BizNews Radio

Swimming South Africa has two officials suspended, a high performance centre with more than R50 million unaccounted for, and an Olympic champion who says she waited over a year for prize money the federation then charged her interest on. So what does a sponsor actually do with that? Bank of America's Brad Ross, speaking to Alec Hogg in a personal capacity, laid out the playbook: freeze the funds, audit what really happened, then find a way to keep supporting the athletes without the money running through a federation under a corruption cloud. Drawing on his years running sponsorship for Coca-Cola, and on cautionary tales from West Ham United to the International Olympic Committee, Ross made the case for morality clauses South African sport still doesn't use, and for putting athletes like Tatjana Smith and Roland Schoeman on the boards that are supposed to serve them.

The Trump administration has escalated its pressure on South Africa, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing new visa restrictions over land expropriation laws and racial discrimination against the Afrikaner minority. Christo van der Rheede, executive director of the FW de Klerk Foundation, calls it a profound strategic blunder, one that risks handing the ANC a political gift ahead of local government elections. Van der Rheede also takes issue with the framing of Afrikaners by the Trump administration, arguing that associating Afrikaners only with white people is problematic. In an interview with BizNews, Van der Rheede argues that the real culprits have already been identified in the findings of the Zondo and Madlanga commissions and that Washington had a far more effective and far less divisive path available to it. He appeals to the US to reconsider its approach to South Africa if it is interested in saving the country and a society in which all enjoy the fruits of a hard-earned constitutional democracy. – Linda van Tilburg

This interview was livestreamed on Conscious Caracal on 11 September 2026. Find Ernst van Zyl's Conscious Caracal Podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/@UCeNFLCUJ2lM1S_H32ICVs4w

Before BizNews, there was a bank job Alec Hogg quit within three years, a company called Moneyweb he built from a room above his garage and then lost control of, and a High Court letter that convinced him to start all over again rather than retire. In this conversation with Ernst van Zyl, Hogg walked through the full history: the SABC newsroom he ran the year Nelson Mandela was released, the corporate takeover that pushed his stake in his own company down to 18 percent, the year of gardening leave that turned into a second startup, and the decision to own almost all of BizNews himself this time. He also covered what BizNews has become since 2013: a newsroom that moved from Bryanston to Hermanus, a YouTube and podcast audience of around a million people a month, and two annual conferences that now sell out within weeks of opening.

FF+ leader Corné Mulder tells Alec Hogg that Pretoria's foreign policy has exhausted Washington's patience and that the ANC could collapse well before 2029. New US visa restrictions name no names, making official travel to America a gamble. Kasinomics author GG Alcock says the deportation drive barely dented a trillion-rand township economy, with spaza volumes back to normal within weeks of the July deadline. Plus Wall Street rallies while the Fed hikes for the first time since 2023.

South Africa just joined a short and unflattering list of countries facing individual US visa restrictions, and Freedom Front Plus leader Corné Mulder says he saw it coming from a manifesto launch stage days before it happened. He tells Alec Hogg why he thinks Cyril Ramaphosa's habit of avoiding decisions has left the country exposed to an American administration that has run out of patience, why the ANC seems willing to simply wait out the Trump presidency, and why he believes ordinary South Africans, not the "comrades" benefiting from ANC patronage, are the ones now pushing back. He also lays out his read on the coalition scramble coming after 4 November, throws down a direct challenge to the DA over Tshwane and Johannesburg, and explains why he thinks South Africa's next real change of government could arrive well before 2029.