Podcasts from the Edge

Death of the Post Office (Part 2) 29.06.2026 46min

Former South African Post Office CEO Mark Barnes tell Peter Bruce, in the second episode of their three-part Podcasts From the Edge Special, what he found when he first walked into his office at Post Office headquarters in Pretoria in January 2016. An early and curt meeting with SAPO union leaders on Day1. “And they said, and we've got 10 demands. And they reamed off these things. We demand this and we demand that. And I said, but I tell you what, if you want to come back tomorrow and you want to have an adult discussion with me, which talks about our common interest and the people that work here, I'll order sandwiches and I'll pour the tea. And then we can cut a deal. And they came back the next day and we never, ever fought again.”

Death of the Post Office (Part 1) 22.06.2026 32min

Listen in as banker, financier, entrepreneur and former Post Office CEO Mark Barnes tells Peter Bruce the story of his appointment as CEO of the South African Post Office in 2016, its recovery from constant State bail-outs and and his sudden exit in mid-2019 when President Cyril Ramaphosa, without warning, spun out the Post Bank and, with it, the SAPOs future as a viable business. In Part 1 Barnes recalls his recruitment and his plans for turning a desperate but vital State institution around.

Cyril, a plodder by day and a cowboy in the dark? 13.05.2026 36min

Why Helen Zille is unlikely to become Johannesburg’s mayor 16.04.2026 40min

How the vanities of small differences trap Africa 08.04.2026 1t 2min

Cyril picks a number, any number… 30.03.2026 10min

President Cyril Ramaphosa will tell delegates at the Sixth South African Investment Conference this Tuesday morning that he plans to raise R2 trillion in news fixed investment over the next three years. Or five years, depending on which articles you read on the Presidency website. Peter Bruce argues in this Podcast from the Edge monologue that Ramaphosa deliberately sets himself soft targets ,he knows he can reach. And R2 trillion doesn’t come close the to 25% of GDP in fixed investment per year the economy needs to grow fast enough to make a real dent in unemployment. So let’s not get too excited.

Can we really make money out of our police stations? 25.03.2026 51min

The government is planning something quite audacious and it isn’t a high speed train from Tshwane to Durban. Instead it wants to create, out of the often dishevelled mass of land and property it owns through the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure, a national property company worth some R155bn … and it’ll be open to, indeed it’ll depend on, private investment. DPWI minister Dean Macpherson tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that “We have to find a mechanism to do something to protect the underlying value (of the State’s assets). If you wanted to put it on a graph, you'd have an inclining maintenance backlog and a declining property value. And those two are going to intersect at a point where if a decision isn't made quickly the damage may become irreversible. And government may have anything between a R30bn and R50bn hole on it balance sheet due to these collapsing buildings."

“You have to get your hand on the steering wheel of state” 18.03.2026 45min

Incoming DA leader Geordin Hill Lewis says that to grow the party it is going to need the votes of people who have never voted for it before. DA members can do the math, he says. But is he comfortable that those new voters are going to have to be black? “Let me just say, specifically to all black South Africans” he tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, “that we are deeply interested, committed and passionate about their advancement and particularly those who still live in poverty and unemployment and who still have not seen the material benefits that political and democratic freedom has brought with it. I’m perfectly comfortable saying that from every platform and intend to say it often and frequently, all around the country. Getting people out of poverty is why we are in politics.”

Stuck in the 80s, has the ANC found the perfect adversary in Donald Trump? 25.02.2026 56min

Songezo Zibi, leader of Rise Mzansi and chair of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in Parliament, tells Peter Bruce in this wide-ranging edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the ANC and US President Donald Trump might have been made for each other. "I never expected the kind of disruption that we see from Donald Trump,” he says, "and this is an ANC problem (because) the ANC doesn't perceive the world in the way that the rest of the normal world perceives the world. … they're stuck in the eighties and nineties, fighting an old Cold War and they found the perfect adversary in Donald Trump because in some ways he takes them back. He validates their failure to kind of move forward and, and understand the word for what it is.”

