BizNews Radio

Reza Shah of Iran died in exile in a house in Johannesburg in 1944. Eighty-two years later, an Iranian-born South African economist stood up at BNC#9 to explain why that strange, half-forgotten history still shapes how Pretoria thinks about Tehran, and why the war now raging between Iran, Israel and the United States might be the moment historians look back on as the start of America's retreat from the Middle East. Dr Iraj Abedian takes you from a British-orchestrated abdication and a CIA-backed coup, through Sasol's Iranian shareholder and Mandela's visits to Tehran, to a chessboard being redrawn "literally hourly." His verdict on Washington's war plan: a swamp, not a surrender.

Today on BizNews Daybreak, Wall Street celebrates record highs while OpenAI and Anthropic eyes a massive IPO. Locally, Dawie Roodt blames ANC ideology for South Africa's economic woes, and Ian Cameron exposes severe dysfunction and backlogs within SAPS. On the global front, Dr. Iraj Abedian analyses America’s retreat from the Middle East, and Javier Blas details the high-risk, "dark" oil tanker trade navigating the Strait of Hormuz.

Dawie Roodt says South Africa's taxpayers are being squeezed harder than ever, and he has the fresh numbers to prove it. In this BNC#9 keynote, the Efficient Group chief economist walks from 300,000 years of human history to the latest Reserve Bank bulletin to make one argument: the state is spending and taxing more than it ever has, while a shrinking pool of taxpayers carries the load. He explains why he backs a controversial BEE fund idea that a fellow speaker slammed at breakfast that same morning, why he's telling people to legally pay as little tax as possible, and what a Middle East ceasefire could mean for the rand, interest rates and South Africa's growth outlook. He also delivers his sharpest line yet on the ANC.

Half of South Africa's police stations don't answer their own phones. There's a DNA backlog running past 300,000 cases, sitting behind rapists who are still walking free. And SAPS spends R102-billion a year on salaries for a leadership structure of 722 generals and brigadiers. Ian Cameron, chair of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, lays out exactly where SAPS is broken, names the generals he says accountability keeps missing, and sets out five foundations he believes could turn it around, if anyone on the inside actually wants to.

Rob Hersov became a household name in South African business circles for one speech and two words. Four years on, he's back on the BizNews stage with a harder, more complicated message: the country is not fixed, the ANC is not gone, and the crisis is deeper than most people admit. But he's also putting his own money down, on the West Coast, on a Cape Town-area development, and on a young entrepreneur building South Africa's first prediction market. Between the warnings about gangsters, hijacked buildings and a R1.8 trillion corporate cash pile sitting idle, Hersov makes the case that South Africa's real danger isn't collapse. It's getting used to it. Watch to hear why he thinks the municipal elections could be the turning point, and where he's actually putting his own capital.