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He turned around mines others had written off and built Sibanye-Stillwater into a global giant. Now Neal Froneman wants to bring Formula One back to South Africa, on 600 hectares of Swartland farmland rather than at Kyalami. In conversation with Alec Hogg, the Blue Mountain Racing chairman explained why he treats the R6.7bn project like a mine still in exploration, what the fallback is if Formula One says no, and why he believes a modern Grand Prix is a week-long spectacle that old circuits simply cannot host. He also tackled the question hanging over every South African bid: after the Lady R affair, what stops government's foreign policy from sinking this one too? And he made his case for why Cape Town, not the team behind it, is the winning card.

On the latest NdB Sunday Show, Chris Steyn asks veteran intelligence analyst Jasmine Opperman why South Africa’s intelligence agencies do not seem to intervene when they become aware of corruption and other criminal activity in official ranks. She says “the whole national analysis capacity has been diluted to the extent that it's non-existent” - and even if that should be available, such intelligence would likely just be pushed in a direction or ignored…The ANC has a laager mentality…They close ranks like it happens with ZanuPF, like it happens with Frelimo. And what happens in that laager, stays within that laager.” As for corrupt and sexually deviant officials being vulnerable to recruitment from foreign intelligence agencies, Opperman says: “Already recruited...if you start talking about the leaking of intelligence, I would love to know how many of them…that raw intelligence reports are leaking at the speed of light, that it's being given to Iran to BRICS countries…this is a probability”. Another “red light” is the Presidency’s grip on intelligence. “If you…see how many of those issues are being run directly from the Presidency. That's a serious issue. It's not right. Something is wrong here: a president cannot run the country out of this office on all these issues.” Opperman also gives an update on the ransom demand for the South African and others kidnapped by ISIS in Mozambique, as well as the 11 Iran-SA-Hamas crypto wallets.

She said she hadn't exchanged a single word with the ANC about a post-election deal. Helen Zille then told Alec Hogg who she thought was talking to them. The DA's Johannesburg mayoral candidate took on Corné Mulder's claim of a backdoor ANC pact and compared Gayton McKenzie's Patriotic Alliance to the early 20th-century American Mafia. She also set out the coalition arithmetic she believes could shut the DA out of Joburg even at 40%. She described Joburg's budget as a fiscal fiction and gave a detailed account of how, in her telling, Julius Malema steered Herman Mashaba's mayoralty one decision at a time. She named the one condition any coalition partner would have to accept, and explained how the DA might still govern eThekwini if MK falls short of a majority.

At a time when news headlines across Africa highlight political friction, economic distress and security concerns, a guarantee of better times ahead may sound almost provocatively optimistic. Yet Dr Jakkie Cilliers, founder of the Institute for Security Studies and head of its African Futures and Innovation Programme, bases that guarantee not on hope, but on rigorous demographic data and structural modelling. In his latest book, Africa's Road to Prosperity: 10 Things to Know, Cilliers doesn't pin Africa's future on its youthful population, technological leapfrogging or natural resource wealth. In fact, he argues that a median age of 20 imposes a heavy dependency burden that constrains economic growth and can make democratic systems more volatile, not less. Technology, meanwhile, is an enabler rather than a shortcut. His confidence instead rests on demographic ratios gradually maturing and a larger, more integrated and productive African market emerging. The conversation also explores several of the practical policy ideas he sets out in the book, including scaling "industries without smokestacks", modernising land tenure systems and how converting communal land, such as KwaZulu-Natal's Ingonyama Trust, into a bankable asset could unlock capital for farmers. Cilliers also shares his views on Africa's geopolitical options, arguing for closer alignment with Europe and India, and discusses the risks facing South Africa as growing numbers of voters lose faith in the ability of democracy to deliver.

He was on the shortlist to run Eskom and lost out to André de Ruyter. Years later, Andy Calitz, who ran South Africa's transmission grid before a career that took him from Shell to Gazprom's control room and the helm of LNG Canada, still thinks about it most weeks. In conversation with Alec Hogg, he called load shedding a South African own goal with no equal among significant countries, and said Germany scored one of its own. He explained why the world's largest machine has nobody in charge of it, why no energy source is truly clean, how Sasol's Secunda plant out-emits an entire European country, and why South Africa keeps losing offshore gas investment to its neighbours. And he had one blunt message for voters about what they are entitled to demand.