Steenhuisen is just following the vaccine rules 04.02.2026 41min

If Ramaphosa caused the navy exercise fiasco, will anyone tell us? 21.01.2026 47min

If the past is any guide then some middle-ranking official of officer is going to take the fall for the cock-up at sea last week when an Iranian corvette took part in exercises off of False Bay with the South African, Chinese and Russian navies after President Cyril Ramaphosa, very late in the day, issued instructions (exactly what he said and whether or not he wrote it down we still don’t know) that they should not take part. There was probably no need for the Iranian vessel to follow the others out to sea, veteran military analyst Helmut Roemer Heitman tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, if it was merely going to observe. You can observe from the bridge of a participating ship. The result of the mess thus created, he says, is that "It'll be have a demoralizing impact on an already demoralized defense force because they'll be given the blame. And that's bad because the morale is already not good for obvious reasons. So you'll have more people leave who we'd rather keep and you'll have fewer people join who we'd like to join”

Why Imports don’t explain our decline 10.12.2025 54min

One of the best industrial minds in South Africa, XA Global Trade Advisors MD Donald Mackay, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that using import tariffs to protect local industry is a losing strategy. “ We assume that the reason our manufacturing sector more broadly struggles to compete is that we assume that an import tariff will fix it whereas the reason we struggle to make things is we've got broken infrastructure. We don't have electricity... The ports are broken.The reason we're not competitive has nothing to do with what other people are doing. Many of our imports are just the importation of [other countries’] electricity that is working consistently and functioning infrastructure and a safe environment to invest in. That is what you're effectively importing.”

Amateur hour in South African diplomacy? 03.12.2025 44min

Former DA leader Tony Leon tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that South Africa is taking a chance in there way it is confronting US President Donald Trump’s decisions to boycott the recent G20 Summit in Johannesburg and his subsequent announcement that he would not permit SA to participate in the G20 under his chairmanship in 2026. Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola calling Trump a “white supremacist” days before the Johannesburg summit was “the most self-harming remark” from the country’s most senior diplomat. It recalls former National Party Prime Minister John Vorster telling the world in 1968 it could “do its damndest” if it thought Apartheid would ever be dismantled. “He did very well in the next election,” remembers Leon, “but I don’t think this will help now. This idea that you can go to a powerful country and give it the middle finger might give you a moment of satisfaction but I think (for) worthwhile diplomats and meaningful diplomacy you have to think twice before you react. South African diplomacy is amateur hour, kind of … if you want a result, if you want to join the cheering gallery of the anti-trumpets in the world well that’s a very crowded saloon and no doubt it makes you feel good but I don;t think its going to meet any of the government’s apparent objectives to grow the economy, to get investment here and bulk up our trade.”

Fantastic Summit, but sadly no consensus 25.11.2025 9min

Peter Bruce argues, in this Podcasts from the Edge monologue, that while the G20 Summit in Johannesburg at the weekend went well, and that the West gathered around to support President Cyril Ramaphosa, he was unable to secure unanimous consensus on the Leaders’ Declaration he cleverly introduced at the beginning, rather than at the close, of the gathering. Whatever the gloss, the absence of the US and the the decision by Argentina not to support the Summit final communique, introduced for the first time a crack in the G20 edifice that may be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. It wasn’t all Ramaphosa’s fault but while the gathering was excellent, it didn’t quite succeed.

So, are we turning the economic corner or still getting to the corner? 19.11.2025 51min

Amid a flurry of upbeat economic news — a good mini-budget, a stronger rand, escape from the Grey List, the JSE on steroids and progress, on paper at least, on reform of South Africa’s moribund rail and ports system — Anne Bernstein, head of the Centre for Development and Enterprise tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that “I’m the first to welcome good news (but) we need to recognise what changes have been made (but) I don't think we've turned the corner. I think we're approaching the corner. And if you look at a lot of the reforms, energy's the most important … but there's so much more to do ... we shouldn't let our guard down. Look at the whole chess board. There's unemployment (which) is worse than it was a year ago by some 200,000 people. And we are simultaneously watching the absolute chaos, corruption and disaster in our criminal justice system”.

Renewal? Seriously? How does the ANC cook with rotten eggs? 12.11.2025 47min

Veteran ANC leader Mathews Phosa, a former ANC Treasurer-general and Mpumalanga premier, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that he doesn’t take talk of renewal in the ANC seriously. It’s spin, he says. "The election of 2024 showed that (the ANC) has died from 57% to 40%. If you think that was bad, as we stand now it is going to go down to 26% unless something traumatic happens ... there's too much spin. When you say want to renew, what are you renewing? You're not going to take rotten eggs and think that tomorrow they'll make a good omelet.”

