“Over 20 years,” writer, investor and campaigner Bill Browder tells Peter Bruce in this Special Edition of Podcasts from the Edge, “Vladimir Putin and his friends have stolen a trillion dollars from Russia.” He has to distract his people or they’d lynch him and It’s why he can’t stop his invasion of Ukraine. Russia today, Browder says, is a much more totalitarian state than apartheid South Africa ever was. In this wide ranging discussion the author of Red Notice and, more recently, Freezing Order, reveals his favourite country in the world is South Africa. He has a home in Cape Town but dare not visit for fear that Putin would ask the South Africans to arrest him and hand him over. And he worries that they would.
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32:39
What Business Wants from a GNU
Business for South Africa chairman Martin Kingston tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that business would prefer the current Government of National Unity to stick together despite the current crisis over the DA’s decision not to support the budget. Business is deeply involved in Operation Vulindlela, the reform process inside the Presidency but, says Kingston, they’re not going to interfere in the politics.
"It’s much better in our view to stay the course,” he says. "We are deeply concerned that ... there is going to be either a minority government or a change in the composition of the GNU that undermines certainty and predictability, that undermines confidence, and confidence levels are now very thin, or where we can’t see the reforms that are taking place then of course we’re allow to express our opinion. What we’re not going to do is apply pressure, as has been suggested, to any of the parties. That would be wholly inapprpropriate. We work with the government of the day.”.
"What the investor community require is the certainty that key policies are going to be the subject of appropriate structural reform and that where decisions are taken they are subsequently implemented."
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37:00
Steel yourself...
South Africa’s steel industry is in the crosshairs once again, and once again for all the wrong reasons. Itac, the department of trade, industry and competition’s trade regulator, has been instructed by minister Parks Tau to conduct arguably the widest tariff review in its history, of imported steel. This as Arcelor Mittal SA (AMSA), the country’s only integrated steelmaker, is being rescued by the State. The review threatens widespread price increases on imports — everything steel-related is included — from iron ore to wheelbarrows. The problem, as trade expert Donald MacKay tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, is that while literally hundreds of imported products will be reviewed, Itac normally takes 27 months to complete just one review. Parks Tau wants the review done by July!
“The unintended consequences can be existential to some companies,” says MacKay, “You can’t do all of this and expect some companies to not fail. So maybe its not Mittal but there’s no way everyone comes through this… I think this review is too big. It should have been broken up.”
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50:59
The deal Cyril has to do with Donald
Joel Pollak, probably the next US ambassador to South Africa, tells Peter Bruce in this revealing edition of Podcasts from the Edge, that President Cyril Ramaphosa and his senior officials got it hopelessly wrong when they responded to US President Donald Trump’s attacks on South Africa with personal criticism of him. ”When Trump commented on South Africa,” says Pollak, “you don’t accuse him of misinformation. People in the media can do what they want but the President of South Africa and senior officials and so forth — you just don’t accuse Trump of misinformation and you don’t say he was acting irrationally. That’s exactly the wrong thing to do. You try to understand where he’s coming from, you offer compromises and you get to a better place … But it was absolutely necessary for him to behave that way.”
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1:06:40
Don’t do it
If he were a young Afrikaner, former Gauging Premier Mbhazima Shilowa tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, he wouldn’t take up Donald Trump’s offer of refuge in the US, expropriation act or not. For a start, “as a young Afrikaner I would be educated enough to be able to read between the lines. Trump is offering refugee status; in reality if you look at the laws and the executive orders he has passed on refugees .., it is to stop everything. He will simply have many Afrikaners hyped up… in reality they have it better here." As for Trump and South Africa, rushing to Washington makes no sense. President Cyril Ramaphosa needs to wait until his ambassador in the US, Ebrahim Rasool, tells him he can sit him down with Trump. Otherwise you risk making a fool of yourself.
Peter Bruce, veteran South African newspaper editor and commentator, interviews the country's social and political leaders and experts in a weekly effort to explain what is actually going on in this complicated country. Bruce's interviews are about making events easy to understand for people with little time to listen.
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