BizNews Radio

Fired 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's actually hurting Afrimat right now. It isn't the cement plant everyone warned him about. It's the slow unravelling of South African industry itself.

He 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 away from coal just yet. This is the story of a company built on getting oil out of coal, told by the man now betting his career on getting it right.

Wall Street dipped as investors braced for retail earnings from Home Depot, TJX and Walmart. In Knysna, Ron Weissenberg says a R70-80 million provincial intervention has barely dented entrenched corruption despite Hawks investigations. From BNC#9, Theo de Jager detail 14 Washington meetings pushing the US to link trade to farm-murder action, BEE exemptions and Expropriation Act changes. Sasol's Simon Baloyi and Afrimat's Andries van Heerden share their turnaround stories, from R60bn capex plans to cleaning out corruption at Lafarge.

They've been dubbed 'the Three Amigos', and a year on from their first appearance as a trio at BNIC#2 in Hermanus, Dr Corné Mulder, Dr Theo de Jager and Gerhard Papenfus are back with an inside account of the Washington meeting that could reshape South Africa's relationship with the United States. They reveal the exact conditions US officials say must be met before trade relations are restored, explain how a foot and mouth disease crisis quietly cost a government minister his party leadership, and don't hold back on why they think transformation policy is strangling the businesses that could otherwise be creating jobs right now. Blunt, funny and occasionally uncomfortable, this is three men who've chosen to stay outside government making the case for why that's exactly where they can do the most good.

With The Hawks investigating corruption at Knysna Municipality amid a failing intervention, Ron Weissenberg of The Accountability Group (TAG) tells Chris Steyn why interventions and money are not the solution. “They tend to paper over the problems and they address… emergencies on a short-term basis. However, when the money ends and the resources are withdrawn, we are left with exactly the same staff complement, the same management, the same issues around leadership and it's effectively taking almost an infant to just before walking stage and as a toddler and then leaving them alone thereafter.” As for the failure of “King Maker” Coalitions, Weissenberg says: “Voters appear...to like the concept of coalitions. But toxic coalitions don't like voters. And what happens is that great intentions, great speeches and a great playbook often results in quite the opposite. And you have the unfortunate situation where human nature, self-interest comes into play and...very quickly these coalitions move into managing the coalition rather than managing the municipality or the local authority. And that exacerbates service delivery…” While voters across the country hope for better municipal governance after the LGEs in November, Weissenberg advises residents how to use current legislation to pressurise political parties or individual independents into more appropriate action.