Author: Irakli Rekhviashvili
-
A world-first: the bond that pays out when nature wins
Listen here In this BizNews interview, Irakli Rekhviashvili sits down with the three people behind FirstRand’s R2.5 billion Cape Water Performance-Based Bond, the first time a commercial bank anywhere in the world has tied a bond’s payout to nature. The Nature Conservancy’s Louise Stafford traces it to 2018, when Cape Town’s dams were weeks from…
-
Why we should all invest more like Crows: Piet Viljoen on the danger of chasing shiny things
This excellent piece is drawn from star money manager Piet Viljoen’s weekly newsletter to his clients. Using crows – cautious by nature despite their reputation for loving shiny objects – as his central metaphor, Viljoen walks through five recent market manias (China, Covid vaccine makers, GLP-1 drugs, Rheinmetall, and memory stocks) where investors piled into…
-
A tremor, not a shift: What the 30 June anti-migrant push actually changed
An anti-immigration movement set 30 June 2026 as its deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave South Africa, triggering the largest such mobilisation since 2008. More than 900 arrests, 120 marches and roughly 25,000 departures followed. But against a foreign population of 2.4 million, the exodus was a tremor, not a resolution. Pretoria answered with enforcement,…
-
The NdB Sunday Show – Willem Els: The deadly recipe of the Ballito bomb boy…
Listen here In this edition of NdB Sunday Show with Chris Steyn, explosives expert Willem Els of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) reveals just how deadly a bomb-making recipe was used by the 15-year-old boy who wanted to commit mass killing at a Ballito mall. “what was really alarming for me when I look…
-
Marika Sboros: Inside SA’s Ozempic copycat case exposing “Fat Drug” free-for-all
This is the second piece published through BizNews’s Commissioning Fund – a mechanism that lets us pay top-tier writers properly for the time and scrutiny a story like this demands. Unfortunately, the brutal economics of online publishing prevent articles like this from being done. Investigative journalist Marika Sboros, best known for her books and expose’s…
-
SA rugby’s ticket strategy prices Bok fans out of stadiums — and puts grassroots rugby at risk
Listen here Springbok ticket prices have soared, suites have been taken over under “clean stadium” rules, and loyal supporters are being squeezed out. BizNews Rugby’s boots-on-the-ground reporter, Rory Steyn, speaks to representatives from legendary Joburg rugby clubs and bitter rivals Pirates and Wanderers, as well as chartered accountant and former Sun International CEO, David Coutts-Trotter,…
-
Duarte da Silva: The world has run out of new gold. South Africa never mined its last 48,000 tonnes.
Global gold discovery has stalled: no major find anywhere in 2023 or 2024, the first time on record, while producers’ reserves shrink and the pipeline empties. In this Gold Papers instalment, Dr Duarte da Silva argues the world’s response has overlooked the obvious candidate — South Africa’s abandoned Witwatersrand residual, estimated at 48,100 tonnes, comparable…
-
Election’24’s missing ballots: What nearly half a million unexplained votes reveal ahead of 2029
Two years after South Africa’s landmark 2024 election, independent researcher Masixole Njengele says the IEC’s own data doesn’t reconcile. Using the Commission’s published station-level results across all three ballot types, Njengele calculates a “floor” deficit of 468,273 ballots that cannot be explained under the IEC’s rules — rising to 929,801 once out-of-district voting is factored…
-
No plaster can heal South Africa’s anti-immigration wound
South Africa’s recent anti-immigration marches, and the fear and violence that followed, have damaged the country’s standing across Africa and beyond, write Solly Moeng and Tshepo Matseba. They argue this isn’t a communications problem to be spun away, but a governance one: the state must reassert control over immigration enforcement, crack down on the corruption…
-
FMD: Farmers can now vaccinate their own herds — Andrew Morphew unpacks what’s changed
For months, South African farmers argued they were being locked out of the fight against foot-and-mouth disease, forced to watch while red tape slowed vaccination to a crawl. This week, that changed. Free State Agriculture, SAAI and Sakeliga settled their court case with the state, opening a regulated private route for farmers to import and…
-
Adrian Wooldridge: Norway v England may be close on the pitch — off it, there’s no contest.
