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Two big JSE companies had received buyout offers in under a month, one of them listed for 62 years, and value investor Piet Viljoen said both deals undervalued the businesses on a ten-year view. He also expected most shareholders to take the money anyway. A day after Sanlam's R505-a-share offer for the rest of Santam, and weeks after India's Solar Industries moved on Omnia, Viljoen told Alec Hogg why insiders and foreign buyers were seeing value that local investors kept missing, and what the delisting wave said about where the market sat in its cycle. He took on the Reg 28 offshore debate, BEE and the 4 November elections, and held his ground when Alec challenged him on MK, before turning to Wall Street, where he argued that a handful of AI stocks were masking real damage beneath record highs as US bond yields climbed to levels last seen in 2002.

The CEO of the South African Housing and Infrastructure Fund and President of the new political party, MOVE SA, Rali Mampeule, has joined the hotly-contested race for Mayor of the City of Johannesburg. In this interview with Chris Steyn, he expresses confidence that he can duplicate in the public sector what he has achieved in the private sector. “In the last six years, through my fund, The South African Housing and Infrastructure Fund, we have delivered more than 68,000 land housing opportunities. …Let's compare that with what the mayor of Ekurhuleni has done in the last five years. I don't think you can match that…We've delivered eleven thousand six hundred and forty jobs through the SAHIF Fund (and) through my investment in a company called MetroFibre, which I bought from Patrice Motsepe, we have connected more than 500,000 households with fast Internet... We've taken more than 100,000 kids to school through the Mampeule Foundation…So we've done it - and we think we can do it better with a better budget from the public sector.” Mampeule advocates a brand of “fearless politics” to rid South Africa of the cadres and the comrades: “And we can go and dance with them in court. We are not scared of them. We're gonna fire the cadre deployees that don't know what they are doing.”

In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, the chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, reveals details of his 30-day campaign to expose convicted sexual offenders. “I've decided that if they won't make the National Register for Sex Offenders public, then we'll start releasing the names and the faces of people.” Just one of those, Nkosinathi Phakathi, was convicted of ninety counts of rape. Reacting to news that a close relative of a sacked deputy Crime Intelligence chief General Feroz Khan, was gunned down on the R21 in Boksburg last night, Cameron says: “I think something that needs to be noted from this - and a lot of the previous bloodshed that has been seen - whether allegedly targeted against someone like Khan or anyone else for that matter that has been mentioned or brought to testify at the Madlanga Commission - shows us what a deep dark pit of underworld mess this whole thing is.” As for former Police Minister Bheki Cele possibly facing criminal charges relating to his relationship with tenderpreneur Cat Matlala, he says: “A lot of the mess that we're currently in happened during the tenure of Cele as the Minister of Police. And there's no secret that a lot of senior positions, even mid-management positions in the South African Police Service, were later given to certain individuals that Mr Cele…felt obliged to arrange jobs for because he knew he wasn't going to return as minister.”

The FW de Klerk Foundation says it is not a platform to attack governments, nor is it a platform to "lobby for certain groups internationally." That follows the departure of its executive director, Christo van der Rheede, after he called US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's decision to impose visa restrictions on a select group of South Africans "a profound strategic blunder" those risks handing the ANC an election gift. In an interview with Biznews, the foundation's director, Coetzee Bester, said he had a very good working relationship with Van der Rheede and that the resignation came as a bit of a shock to the board. He described the split as a difference in methodology rather than policy. Bester said the foundation will not address many international positions because they are not its objective, and it does not try to create or break leaders. It focuses on reconciliation and peace globally, with a very strong stance on nuclear weapons, and on constitutional reform and maintenance at home, so that the constitution is known, used and respected. Bester said the board will work on a new strategy for the foundation, and the finished plan will be announced on 2 February, the anniversary of former President De Klerk’s unbanning of the ANC. A new executive director will only be sough after that. – Linda van Tilburg

Asbestos is still sitting in South Africa's embassy building in The Hague, and according to the DA's Ryan Smith, nothing has moved on the chancery. Smith told Linda van Tilburg that DIRCO was not being transparent, that UK public representatives such as Lord Peter Hain could help get answers, and that money meant for embassy buildings was being lost to party politics, citing an estimated R1.4 billion in aid to Cuba. Alec Hogg explained why nine gigawatts of rooftop solar, more than three times what the state's renewables programme delivered, amounts to privatisation by stealth. The FW de Klerk Foundation's Coetzee Bester spoke about the early departure of Christo van der Rheede after his criticism of US visa restrictions, calling it a difference in methodology rather than policy. Reuters explained why Revolut, now valued at $115 billion and seeking a South African banking licence, is giving bank bosses sleepless nights, and wrapped up a record close for the Nasdaq.