Peter Bruce, veteran South African newspaper editor and commentator, interviews the country's social and political leaders and experts in a weekly effort to exp...
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.
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41:16
They’re mature, we’re premature…
Industrial strategy consultant Jake Morris enters the hot topic of industrial policy and tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that localisation has its place in industrial growth strategies and shouldn’t be automatically written off as many of its critics do. But they are only a part of many bigger and older success stories. “We have no choice but to follow a manufacturing-led growth path and yet our manufacturing is in decline, not just in terms of output but more worryingly in terms of investment and especially in terms of investment in new as opposed to replacement capacity. We have to follow this path and we’re currently going the other way.”
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45:58
Trump takes the GNU back to the brink
In the space of a week DA leader John Steenhuisen has moved from threatening legal action against the Expropriation Act signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa to defending the Act following US President Donald Trump’s astonishing attack on the country. Can Steenhuisen survive his flip-flop? Can the GNU survive the obvious neglect of the DA’s interests and red lines. Former DA leader tell Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that something will have to give. "I think there only so much one way traffic that any self-respecting party or organisation can endure,” he says, "and unless there’s fundamental reset of the relationship and the bona fide concerns of the DA and their constituency are taken into account I don’t think that this GNU can survive in the medium term unless there are different terms of trade within it.”
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.
South Africa