure,” he says, "and unless there's fundamental reset of the relationship and the bona fide concerns of the DA and their constituency are taken into account I don't think that this GNU can survive in the medium term unless there are different terms of trade within it.”

Believe it or not, veteran political editor and Business Day Editor-at-Large Natasha Marrian tells Peter Bruce in tis edition of Podcasts from the Edge, President Cyril Ramaphosa is enjoying an all-too-rare personal and political purple patch right now and has found his happy place. Pushing through first the Bela Bill and now the new Expropriation Bill has done wonders for his position inside the ANC. Critics and doomsayers notwithstanding, the fact is that Ramaphosa has largely silenced his critics in the SACP and he has been able to brush aside deputy president Paul Mashatile's people in Gauteng and opponents in the ANC's KwaZulu structures. Sure, he is going to have to manage the DA in the GNU coalition but that's more than doable.

Jamie Holley, CEO of Traxion, Africa's largest private rail and rail services company, tell Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the company is dead keen to participate in the long-promised concessioning of rail routes owned by Transnet to the private sector and now that Transport Minister has released an almost complete Network Statement the final preparations for the award of concessions are in place. But there's a problem. Transnet's track and systems are old and broken, in “a critical state of disrepair” according to the statement. And Transnet, which moved 226m tonnes of bulk and freight in 2017/18 managed only 152m tonnes in 2023/24. So while train operators are lining up to run on the Transnet corridors, the track and the systems on them need eye-watering investment. If the government get the money flowing it could make a huge difference to our fortunes and Holley believes it will. And it wasn't the truck that forced rail off the rails he reminds Bruce, “it was just maintenance"

Rise Mzansi leader and SCOPA chairperson in parliament, Songezo Zibi tells Peter Bruce in this first edition of the Podcasts from the Edge of 2025 that with the turn of Donald Trump to the White House and the removal of constraints from social media platforms like X (Twitter) and, now Facebook, he fears for where South Africans might go to look for the truth. Right now, he says, the truth can be whatever you're able to make other people believe. A young democracy like South Africa, he warns, is vulnerable. "We need to make the truth more interesting,” he says. “We need to get the truth into the ring. What does bloodlust on behalf of the truth look like?"

Eskom Chairman Mteto Nyati tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that South African's crisis is about a lack of leadership. It was there at the start…. Like the rest of us he worries about the country but reckons our problems can be solved with discipline and application. Even in the most broken-down schools students are getting great grades where they have excellent headmasters. And while you can't just scrub coal out of our energy future, — too many jobs depend on it — he says Eskom will fight its own corner and in 10 years' time will be 30% renewable, 10%-15% gas and a doubling at least of our current nuclear capacity.

So Donald Trump becomes President. Former DA leader and GNU co-architect Tony Leon tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that while the Trump White House may indeed smile benignly on South Africa it is highly unlikely. We have built an arc of Trumps biggest targets — we're “misaligned”. We are close to Iran and close to China. We have attacked Israel, which Trump has sworn to defend and, probably worst, we run a trade surplus with the US. So let's not go expecting the next few years to be a walk in the park.

Celebrated South African trade and industry specialist Donald MacKay tells Peter Bruce in this Edition of Podcasts from the Edge that he thinks Donald Trump is going to win the November 5 US presidential election and that the result could spell trouble for South Africa. If Trump declares war on imports into the US, our problem isn't Agoa, which in reality affects only R2bn a year of SA exports to the US. It's that the US market is worth around 10 per cent of our total exports. “It's a big big deal,” he says, and Trump now is a far more dangerous proposition to global trade than he was when he first ran for the White House in 2016.

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that digitising our the entire chain of documentation between the state and us citizens, and for inbound travelers, “is completely doable” despite the weaknesses of the state-owned IT agency, Sita. He says officials are working overtime and even at weekends to clear visa application backlogs and he wants it all done by Christmas. And as the DA MP who forced the ANC to hand over records of its secretive deployment committee, he says he's not nearly done and that the courts are backing him.

Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Dean McPherson tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that are are “pots and pots of money” available to finance the right infrastructure projects in South Africa. And the National Treasury sits on a nominal R950bn for infrastructure. The trick though is to get something actually done. Infrastructure is complicated and expensive but McPherson says he is going to push as hard as he can to turn South Africa into a construction site.

Reports that Justice Minister Thembi Simelani took what she calls loans worth R575 600 from a financial advisor who paid her out of commissions he had earned as part of the looting of the VBS bank should be enough for President Cyril Ramaphosa to require her immediate resignation. That the payments to the minister were made -- to buy a Sandton coffee shop -- are not contested. She insists they were legal but so then does everyone else found in possession of the proceeds of crime.

Rise Mzansi leader and former Business Day editor Songezo Zibi says the Government of National Unity has seven months to get the country out of the woods. And he tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the DA is simply incapable of understanding why its competitors behave the way they do.

Combative and passionate South African investor and industrialist Vuslat Bayoglu and Peter Bruce cross swords over the virtues of coal and renewable energy in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge but both agree than plans in the latest Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) to build a new 3 000MW gas-fired power station are plain mad. Why pay dollars to import gas when you can buy South African coal in Rands?

Jorge Heine, arguably Chile's most illustrious modern diplomat, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that South Africa has no choice but to follow an Active Non-Alignment path in its diplomacy as the US and China square up to one another. Heine has been ambassador to South Africa, India and China for Chile, Latin America's most prosperous country. The world has already entered a second Cold War, he warns. The safest place is is equidistant from both.

The world is closer to war than it has been for decades. As the US and China square up to each other, any of the flashpoints in the Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan and the South China Sea could erupt at any time. All it would take is one rash act. World War 1 began with a Bosnian separatist, Gavrilo Princip, shooting and killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in 1914. It turned out the world then was ripe for war, South African Institute for International Affairs chief Elizabeth Sidiropoulos tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. And it may be ripe again now.

Technology is dramatically speeding up change. The first meeting this week of the Cabinet of President Cyril Ramaphosa's new coalition Cabinet must quickly come to grips with the ferocity of the revolution rushing towards South Africa. In all probability they will ignore it. But as futurist Neil Jacobsohn tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, we. are already behind the curve. Artificial Intelligence will change almost every aspect of our lives and while renewable energy will kill off almost 3m jobs in the coal and oil and gas industries, the International Energy Agency reckons it'll create another 13m in their place. Time to get on the bus.

Former DA leader Tony Leon has emerged mightily relieved to get his life back after two weeks spent in the political cauldron he left behind more than a decade ago. He tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that DA ministers in President Cyril Ramaphosa's are not going to be hogtied and will be able to make their presence felt. Though dominant, the ANC nevertheless has "negative power" in the GNU in that while it can stop policy initiatives it doesn't agree with, it can't stop alternatives surfacing.

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.

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.

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".

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…

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….

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…

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.”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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%.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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…

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….