BizNews Radio

Afrimat's Andries van Heerden bought a struggling cement business for its quarries, not its cement, and is now watching a Chinese buyer take on the part he didn't want. In this Q&A from BNC#9, he tells Alec Hogg what actually scares him in a takeover, why Transnet's turnaround is the best he's seen in years, and why he still won't chase lithium at today's price. Along the way: fixing a Free State town without handing over a cent, the gold South Africa has left in the ground since 1886, and why doing business with Chinese contractors is a lesson his own team is still learning.

In this interview with Chris Steyn, Hermann Pretorius of the Institute for Race Relations (IRR) unpacks his polling results on South Africa’s women voters from 2021 to 2026, including the key finding that women voters are keeping the African National Congress (ANC) ahead of the Democratic Alliance (DA). “..all the years from 2021 till now, the ANC has an advantage among women voters.. if only men voted in an election in South Africa in 2026, the ANC and the DA would be essentially tied at 26-27%. If only women voted, the DA would be on 26% and the ANC would be on 37%.” Asked for his predictions of the outcome of the November Local Government Elections, Pretorius estimates that the ANC could get as much as 50% in Mangaung, while DA in Johannesburg could get between 42 to 44% and the ANC between 20 to 23%; the DA in Tshwane between 44 to 47% and the ANC between 24 to 27%; the DA holding Cape Town with between 58 and 61% of the vote; the DA in Ekurhuleni garnering as much 43% of the vote with the ANC down in the mid-low 20s and the Freedom Front Plus at between 9 and 11%; and in EThekwini the DA and MKP possibly tying at 30%, with the IFP at about 14%, and the ANC at around 10%. “But I think the number to watch is MK versus DA. Those I think in an urban-suburban setting are the two parties that are likely to be at each other's throats for that first spot.”

Brett Redelinghuys was banned for ten years by Swimming South Africa for trying to fix it from the inside. This week, the two men who banned him, president Alan Fritz and CEO Shaun Adriaanse, were provisionally suspended by World Aquatics itself, over allegations of abuse of power and fake documents. In between: a R111 million high-performance swimming centre in Franschhoek that has never held a swimmer, its pools filled with stagnant water instead, a school stripped of the facilities it signed away, and a breakaway water polo body formed because, in Redelinghuys's words, there was no way to fix this from within. He lays out what he says actually happened to the money, why South Africa's water polo team walked away from the 2024 Olympics without most of the country knowing, and what he thinks needs to happen next.

Three senior executives are gone from one of South Africa's flashiest bitcoin bets this week, and the company's new interim boss won't say how big the alleged share manipulation was. An intelligence analyst says the crime bosses everyone is fixated on are just middle management, answering to people we never hear about. Andrew Smith explains what it actually costs to hand your company over to outside money, years after he thought he already knew. A DA mayoral hopeful with a Hawks case behind him makes his pitch on infrastructure over show ponies. And the minister sitting on thousands of empty government buildings explains why the state still pays R6 billion a year to rent from someone else. Plus the latest from Wall Street.

What really happens after the entrepreneurial dream comes true? Andrew Smith, co-founder of Yuppiechef, opens up about building a business from a side hustle into a retail powerhouse, taking venture capital, navigating rapid growth, surviving Covid, and ultimately selling the company. Drawing on years of handwritten journals, he shares candid lessons about ambition, control, investors, partnerships and the emotional cost of letting go. It’s an honest, thought-provoking look at entrepreneurship - and a powerful reminder that success doesn’t always mean getting everything you wanted.