Podcasts from the Edge

Africa’s populations are exploding. By 2050 one in 10 children born in the world will be Nigerian. Right now 29 of the world’s top national fertility rates are African. But Africans need to find new power and position in the world. Widely-respected South African business leader Phuthuma Nhleko has just published a book, The Invisible People, to make the case for a new Pan-Africanism and tells Peter Bruce in this Edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the continent really can find its voice again. "I know the African Union has got many, many challenges (but) the structures are there. The European Union has done the same … before 1945 Europeans were killing each other … but post 1945, the EU was built block by block, and I struggle to understand why that would be a farfetched vision for Africa in the next 20 years.” 

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President Cyril Ramaphosa will tell delegates at the Sixth South African Investment Conference this Tuesday morning that he plans to raise R2 trillion in news fixed investment over the next three years. Or five years, depending on which articles you read on the Presidency website. Peter Bruce argues in this Podcast from the Edge monologue that Ramaphosa deliberately sets himself soft targets ,he knows he can reach. And R2 trillion doesn’t come close the to 25% of GDP in fixed investment per year the economy needs to grow fast enough to make a real dent in unemployment. So let’s not get too excited. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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The government is planning something quite audacious and it isn’t a high speed train from Tshwane to Durban. Instead it wants to create, out of the often dishevelled mass of land and property it owns through the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure, a national property company worth some R155bn … and it’ll be open to, indeed it’ll depend on, private investment. DPWI minister Dean Macpherson tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that “We have to find a mechanism to do something to protect the underlying value (of the State’s assets). If you wanted to put it on a graph, you'd have an inclining maintenance backlog and a declining property value. And those two are going to intersect at a point where if a decision isn't made quickly the damage may become irreversible. And government may have anything between a R30bn and R50bn hole on it balance sheet due to these collapsing buildings." Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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Incoming DA leader Geordin Hill Lewis says that to grow the party it is going to need the votes of people who have never voted for it before. DA members can do the math, he says. But is he comfortable that those new voters are going to have to be black? “Let me just say, specifically to all black South Africans” he tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, “that we are deeply interested, committed and passionate about their advancement and particularly those who still live in poverty and unemployment and who still have not seen the material benefits that political and democratic freedom has brought with it. I’m perfectly comfortable saying that from every platform and intend to say it often and frequently, all around the country. Getting people out of poverty is why we are in politics.”
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Songezo Zibi, leader of Rise Mzansi and chair of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in Parliament, tells Peter Bruce in this wide-ranging edition of Podcasts from the Edge that the ANC and US President Donald Trump might have been made for each other. "I never expected the kind of disruption that we see from Donald Trump,” he says, "and this is an ANC problem (because) the ANC doesn't perceive the world in the way that the rest of the normal world perceives the world. … they're stuck in the eighties and nineties, fighting an old Cold War and they found the perfect adversary in Donald Trump because in some ways he takes them back. He validates their failure to kind of move forward and, and understand the word for what it is.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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