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Jaco Zuma’s ambition to become president of South Africa was rooted in personal interests: to evade the law and assuage his dire financial circumstances - and his faction used chilling tools to get and keep him in power for as long as possible. So says political scientist Professor Mcebisi Ndletyana, the co-author of the “The Zuma Effect”, a five hundred-page work regarded as the definitive work on the Zuma era. In this interview with Chris Steyn, he describes what happened behind the scenes with the making of a personality cult, the remaking of the African National Congress (ANC), the disbandment of The Scorpions, the manipulation of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and other law enforcement institutions, as well as Zuma’s “intelligence project” Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhewebane. “So you have these series of undeserving people who don't expect to have these positions on their own merit. They're shocked that they're even appointed. So they spend most of their time paying back this debt to the president for doing something that they never thought they would ever achieve in their lives.” As for Zuma’s “revenge” MKP, Professor Ndletyana says: “MKP couldn't escape Zuma's personality because JZ believes in personalised rule. So he's formed the party in his own image. When Zuma dies, the party dies.”

Retief Odendaal ran Nelson Mandela Bay for eight and a half months before a no-confidence vote removed him in 2023. Three weeks out from the 4 November local elections, with a new poll putting the DA and ANC almost level in the metro, the DA's mayoral candidate told Alec Hogg why his party has gone to court to make mayor Babalwa Lobishe personally liable for leasing a R25m municipal transformer to a private company. He laid out how a metro with cash in the bank keeps handing infrastructure money back unspent, why he says its top management posts sit empty, and why he will not sign up for another ten-party coalition. He also explained why, despite all of it, he still calls Nelson Mandela Bay the country's most fixable metro.

Freedom Front Plus leader Corné Mulder tells BizNews the government of national unity could technically run to 2029, but Parliament can dissolve itself from May next year and a new ANC president elected in a year's time could recall Cyril Ramaphosa. Mulder also reveals the DA agreed early on to leave international relations to the ANC, and says the FF+ has declared a dispute under the GNU's deadlock-breaking mechanism over the US standoff. Plus DA Western Cape leader Tertuis Simmers on the premiership, Donald MacKay on what really hollowed out manufacturing, Willem Els on the Ballito teen, and Wall Street.

A six-year-old girl was critically injured in a school stabbing this morning allegedly by a former pupil who also planted a homemade bomb at a Ballito Mall in March. Describing the attack, Willem Ells of the Institute for Security Studies and the Security Initiative for Africa, says: “He was armed with a homemade firearm as well as a kitchen knife with a six-inches long blade. And apparently he discharged the firearm and it did not function. So there could have been some more fatalities there, but then he attacked the little girl.” Els recalls a previous interview in which he spoke to Steyn about how the “Lone Wolf” teenager had “idolised the Columbine shooters in America and that he wanted to do the same in order to cement his name in history…” As for why this teenager was roaming the streets after the failed bomb attack, Els - who is also an explosives experts - charges: “I think we need to ask those questions high up and more questions should be asked because what we gathered is that the police that attended the scene handed the IED back to his parents. That is completely, completely against the law to do that. “

A week after an ANC committee chair floated treason and suggested stripping critics of their citizenship, Corné Mulder joked that the state had better move fast, because his tax return was due. Then he got serious. The Freedom Front Plus leader told Alec Hogg why he believed the threat had no constitutional footing, why he had moved to invoke the GNU's deadlock-breaking mechanism rather than fight it out in a cabinet he called stacked against his party, and why he thought the ANC was misreading Washington. He also told the story of a grandfather sentenced to death for a killing that never happened, set out who he would and wouldn't govern with in Tshwane, Joburg and the Western Cape, and explained why he expected the FF+ to be the good story of the 4 November vote.