BizNews South Africa

South Africans vote in local government elections on Wednesday. The stakes reach well beyond municipal councils. William Saunderson-Meyer warns of a familiar trap: the ANC losing votes yet keeping power, as it did after 2021 and again in the GNU. The DA needs more than seats, he argues. It needs the whip hand, and the will to use it. Even many ANC supporters seem fed up. Will they act on it this time?Jaundiced Eye by William Saunderson-MeyerWednesday’s local government elections (LGEs) matter as

A day before the vote, Cilliers Brink said the polls that put him well short of a majority in Tshwane had it wrong, or at least not yet right. The former mayor, removed two years earlier, told Alec Hogg that squeezed smaller parties and a weakened ANC election machine could still hand the DA an outright win. He laid the Bronkhorstspruit water crisis at the door of mayor Nasiphi Moya and the ANC-held portfolios in her mayoral committee, explained why he would bring private operators into water, e

The AI investment boom is propping up global growth, but economist Dambisa Moyo warns it is increasingly funded by debt, putting AI firms in direct competition with heavily indebted governments for capital. That contest is pushing up bond yields worldwide, and if AI returns disappoint, central banks and treasuries would have little room to respond. For South Africa, the stakes are real: a government that relies heavily on bond markets faces higher borrowing costs as global yields rise, and any s

A personalised mRNA treatment for melanoma, designed from the mutations in each patient's own tumour, has reduced the risk of the cancer returning in a phase 3 trial of 1,137 high-risk patients. At two years, 82.2% of those given intismeran with pembrolizumab remained recurrence-free, against 70.0% on pembrolizumab alone. Survival data are still immature and long-term safety unknown. For South Africa, the harder question is access: the treatment depends on timely diagnosis, surgery, pathology an

South Africa's new 10-year grid adequacy outlook assumes electricity demand on Eskom will keep rising, backed by new gas plants and thousands of kilometres of transmission lines. Engineer Wietze Post argues the data point the other way. The energy Eskom must still supply has dropped from 201 TWh to 179 TWh in under two years, while rooftop solar now outstrips Medupi and Kusile combined and coal units sit in cold reserve. If he is right, the risk for consumers and taxpayers is not a shortage of p

Americans vote today in midterms that are, in effect, a referendum on Donald Trump. The Economist’s model gives Democrats a 94% chance of taking the House, but only a coin-flip 53% chance in the Senate, far more cautious than the prediction markets. Why should South Africans care? Because Washington’s mood shapes ours. Trump’s tariffs have squeezed our exporters, and his administration’s hostility toward Pretoria has been no secret, with yesterday’s AGOA announcement confirming action has begun.

Political analyst Prince Mashele tells Alec Hogg the ANC needs 35% nationally for a good night, that anything in the upper 20s would be a catastrophe, and that with the vote days away Johannesburg voters still have no idea who its mayoral candidate is. SRF chairman Dr Frans Cronjé says South Africa is halfway through a two-step regime change, and only a DA-ANC deal uniting the middle class and the aspirant middle class holds the country together. Willem Els weighs Paul O'Sullivan's bid to block

By Aidan Freswick*The people who have already retired are the best teachers of how to do it. Here are the lessons I hear from them again and again.Some of the most useful conversations I have aren't with clients who are planning for retirement. They're with clients who are already there. Ask a retiree what they wish they had known at 35, and you get answers no textbook can give you: what worked, what they regret, and what turned out not to matter at all.Over the years I've collected these lesson

Cy Jacobs has lived in Johannesburg all his life, and he told Alec Hogg he feared the city was close to the point of no return. The 36ONE co-founder explained why he had stepped into the election, why he believed Helen Zille had earned the city's thanks, and why another 50,000 to 100,000 voters could change the outcome. William Saunderson-Meyer said this election felt different, with the country in desperate straits and voters more disillusioned than ever, and he had strong words for anyone plan

Security analyst Willem Els tells Chris Steyn that the collapsed plea deal behind Cat Matlala's unsigned 25-page statement, which throws former deputy national commissioner Shadrack Sibiya and former police minister Bheki Cele under the bus, hands investigators a money trail even if it can no longer be used in evidence. Alec Hogg tells the BizNews Premium community what stood out from his Enoch Godongwana interview: Transnet's private rail lines, Eskom's turn, and the push to fix South Africa's

