Show Notes
Jaco Zuma’s ambition to become president of South Africa was rooted in personal interests: to evade the law and assuage his dire financial circumstances - and his faction used chilling tools to get and keep him in power for as long as possible. So says political scientist Professor Mcebisi Ndletyana, the co-author of the “The Zuma Effect”, a five hundred-page work regarded as the definitive work on the Zuma era. In this interview with Chris Steyn, he describes what happened behind the scenes with the making of a personality cult, the remaking of the African National Congress (ANC), the disbandment of The Scorpions, the manipulation of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and other law enforcement institutions, as well as Zuma’s “intelligence project” Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhewebane. “So you have these series of undeserving people who don't expect to have these positions on their own merit. They're shocked that they're even appointed. So they spend most of their time paying back this debt to the president for doing something that they never thought they would ever achieve in their lives.” As for Zuma’s “revenge” MKP, Professor Ndletyana says: “MKP couldn't escape Zuma's personality because JZ believes in personalised rule. So he's formed the party in his own image. When Zuma dies, the party dies.”
More from BizNews Radio
Lesaka grew out of Net1, whose subsidiary's social grants contract ended up before the Constitutional Court. Now it wants to take deposits from the same grant recipients it lends to. In a follow-up to their strategy conversation, Alec Hogg put the harder questions to executive chairman Ali Mazanderani: who carries the legacy of Cash Paymaster Services, what borrowers really pay on a R5,000 loan, and who protects the customer when one company is both banker and lender. Mazanderani gave little ground. He called the banker-and-lender criticism nonsensical, argued that for many rural borrowers the real alternative is a loan shark, and asked why a loan is fine for someone with a city job but not for someone living on a grant.
A tariff investigation in South Africa is meant to take six months. Donald MacKay, whose XA Global Trade Advisors released its latest import duty report this week, told Alec Hogg the average had stretched to 40 months, and that the oldest open case was old enough to start school. He explained why the International Trade Administration Commission was only part of the problem, how a groundnut processor gave up waiting and shut its factory, and why ArcelorMittal had become the most protected company in the country while the businesses downstream paid for it. He was also unusually calm about losing AGOA, called Washington's demands badly delivered but not irrational, and warned that secret deals attached to tariff decisions created exactly the conditions where corruption could take root, though he stressed he had no evidence it had.
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-dollar moon mission, and Wall Street's AI selloff.
A fresh poll had Herman Mashaba running more than twice as strong as his own party in Johannesburg. He called it laughable. Thirteen days before the local elections, the ActionSA leader told Alec Hogg he would be disappointed with anything under 30% in Joburg and set himself a target of half of Soweto's wards. He explained what the 2024 election cost ActionSA, why he stayed out of Parliament to rebuild, and which two DA figures would have to go before he would share a council with the party. He also laid out his three conditions for any coalition partner, his plan to fold Joburg Water and City Power back into the city, and a blunt message for the officials he says crept back in after he left office. And he explained why a professional fisherman never bothers with the dam.
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 underpriced; and Teledyne, the sensor maker that had just posted the best quarter in its history. One share was put on probation with three tripwires. Another was left hanging until the next Ricardo webinar, along with a new rule and a JSE share the market had priced for a decade of decline.