BizNews Radio

JP Smith has spent years being told his city is one of the world's most violent. He didn't dispute it. He explained why. Nearly every gun his officers pulled off the street came back to bite them: nineteen times out of twenty, the man caught red-handed walked free, because Cape Town cannot investigate its own arrests. That fight over investigative powers, now heading to court against national government, ran alongside almost everything else that landed on his desk this fortnight: a pet bylaw row that briefly convinced half the city it was about to be taxed for owning a cat, a cabinet minister repeating a gangster's phone call on camera, a R3 billion construction site with a 28s gang boss's family on the books, and a straight answer to the question everyone keeps asking him: would he help Helen Zille fix Johannesburg. Alec Hogg sat down with the MMC for safety and security to get all of it on the record.

Retired senior advocate Chris Marnewick spent six years on the Pistorius trial record and tells Alec Hogg the conviction should have been culpable homicide, not murder, blaming social media groupthink for a "big lie" of gender-based violence. Analyst Jasmine Opperman reveals 14 active bitcoin wallets in South Africa channelling funds to Hamas. Financial Mail's Rob Rose unpacks how the Competition Commission wrongly named salesman Bryan Brownrigg in its rand-rigging case, wrecking a decade of his life. TymeBank's Coenraad Jonker says AI will enable bankers, not replace them, and Sakeliga's Piet le Roux takes employment equity quotas towards international courts.

In this week’s NdB Sunday Show, intelligence analyst Jasmine Opperman of Fulcrum Analytics, reveals to Chris Steyn that there are 14 active cryptocurrency wallets linked to Hamas in South Africa. “We know that Hamas has offices in South Africa. We know that they allowed freedom to move…And that there are definite financial streams going to Hamas, going to Hezbollah.” Opperman also shares the latest information on the South African recently kidnapped by ISIS in Mozambique, and further describes how ISIS-trained operatives take part in criminal operations in South Africa. “...the door for ISIS in South Africa is organised crime.” As for why the South African government would allow terrorist organisations to operate here, Opperman says: “...our government is ideologically blinded by the history of support they gained…it is as if the South African government is confusing their past with foreign policy.” Meanwhile, Opperman warns that US President Donald Trump has made a “fatal mistake” and that “we have entered fast and furious radicalisation…my concern is that the next generation of violent extremists, violent terrorists has already been generated.”

At the close of BNC#9, Alec Hogg sat down with David Shapiro and Piet Viljoen to unpack the conference. Viljoen made the numbers case for South Africa: bar the two big banks, every stock in his portfolio trades at a discount of thirty percent or more to what he thinks it is worth, and the market is effectively paying investors fifteen percent a year just to stay put. Shapiro made the human case, and the uncomfortable one, running through what three days without power does to a family in Johannesburg, and why he still believes America out-competes an ageing Europe on sheer will to win.

Piet le Roux runs the organisation that has taken on the South African state more than any other business group this year, and he came to BNC#9 to explain why. Sakeliga beat the government on foot and mouth disease vaccines, international airline licensing and estate agents' BEE certificates in 2026 alone, and it wasn't finished. In this Q&A with Piet Viljoen, le Roux traced Sakeliga's strategy back four hundred years to a merchant alliance most people have never heard of, explained why the organisation deliberately avoids chasing individual officials into court, and previewed an AI system built to read every government gazette so his team doesn't have to. He also took audience questions on a minister's response to Sakeliga's court wins, on personal accountability, and on what a self-funded, twenty-person team can realistically take on next: the Reserve Bank.