Author: Chris Steyn
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Wendy Addison: Execs could face criminal accountability for mistreating whistleblowers…
Listen here In this interview with Chris Steyn, South Africa’s first high-profile whistleblower, Wendy Addison, describes scorched earth legal action being launched to ensure executives face criminal accountability for failing whistleblowers. Addison, a Council of Europe Whistleblowing Expert, confirms that a criminal docket has been raised against a top South African corporation and its directors…
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‘AfriMAGA’, bots and broken promises — Steenhuisen’s bombshell DA exit interview
John Steenhuisen has torched his exit from the DA with a scorched-earth interview, accusing new leader Geordin Hill-Lewis of breaking a personal commitment to keep him as Agriculture Minister and fingering Tony Leon’s firm Resolve Communications as complicit in his removal. Writing for BizNews, veteran political analyst John Matisonn unpacks the more serious damage: a…
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Dis-Chem at the crossroads: Can Rui Morais fill Ivan Saltzman’s very large shoes?
Ivan Saltzman borrowed R10,000 from his mother in 1978, bought the chemist he managed, and built it into a $1.7 billion healthcare chain spanning three countries. This month he retires as chairman, gifting shares to two sons but leaving day-to-day control to insider CEO Rui Morais. The succession arrives at a pivotal moment: Morais is…
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WeWork after WeCrashed: New CEO Santora on how to rebuild a wayward brand
WeWork’s near-death experience — a $47bn valuation collapse, founder Adam Neumann’s spectacular exit, and a 2023 Chapter 11 bankruptcy — makes its CEO John Santora’s task one of the toughest challenges in corporate rehabilitation. The 69-year-old veteran, who spent 47 years at Cushman & Wakefield, rising from maintenance worker to COO, was recruited three days…
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From Manchester to No. 10: Andy Burnham’s devolution revolution — First the UK, then SA?
Keir Starmer’s resignation has cleared the path for Andy Burnham — Greater Manchester’s former mayor and devolution champion — to become Britain’s next prime minister, possibly by July 17. His pitch: the biggest transfer of power from Westminster to local authorities in modern English history, rebalancing an economy grotesquely tilted toward London. For South Africa,…
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Warsh spoils the party: Hawkish Fed chief clips emerging market wings — and SA bonds feel the draught
Iran peace talks pushed oil lower and gave emerging market bonds a rare tailwind. Then Kevin Warsh — in his first Fed meeting as chair — killed the rally with hawkish inflation warnings, sending the dollar to its biggest monthly gain since March. For South Africa, the double bind is familiar: a stronger greenback tightens…
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BN Daybreak: Strait of Hormuz showdown as US and Iran head back to Doha
Listen here Vessels are still threading the Strait of Hormuz, but a Bloomberg analyst calls it Schrodinger’s Strait: you never know if it’s open until you try to get through. With traffic down to a fraction of normal and ships taking hits, owners are weighing whether the world’s most vital oil route is worth the…
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Section 10C: Income tax strategies in retirement structuring
By Ruan Breed * One of the more misunderstood corners of SA’s retirement legislation is what happens when an investor contributes more to a retirement fund than they are allowed to deduct in a given tax year. Many assume that anything above the limit is simply money not put to good use. Well, the opposite…
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The AI backlash is only getting started — and the stakes couldn’t be higher
Artificial intelligence faces a growing popular revolt in the West, with US protests blocking nearly $100bn in data centre projects and around 40% of American voters telling pollsters they want AI banned from most industries. In its cover story this week, The Economist argues the backlash is dangerous: AI carries transformative potential comparable to electricity…
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Rian Malan writes to Helen Zille: Behind the MoM marches lurks something far more dangerous
Rian Malan is the author of My Traitor’s Heart — a bestseller translated into 11 languages, still in print decades after publication, and a book that drew praise from V.S. Naipaul, John le Carré and the New York Times as one of the most important works ever written about South Africa. In short, he is…
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Duarte da Silva: South Africa is spending R1.77bn a year to keep a R60bn loss running