As England gears up to face Norway on the pitch in the 2026 FIFA World Cup quarter-finals, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Adrian Wooldridge argues the real mismatch is economic. Norway kept majority state stakes in its oil, telecoms and banking sectors, taxed resource profits heavily, and built a $2-trillion sovereign wealth fund — while Britain privatised…
-
Justice Malala: SA’s anti-migrant violence exposes Africa’s bigger failure
Political columnist Justice Malala calls South Africa’s recent anti-migrant attacks reprehensible and reputationally damaging, risking major investments like MTN and Shoprite across the continent. In this piece for Bloomberg Opinion, he argues outrage at South Africa can’t be the whole story. Malala points to Zimbabwe’s Mnangagwa extending his rule past 2030 and Uganda’s Muhoozi Kainerugaba…
-
BN Daybreak: Jailed South African spy; SA Education reform; Wall Street’s SpaceX verdict
Listen here A former Air Force brigadier is behind bars in the United States, Jasmine Opperman warns the real failure lies in how the State Security Agency handled her. Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube hits back at claims her department is a mess as the DA looks to 2029, while traders pile into Micron and…
-
Director’s Cut – DA Minister Siviwe Gwarube: The truth about SA education
Siviwe Gwarube says South Africa’s education system needs long-term reform, not quick political wins. The Basic Education Minister discusses her first two years in office, tackling textbook procurement concerns, eliminating unsafe pit toilets identified in 2018, strengthening early childhood development, and navigating provincial delivery challenges. She argues the real measure of success lies in improving…
-
Director’s Cut – DA Minister Siviwe Gwarube: The truth about SA education
Siviwe Gwarube says South Africa’s education system needs long-term reform, not quick political wins. The Basic Education Minister discusses her first two years in office, tackling textbook procurement concerns, eliminating unsafe pit toilets identified in 2018, strengthening early childhood development, and navigating provincial delivery challenges. She argues the real measure of success lies in improving…
-
Jasmine Opperman: Ex-SAAF General jailed in the US as an SA agent…
Listen here A former brigadier general in the South African Air Force (SAAF) has been jailed in the United States after she pleaded guilty to one count of acting as an agent of South Africa and one of making a false statement in her security clearance application. In this interview with Chris Steyn, Jasmine Opperman,…
-
BizNews Edge: DA Education Minister Gwarube unpacks what’s next for her and her party
Listen here Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube — DA insider, former party spokesperson and one of the organisation’s most recognisable faces — gives BizNews a candid read on a turbulent week. She pushes back on Dr Frans Cronje’s assessment that education is in a mess, making the case that systemic reform cannot be judged in…
-
From M-Net to Musk: MultiChoice legend bringing Starlink to Southern Africa
Nolo Letele’s move from broadcasting royalty to telecoms trailblazer is a fitting sequel to a career built on cross-border expansion. The man Koos Bekker tasked with growing MultiChoice across Africa in the 1990s is now chairing T-Connect Lesotho, the ISP driving Starlink’s rollout across Southern Africa. It’s a neat symmetry: decades ago Letele extended pay-TV…
-
Fertiliser Tsar’s warning: Why SA farmers should watch this oligarch
South Africa has skin in this game. Oligarch Andrey Melnichenko is the world’s fertiliser king, and one of South Africa’s largest suppliers. Melnichenko’s own company has shipped product through African ports amid sanctions pressure — making local farmers’ input costs hostage to Moscow’s stability. Pretoria’s non-aligned, BRICS-friendly stance on Ukraine has long banked on Russia…
-
Anthea Jeffery: Net zero will de-industrialise SA like Germany and the UK
Dr Anthea Jeffery argues SA is on the verge of repeating Europe’s costly mistake. As new environment minister David Maynier takes office, draft regulations under the 2024 Climate Change Act threaten to impose mandatory carbon budgets, steep fines, and even jail terms for directors at firms emitting above a low 30,000-tonne threshold — potentially forcing…