ANC MP Supra Mahumapelo suggested that South Africans who spread “misinformation” about the country abroad should lose their citizenship. He seems to have since walked it back, but International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola backed the idea. This column argues that it strikes at the foundation of constitutional democracy. Section 20 of the Constitution says no citizen may be deprived of citizenship, and even convicted prisoners keep the right to vote. Earlier calls to denationalise the Guptas

For more than 13 years, Dr Carla Mitchell has chased a dream she once believed belonged to Americans and NASA. Now she is leading Africa’s first space exploration mission to the moon in 2029. Africa2Moon will ride on China’s Chang’e 8 lander and deploy three 30 centimetre antennas, fondly known as BALLS, to pick up low frequency radio waves that our atmosphere blocks from Earth. A mission that should have cost more than $100 million is now expected to cost less than half a million dollars, becau

Viv Vermaak dusts off South Africa’s old election posters and finds the promises still standing. The ANC offered a better life for all. The Democratic Party offered freedom, federalism and free enterprise. Three decades on, the ANC has lost its majority. The DA sits inside the Government of National Unity. Both now face the same test. Did those founding promises survive contact with office? With the 2026 slogans out, Vermaak says the answer won’t be found on a lamppost.By Vivienne Vermaak*From “

A Starlink offer to connect 5,000 mainly rural South African schools, which would reach more than 2.4 million learners a year, is still on hold because of local ownership rules. Instead of giving 30% of its local operation to historically disadvantaged groups, the company proposed a R500 million equity equivalent investment. Microsoft, IBM and AWS already use this kind of arrangement. Communications minister Solly Malatsi supported the change, but ICASA says it won’t act until the Electronic Com

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won a fourth term as Brazil’s president. He trailed Flávio Bolsonaro by 2m votes after the first round, then took the run-off 52% to 48%. No candidate since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 had lost the first round and gone on to win. Three things helped: a WhatsApp-driven campaign, generous pre-election handouts, and growing doubts about Bolsonaro’s alleged militia ties. For South Africa, the result keeps a familiar left-leaning partner in charge of a fellow BR

By Kristin Putter*We’ve all been in that uncomfortable position when unexpected expenses crop up and we’re scrambling to pay for the kids’ overseas school trip, urgent car repairs, or a family emergency. Up until fairly recently the only way to take care of these costs was to use credit.But now, many South Africans with a retirement fund or annuity are looking to tap into a new source of help when finances are tight: the savings portion of their two-pot retirement funds.Before September 2024, ge

ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba tells Alec Hogg he will work with any party where the numbers make sense, but if the DA wants a Johannesburg coalition, Helen Zille and Cilliers Brink must go first, calling both untrustworthy. He is wary of MK's instability but rules no one out. A BizNews Premium portfolio update asks whether Clicks is a bargain or a trap after a 47% slide, with headline earnings up 4.4% and just 2.7% once buybacks are stripped out. Plus Dr Carla Mitchell on Africa's half-million-

Alec Hogg went into this episode wanting to sell two shares. The rules he built for the Ricardo portfolios talked him out of at least one. In the first of a new run of Premium portfolio updates, he put four fresh sets of results through the same valuation test: Afrimat, whose iron ore profits all but vanished while its quarries quietly earned their keep; Clicks, a business still growing that had turned into a valuation problem; Chubb, the insurer walking away from business it thought was underpr

In this edition of Electoral Roadshow with Chris Steyn, analyst Wayne Sussman unpacks the latest results from the eNCA MarkData Election Survey. In Johannesburg, the Democratic Alliance (DA) is way out in front on 35% of the vote, the African National Congress (ANC) second on 21,8%, uMkhonto weSizwe (MKP) third on 12,5%, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) fourth on 11.9% followed by ActionSA on 10.3%, and the Patriotic Alliance (PA) well below on 3.7%  Here, the DA’s Helen Zille is the mos

Jim O’Neill, who coined BRIC and later questioned whether South Africa had earned its S, has a new target: share buybacks. Since 2001 Big Pharma has spent around $1.2 trillion on buybacks and dividends. That’s enough to fund his superbug review’s 29 recommendations 30 times over. Meanwhile, drug-resistant sepsis stalks newborns across the developing world. JSE investors know the buyback game well. Naspers and Prosus have spent tens of billions of dollars on their own shares since 2022. Great for