BizNews Radio

In today's BizNews Daybreak: Trevor Manuel delivers a scathing account of how South Africa lost SAA and Eskom, while the IRR's John Endres warns that trying to wait out the Trump administration could cost the country billions in investment. We also unpacks the first monthly drop in US consumer prices since 2020 under Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, plus OpenAI's deepening legal battle with Apple.

South Africa's weight loss jab boom has a dark underside. A Pretoria pharmacy, iDexis, was producing roughly 84,500 units of semaglutide a month — more than Novo Nordisk's entire local sales of Ozempic and Wegovy — under the guise of a one-off "compounding" exemption meant for individual patients. Regulators only inspected the premises this year, more than two years after Novo Nordisk first complained, and found no sterile ventilation, no batch records, and no adverse-event tracking. Elsewhere, the Public Investment Corporation has suspended CEO Patrick Dlamini over an alleged Lanseria Airport conflict of interest, its fifth executive suspension in two years.

In this wide-ranging interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, the Chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, details the shocking DNA testing backlog. “...this is literally how a child rapist, a child murderer, any murderer or rapist for that matter walks free. This is literally the way that the State, the inability of the State to process this evidence, becomes the reason for a rapist to continue raping.” Cameron discusses the widening scandal surrounding Crime Intelligence (CI) boss General Feroz Khan, the case of suspended Lieutenant General Molefe Fani, and others. “What the Madlanga Commission is showing us is that Khan was actually one of the key pieces of the puzzle for Fani to ensure that this procurement process for PPE during the COVID-19 period was smoothly operated with the South African Police Service……a lot of key players in SAPS knew that Fani had been involved in this irregular PPE procurement during his time as a Chief Procurement officer at National Treasury. And he was still appointed in SAPS as the Head of Supply Chain Management. That tells you that it was strategically done. That would be a key way of ensuring that a 360 million Rand Medicare 24 contract can come in. It's a key way of structuring your entire process before the contract could come in, in order for it not to be red flagged… lot of the things that are happening, make no mistake, it was done deliberately - and it was done deliberately to hollow out and to control the system in order to ensure that further criminality would be able to flourish.”

In today's BizNews Daybreak we cover the escalating US-Iran conflict and its impact on soaring crude oil prices. In South Africa, Dr. John Endres critiques low fixed investment rates, SARU faces backlash over overpriced Springbok tickets, and over 53,000 undocumented foreign nationals are successfully repatriated. Finally, Apple hits OpenAI with a massive trade-secrets lawsuit.

John Endres, CEO of the Institute for Race Relations, tells BizNews that the elite consensus defending BEE is cracking, even as its beneficiaries defend it loudest. He points to the Starlink saga - blocked partly over empowerment shareholding while a pricier, slower rival wins state favour - as proof the policy is running out of road. Endres also unpacks why so many of South Africa's estimated one million skilled emigrants stay away, and delivers an unexpected verdict: he's more optimistic about South Africa's prospects than Britain's, arguing the UK has traded freedom for safety and lost its economic nerve in the process.