Can the State step on the gas? 29.10.2025 47min

South Africa is taking a huge bet on a new fuel source for electricity — liquid natural gas (LNG). Electricity Minister Kghosientsho Ramokgopa has said we will target using LNG for 6 00MW of powerby 2030 but there almost no infrastructure to import it and no plant to make electricity from it. The government will gazette its 2025 Integrated Resource Plan in a matter of days. In this edition of Podcasts from the Edge Peter Bruce talks to Jaco Human, CEP of the Gas Users Association of Southern Africa, who currently use gas for industrial heating but who face a critical deadline — June 2030 when the current monopoly supplier, Sasol, will cut of supplies, the so-called “gas cliff". The industrial gas users employ close to 100 000 people. Can they and the State build import terminals and pipelines land long-term gas supply contracts in time? Only the State is big enough to serve as an anchor importer for long-term contracts. "What simply has to happen in order to mitigate the gas cliff? That, that is priority number one,” says Human. "What we're saying to the state is (that)e have now run out of time. We simply have to talk about demand stacking (orders into the future), and that simply means the sequencing and, and addition of gas demand through Eskom, through industry and through private power generation. If we don't get that right, we will sit with a market failure. Right now we see that the government is about to issue or get moving on a gas master plan very shortly, or at least publish something. We’re not sure ... that the gas cliff is sufficiently addressed in that.”

Why Paul Mashatile should never be president 22.10.2025 43min

Deputy President Paul Mashatile is a flawed individual who should probably not be president, journalist and author Pieter Du Toit tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. Du Toit in his new book on Mashatile, The Dark Prince, lays out the complex web of personal and financial relationships that keep Cyril Ramaphosa’s probable successor that are now “so intertwined that his life seems to be funded by individuals directly dependent government contracts”. “You remember that in 2009 (when corruption charges against Jacob Zuma were withdrawn there were large parts of the commentariat back then and in, in, in general, in the country saying, you know, ' Let's just give this guy a chance. He connects with people at grassroots level’ ", says Du Toit. "And I think if we decide to say, let's just give Paul Mashatile a chance we'd make a grave mistake. He lacks a political compass. He is someone who who is open to influences outside of what can be considered proper. He’s a deeply problematic character”.

Time now to reopen our embassy in Tel Aviv? 15.10.2025 32min

US President Donald Trump’s flash coup in bringing fighting in Gaza to end end on Monday, along with the return of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, may still be on shaky ground but it’s a good moment for South Africa to grab and to reopen its embassy in Tel Aviv, which we shuttered a few years ago without ever breaking actual diplomatic relations. Now, Freedom Front Plus leader Corne Mulder tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, is the time to go back and put official feet back on the ground. And, clearly, with an eye on Washington, where negotiations to reduced Trump’s punishing tariffs on SA are painfully slow. "South Africa is not, on its own, going to change the course of events in the Middle East at the moment,” says Mulder. " (Events have) overtaken us and we must now get onto that wave and, and, and move with it. It gives us really an opportunity to not only reach out to United States in terms of, uh, repositioning of our international relations when it comes to Israel, because that is one of the major points of contention from the US side, but it gives us the opportunity to reach out. And I think opening the embassy would be a very, uh, a very sound step to take ... it would be very well received in Washington because I know they're expecting us to have a rethink in terms of our relationship with Israel and the latest developments give us that opportunity to move into that space.”

Can Cyril get a US trade deal over the line? 13.09.2025 56min

President Cyril Ramaphosa goes to the US in the next few weeks to address the United Nations General Assembly. But will his trade negotiators currently in Washington have made enough progress by then to allow Ramaphosa to fly from New York to Washington to sign a trade deal that significantly reduces the crippling 30% tariffs US President Donald Trump has imposed on imports from South Africa? Former South African newspaper editor Phillip van Niekerk, now living in Washington, thinks a deal may be on the cards. “But, you know, South Africa has really dropped the ball (diplomatically in the US) And this goes back a long way. This doesn't, doesn't start with the Trump administration. It doesn't start now, in 2025. There's deep relationships between South Africa and the United States that back a long, long way.,” Van Niekerk tell Peter Bruce in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge.