TimesLIVE Podcasts Podcasts from the Edge

Podcasts from the Edge

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.
Weekly English South Africa News Commentary · Politics
112 Episodes
32 – 52

The Book of John

Newly re-elected Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen went out on a very long limb at the end of the party’s Midrand congress on Sunday, putting his job on the line for an extremely short term objective — preventing the formation of a coalition government between the ANC and the EFF…
3 Apr 2023 11 min

Heaven will have to wait

We're stressed and anxious. The State is barely functional and in many places it has already failed. While a new minister tours power plants his old, formerly absolutely vital, job is unfilled. While the private sector could fix or make a real difference to the country in weeks if not…
29 Mar 2023 15 min

What Was That?

The EFF’s National Shutdown on Monday was a political failure and, if anything, argues Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, would end up strengthening the ANC and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s hand if it is ever repeated. Who would have thought a politician normally as tactically astute…
22 Mar 2023 10 min

How a stinking government kills its children

Peter Bruce is enraged in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge by the absolutely needless death of a four-year-old girl, Langalam Viki. She fell into a pit latrine in her Eastern Cape school last week and drowned. He wants to know why the government, despite all its promises and…
14 Mar 2023 12 min

A Hiding To Nothing

Peter Bruce despairs of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s late night reshuffle in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge. The new Electricity Minister, Prof Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, was just down the corridor running Ramaphosa’s infrastructure programme. If the Electricity State of Disaster he announced a month ago was so urgent why…
7 Mar 2023 19 min

The writing on the wall…

Peter Bruce goes solo again in this new edition of Podcasts from the Edge, suggesting that former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter’s revelations about corruption inside Eskom and the direct involvement of cabinet ministers is probably the real reason President Cyril Ramaphosa is being so slow to name a new…
28 Feb 2023 15 min

Absolute zero

There is "almost zero chance" Eskom or another intervening authority, can end load shedding in South Africa any time in the next two years, one of South Africa’s leading energy experts, UCT's Prof Anton Eberhard, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. He says President Cyril…
21 Feb 2023 30 min

Send in the Clowns...

That used to be theatre-speak for when something went wrong on stage and the crowd began to boo. At South African Tourism there seems to be no need. In this episode of Podcasts from the Edge Peter Bruce digs in to the would wide web (i.e. his phone) to find…
13 Feb 2023 14 min

True Crime Stories

In his first podcast monologue Peter Bruce takes his Podcasts from the Edge into new realms. Basically because a guest didn’t pitch up he wonders pout loud when President Cyril “The Vanisher” Ramaphosa's reshuffle is going to happen or even if it ever will. Rumours have Gwede Mantashe keeping his…
6 Feb 2023 10 min

Say what?

Veteran energy analyst and journalist (and electrical engineer) Chris Yelland tells Peter Bruce in this illuminating edition of Podcasts From the Edge that it is going to take something special for Eskom to meet the exacting deadlines it has set itself to restore Eskom’s vanishing Energy Availability Factor. Fixing the…
24 Jan 2023 49 min

Half full? Half empty? Or just not full?

As Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Commission, Dr Crispian Olver is at the very centre of South Africa’s swirling energy policy debate. The commission’s job isn’t just to plan a way forward for the country, but to find the money to do it. In this first 2023 edition of…
16 Jan 2023 33 min

Curb your enthusiasm folks… 2029’s the year; not 2024

Even if the ANC falls below 50% of the vote in the next general election in 2024 it’ll be able to form “a relatively easy” coalition with a small and perhaps like-minded party in Parliament. Cyril Ramaphosa will shake off the Phala-Phala game farm cash heist problem that stalks him…
29 Nov 2022 27 min

Cyril's big call

Elections analyst Michael Atkins walks Peter Bruce through the bewildering maze of a rapidly approaching Constitutional crisis over our electoral system. The government has ignored advice from its own Ministerial Advisory Committee and is sending a Bill to the president to sign allowing independent candidates to stand for elections against…
31 Oct 2022 33 min

Big Batteries? Here’s a way to do it our way...

s South Africa's efforts to plug the gaps in our electricity supply grind slowly forward there's a clear hole emerging in the plans for new, renewable energy generation. The hole is the absence of storage, of batteries, that are being rapidly deployed now around the word at a fast pace…
24 Oct 2022 31 min

A Boer made a plan and that’s a pebble bed nuclear reactor orbiting above us

South Africa had spent around R10bn developing the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor before abandoning the nuclear project when Jacob Zuma became President. He had a much bigger nuclear ambition cooked up with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Now, however, Andre Pienaar, a pioneering Afrikaner venture capitalist who lives his life between Washington…
17 Oct 2022 43 min

The system is broken

Donald MacKay, director of XA International Trade Advisers in Johannesburg is arguably the most knowledgeable outsider on the inner workings of South African Byzantine trade policy mechanisms — the matrix between the International Trade Administration Commission, the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, the National Treasury and the South African…
22 Aug 2022 35 min

Helen Zille on the ANC polling below 40%

Sunday’s cracking headline in Rapport, “ANC falls below 40%” is the result of the ANC’s own polling, chair of the DA Federal Executive and former party leader Helen Zille reminds Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. Indeed, Rapport appears to have seen two polls, an internal…
15 Aug 2022 34 min

What did we need most — education or skills?

The head of Investec’s corporate social investment programme, Setlogane Manchidi, sits atop a R90m-R100m budget each year to do some good out of the glare of analysts or the advertising department. And he does. He tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that at any one…
2 Aug 2022 30 min

Will the ANC go quietly in 2024?

Veteran South African editor and commentator Tim du Plessis tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that he worries that ANC may not accept the result of a 2024 general election in which it loses badly. This is a party that knows only liberation struggle and…
25 Jul 2022 28 min
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