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In today's NdB Sunday Show with Chris Steyn, Political Analyst Mzo Mpolase slams President Cyril Ramaphosa's latest utterance on the looming loss of AGOA. "You're running a country here, you're not running some ANC ideological office. This is the fate of the economy, the fate of many jobs, which you promise every time. So to hear this, it's almost as if … how low can we go as a country that our president will basically do running commentary of something that they stand right in a position where they can change. And then he speaks as if it's God's will that it will be this way…all it needed was decisions from you, political will from you, and a sense of diplomacy and a sense of understanding what our national interest is." Mpolase says South Africa needs a "never-again" moment. Dissecting testimony before the Madlanga Commission, he says: "When you look at some of the individuals that have thus far been implicated or are having court cases now, you do feel that there is perhaps a hand behind these individuals…the almost strategic targeting of provincial, local government, by entities…there has to be some power behind it orchestrating all of this." Mpolase also looks at the future of coalition rule.

Two days after telling Parliament that South Africa had emerged from the fiscal wilderness, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana gave up part of his weekend to explain what that did and didn't mean. He conceded the tax burden had reached levels no finance minister should be comfortable with, and that growth of 1.2% was a long way from where he wanted it. His answer was not more tax, but cleaner spending and a hard look at the rules he said had stopped gas explorers in South Africa before they struck in Namibia, and left mining exploration far behind Canada and Australia. He also defended sending more money to failing municipalities, signalled a rethink on crypto, and set the record straight on his clash with the Reserve Bank governor.

In the latest Electoral Road Show with Chris Steyn and analyst Wayne Sussman, he shares the eNCA-MarkData Local Government Elections Survey results for eThekwini and Tshwane. It shows that former President Jacob Zuma's MKP is polling at 48% and heading for an outright majority in eThekwini with the ANC way below at 14,5% while the DA came in at 25,2%. "The ANC is on track across KwaZulu-Natal, not just eThekwini, to lose about five hundred councillors on election day…This is going to be a devastating result." Sussman adds that having reviewed the six major metropolitan areas in South Africa, "not once has the African National Congress been the leading party in our polls… this is absolutely unprecedented." Another unprecedented result is that now "the DA is bigger in Johannesburg than in Tshwane". In Tshwane, the poll has the DA in the lead at 33,9% to the ANC's 24,9%. Listen to Sussman unpack these latest poll results in detail and give an election preview with six Metros surveyed.

Lesaka grew out of Net1, whose subsidiary's social grants contract ended up before the Constitutional Court. Now it wants to take deposits from the same grant recipients it lends to. In a follow-up to their strategy conversation, Alec Hogg put the harder questions to executive chairman Ali Mazanderani: who carries the legacy of Cash Paymaster Services, what borrowers really pay on a R5,000 loan, and who protects the customer when one company is both banker and lender. Mazanderani gave little ground. He called the banker-and-lender criticism nonsensical, argued that for many rural borrowers the real alternative is a loan shark, and asked why a loan is fine for someone with a city job but not for someone living on a grant.

A tariff investigation in South Africa is meant to take six months. Donald MacKay, whose XA Global Trade Advisors released its latest import duty report this week, told Alec Hogg the average had stretched to 40 months, and that the oldest open case was old enough to start school. He explained why the International Trade Administration Commission was only part of the problem, how a groundnut processor gave up waiting and shut its factory, and why ArcelorMittal had become the most protected company in the country while the businesses downstream paid for it. He was also unusually calm about losing AGOA, called Washington's demands badly delivered but not irrational, and warned that secret deals attached to tariff decisions created exactly the conditions where corruption could take root, though he stressed he had no evidence it had.