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A week after his first election as DA leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis had a queue of rivals telling him what to do. Herman Mashaba wanted Helen Zille out of the picture, Corné Mulder warned against any deal with the ANC, and Julius Malema's lawyers were threatening Zille with court. Speaking to Alec Hogg on the day the 14-day coalition clock started, Hill-Lewis refused to negotiate through the media, but he set out the range of deals on the table, said what the DA's donors want in return, and explained why he believes the party has broken through its glass ceiling with black voters. He also said an early national election was possible from next May, promised to back Zille "to the hilt" in any court fight with the EFF, and named the tests any new metro government would have to pass.

Seven of eight metros hung, the ANC on under a third of the vote, and less than a fortnight to form governments. William Saunderson-Meyer told Alec Hogg that Cyril Ramaphosa had finally run out of road to kick the can down, and that his choice between the ANC's heart and its head would shape the next decade. He argued the most telling result came not from Johannesburg but from Howick, where Chris Pappas grew the DA's majority in a seat everyone expected him to lose. He weighed the odds of an ANC-DA deal, questioned what corporate South Africa got for its campaign money, and suggested the DA might be better off sitting out bad coalitions until 2029. He also gave a blunt verdict on Gayton McKenzie's PA, and on whether new parties stand a chance.

Athol Trollip knows how coalitions end: one made him mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay, another removed him. Speaking to Alec Hogg after ActionSA took dozens of former ANC wards in Gauteng, the party's parliamentary leader argued that the next move belonged to the DA, not ActionSA, and explained why a tidy three-way deal with the DA and the Freedom Front Plus was not the easy answer many expected. He revisited the 2016 Johannesburg negotiations that, in his telling, sit at the root of today's bad blood, pushed back on Tony Leon's and Prince Mashele's readings of the result, and set out what ActionSA wanted in Tshwane, Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela Bay. He also explained how a small Karoo town became ActionSA's newest foothold, and why he believed funders who walked away in 2024 would be back.

In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, Chair of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, reveals the answer he received from Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia on the number of abandoned 10111 calls: almost 1.8 million during the 2025-26 financial year. “That's about 5,000 calls per day. I mean if we really want to try and quantify it and give people an idea of the human impact of that, imagine you've got 5,000 victims calling for help and those calls are abandoned…He (the Minister) then further admits that genuine emergencies go unanswered. He acknowledged that in some cases, people that are literally facing life-threatening situations cannot connect to available operators because of excessive queues, system disconnections, and limited capacity.” Meanwhile, Cameron also expresses grave concern at the lack of progress with analysis of DNA samples from the 12 Ekurhuleni murders. “The response was shocking because the minister actually failed to provide any kind of a clear account... In fact, the reply explicitly says that the information is not readily available. Why not just answer us? So, I must be honest, I'm doubting the forensic process in this case…You can imagine what it feels like to the families of these victims when they hear this type of thing. “

Freedom Front Plus leader Corné Mulder says a DA deal with the ANC in Johannesburg would be the highest form of treason, and that his party would pull out everywhere rather than hand the ANC a lifeline. Analyst Sean McLaughlin reads the result as a step forward: voters rewarded service delivery and punished councils under administration. Herman Mashaba tells Alec Hogg there is no meeting while Helen Zille or Cilliers Brink is in play, while Zille says she is staying out of the negotiations. Plus Tatjana Smith on swimming for the Netherlands, and a hot-CPI selloff.