Operation Vala Umgodi deployed 4,302 troops, made 18,000 arrests, produced zero kingpin prosecutions — and the gold left the country anyway. That is the central argument of Paper 5 in the Gold Papers series by Northbound Processing’s Dr Duarte da Silva, which makes the case for legalising artisanal mining on purely financial grounds. A mercury…
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Sara Gon: The oldest hatred and its newest mutations: antisemitism’s enduring lies
Antisemitism has surged globally since October 7, 2023, with Jews facing violence and intimidation from both the political left and right, and from Muslim communities across Europe and America. Writing in the Daily Friend, Sara Gon traces the phenomenon from its Byzantine-era Christian roots through to today’s iterations — blood libels reinvented as vaccine conspiracies,…
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Drones, helicopters and armoured vehicles: SA business mobilises as anti-migrant deadline looms
A deadline issued by anti-immigrant groups for undocumented foreigners to leave South Africa expires June 30, and the threat is being taken seriously. Business Against Crime SA has activated its E2-Plus public-private partnership, committing helicopters, drones, armoured vehicles and access to 7,000 CCTV cameras to support the police. At least three people have already been…
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Greenspan: Dark chocolate, gold bars and the maestro who shaped a century of capitalism
Alan Greenspan, who died on June 22 aged 100, was the most consequential central banker of the modern era — and one of the most contradictory. A Ayn Rand libertarian who thrived at the heart of big government for nearly two decades as Federal Reserve chairman, he was also a gold obsessive who spent evenings…
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The NdB Sunday Show: Lauren Evanthia – Heat on Hill-Lewis, “Cat” cuts a deal, Mbalula blames Zuma, Jacinta’s agenda…
Watch here: Listen here: In the latest edition of the NdB Sunday Show with Chris Steyn, Lauren Evanthia, the Founder of the Organic Humanity Movement (OHM), talks about fears that the National Shutdown this week could spark unrest with African National Congress (ANC) SG Fikile Mbalula accusing former President Jacob Zuma of fuelling anti-immigrant violence:…
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Baboon research delivers a message for humans: flying solo cuts your lifespan. Dramatically.
Four decades of fieldwork across three baboon species has produced a finding with uncomfortable relevance for humans: females with strong, stable social connections live substantially longer than socially isolated ones. Evolutionary anthropologist Joan Silk explains why. Female baboons stay in their birth groups for life, building matrilineal hierarchies where daughters inherit their mothers’ social rank…
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Twitter diplomacy backfires: Why the US ambassador’s public spat with Pretoria damages both sides
Forensic psychologist and military analyst Dr Joan Swart dissects the increasingly public diplomatic standoff between US Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III and DIRCO — and finds both sides wanting. Her core argument: social media rewards confrontation, but statecraft requires discretion. DIRCO’s assertion that “non-alignment must not be conflated with neutrality” reflects a coherent doctrine of…
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The gold did not run out — the owners did: Duarte da Silva’s devastating case against SA’s mining abandonment
South African gold output has fallen by roughly nine-tenths from its peak while the dollar price has multiplied more than twenty-fold — from a 1999 low near $255 to a January-2026 record above $5,500, before easing back toward $4,000 by mid-year. The decline of the deep mines was real and, on its own terms, correctly…
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AI labs eye the consultants they despise – and SA’s professional services sector should take note
The Economist’s Schumpeter column cuts to the heart of AI’s existential commercial challenge: model-makers like OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t yet generating returns that justify their valuations, so they’re pivoting into consultancy — the very white-collar world their founders publicly disdain. Accenture, which has 30,000 staff training on Anthropic’s Claude, has lost half its market value…
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SA’s quiet break-up: Why the enclave economy is now the most important investment thesis in the country
This article was first published by The Common Sense The Common Sense editorial board makes a provocative but increasingly hard to dismiss argument: South Africa isn’t heading for collapse — it’s fragmenting into a de facto federation of privately and regionally administered enclaves. With 51% of municipalities insolvent, 72% facing severe cash flow pressures, and fewer…