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
40 – 60

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

Flights of Fancy

The Competition Commission is investigating three (yes, three, that’s all it takes) complaints that South Africa’s domestic airlines are overcharging since the collapse of Comair at the end of May. Air travel expert and consultant Linden Birns tell Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that he…
18 Jul 2022 35 min

Lines in the sand

Change is coming to South African politics, former DA federal chairman and now Eastern Cape Provincial Chairman for ActionSA, Athol Trollip, tells Peter Bruce on this edition of Podcasts From the Edge. The thing is to get the ANC out of power. But Trollip is no starry-eyed idealist. Only coalitions…
11 Jul 2022 32 min

Gqeberha 2022 is not Cape Town 2018

"We need political stability to get to economic stability," Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber CEO Denise van Huyssteen tells Peter Bruce as they chart their way through Gqeberha's approaching water crisis. Yes while there is no water already in many City taps, and while some local dams have run dry…
27 Jun 2022 25 min

Not a moment too soon

People have been celebrating with some relief the publication of Songezo Zibi’s new book, Manifesto. It’s been a long time coming and with characteristic reticence, former Business Day Editor Zibi tells former Business Day Editor Peter Bruce in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge that he still isn’t quite…
20 Jun 2022 32 min

In six weeks Cyril can save South Africa

Whatever your politics, there’s no doubt that Eskom’s unreliable power supply, the worsening condition of its kit and the prospect of a complete Eskom system failure are the single biggest barriers to investment and growth in South Africa. Something radical has to be done and it has to be done…
13 Jun 2022 35 min

Let's try not to pass gas

As business and the State lean towards gas as an intermediate fuel between our current dependence on coal and our future commitment to renewable energy, some voices are being raised about the futility of inventing, building and paying for an entirely new energy infrastructure to power South Africa, only for…
6 Jun 2022 32 min

Too complicated to contemplate?

Peter Bruce asks South Africa’s busiest and arguably most influential agriculture and land advisor, Wandile Sihlobo, why the newly-released Agriculture and Agro-processing Masterplan is so complicated. Does he really expect this ANC government to be able to do any of the things the plan says the state will do? In…
23 May 2022 34 min

Just, please, stop talking and get on with it

Goldfield CEO Chris Griffith tells Peter Bruce in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge that he thinks South Africa is still investable but that the state makes too many plans that it doesn’t implement. On the cusp of switching on a 50MW renewable power project to help power close…
16 May 2022 32 min
40 – 60