BizNews South Africa

Two days after their first take on the Dimension Data campus saga, David Shapiro and Alec Hogg came back to it with the remaining four directors' rebuttal in hand. The four said Jason Goodall's statement contradicted what he had said under oath, and that NTT's Japanese owners knew about the deal all along. Shapiro and Hogg asked how that defence squares with Goodall's account, and why a man who rose to run NTT would hand back so much money and implicate his former colleagues. Shapiro questioned

SASCOC has suspended its president, Barry Hendricks, with immediate effect, following anonymous complaints alleging breaches of the organisation's safeguarding policy. A review by retired Judge Basheer Waglay found enough grounds to refer the matter to the SASCOC Judicial Body. The board is at pains to stress that suspension is not a finding of guilt, and that Hendricks is entitled to due process. First vice president Lwandile Simelane takes over presidential duties in the interim. With the matt

Listen hereAt 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, an

Listen herePiet 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

Listen hereCape 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 c

Listen hereWith South Africa’s premier universities oversubscribed and the cost of popular overseas destinations like the UK, US, Australia, and Canada soaring, families could pivot to highly competitive, cost-effective global alternatives. Sable International’s Brent Morris told BizNews in an interview that Mauritius, the UAE, and Malaysia now offer highly attractive degrees, rivalling the total costs of studying at some local South African institutions, such as Stellenbosch. This option is par

Listen hereAfriForum's Morné Mostert tells BizNews the ANC's plan to merge Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni into one mega metro fails the science test - bigger municipalities don't perform better - and mainly boosts councillors' pay, which scales with size. From BNC#9, Dawie Roodt tells Alec Hogg he'd rebuild confidence by literally cleaning up the country, then hand himself the finance ministry to build the world's simplest tax regime. Ian Cameron revisits the Philippi ambush that nearly ki

Generative AI has gone from novelty to daily tool in under three years, and business commentator Nicole Wills argues the bigger challenge is psychological, not technical. Drawing on Reid Hoffman, Alex Hormozi and the World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs report, she notes five of the seven most future-proof skills are human ones: emotional intelligence, leadership, creative and analytical thinking, and talent management. Wills warns that fear, not the technology itself, is what paralyses or

Listen hereIn this edition of the NdB Sunday Show, Ron Weissenberg of The Accountability Group (TAG), tells Chris Steyn how South Africa could have a new government by next year instead of after the 2029 national elections. He says it can be achieved in accordance with a Constitutional provision for Parliament to be dissolved between national elections once a minimum of three years have passed since it was elected. It would require a motion to be tabled by an MP and voted for by the majority of

Listen hereIn this interview with Chris Steyn, Build One South Africa (BOSA) mayoral candidate for the City of Cape Town, Roger Solomons, describes how unaffordable it has become for ordinary citizens to live and do business in the Mother City. “I've crisscrossed the city, not just during this campaign trail, but during my public service, across all of Cape Town, all 118 wards, and the overwhelming majority of Capetonians say that life has become way harder over the last five to ten years… The p

Listen hereHelen Zille left her husband, sons and grandchildren in Cape Town to chase what she calls one of the toughest jobs of her career: mayor of Johannesburg. In this wide-ranging conversation with Alec Hogg, she explains why she'd rather walk straight into opposition than repeat the "extortion" coalition deals that helped bring Joburg to its knees, takes on the DA's Mark Burke controversy head-on, and reveals what Henry Kissinger once told her about the DA's chances on the African continen

Listen here“Oily, sneaky. I think if he was in the Wild West in America, he would make a very good snake oil salesman.” That is the verdict by Safe Citizen Founder Jonathan Deal on suspended MP Fadiel Adams testimony before the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry. In Deal’s latest appearance on the NdB Sunday Show with Chris Steyn, Deal details the dramatic unraveling of nefarious plots and the vindication of those falsely accused “...these very watchdogs that were supposed to protect the public from

Listen hereMark Burke discusses Kastelo’s regulatory dispute with the South African Reserve Bank, explaining the company’s compliance processes, client mandates, offshore investment transactions and decision to halt operations amid the blocking order. He also addresses the political fallout, media coverage and his decision to step back from the DA’s finance cluster. Burke maintains that Kastelo acted within the regulatory framework, while insisting the controversy should be allowed to run its co

Listen hereHe spent three months convincing two reluctant shareholders to sell. He drove across the Hong Kong border in a train packed "like sardines" to negotiate with four young founders through an interpreter. He talked Naspers into betting $32 million it barely had on a loss-making Chinese chat app called QQ. It became Tencent, one of the most valuable companies on earth, and the single biggest driver of wealth in almost every South African pension fund. A year later, his contract wasn't ren

Listen hereTen years ago this month, Bernard Mostert and Braam van Huyssteen signed away their shoe empire for R3.2 billion in Steinhoff shares. Within eighteen months those shares were worth almost nothing, and the men who bought Tekkie Town had walked South Africa into its biggest corporate fraud. In this fireside chat, Mostert breaks a five-year public silence to talk through the due diligence that missed everything, the 2am WhatsApp meltdowns that should have been a warning, and why he and h

Listen hereFired from a small quarrying company in 2005 for pitching an idea a lawyer called "unlistable," Andries van Heerden went and built it anyway. Twenty years on, that idea is Afrimat: a R10 billion JSE-listed miner spanning iron ore, manganese, anthracite, rare earths and now cement, after last year's Lafarge acquisition. At BNC#9, the man rated by his peers as South Africa's best miner lays out the deals, the near-misses, and the culture overhaul it took to get there, then turns to what

BHP, the mining giant with deep South African roots, has posted record profits driven by copper rather than iron ore. Underlying EBITDA rose 27% to $32.9 billion, and shareholders received a record $115 billion over the past decade. But there are costs too: a $2.3 billion writedown on an unfinished Canadian potash project, and ongoing payments linked to Brazil's 2015 Samarco dam disaster. These numbers belong to outgoing CEO Mike Henry. His successor, South African-born Brandon Craig, now inheri

Statistician Garth Zietsman asks how intelligent someone would need to be to become a real world Moriarty, a criminal mastermind who consistently escapes justice. Using Bell Curve data and US serial killer statistics, he estimates that evading a single murder charge takes roughly the cognitive ability needed to finish junior college, while getting away with three murders is somewhat harder than earning a basic degree. He puts the number of genuinely genius-level killers in the US at around a doz

Absa posted headline earnings of R12.8 billion for the first half of 2026, up 8%, as new CEO Kenny Fihla pushes a three-year turnaround. But the detail is less flattering. Corporate and Investment Banking, historically the group's biggest earner, grew just 1%, with returns shrinking. Africa Regions, the continental growth story Absa has sold investors for years, went backwards, earnings down 10%. South Africa did the heavy lifting instead, with retail and business banking earnings up 17%, now 72

Listen hereHe started out as a bursary student from a village with no electricity or running water. Now Simon Baloyi runs one of South Africa's biggest industrial employers. In his first full year as CEO (2024) he turned a loss of nearly R70 a share into double-digit profit. Baloyi's BNC#9 keynote takes us inside that turnaround: the internal battle to hold the strategy together through Trump's tariffs, the balance sheet target that will decide when dividends return, and why Sasol isn't walking