Category: Boardroom Talk
-
Boardroom Talk: Behind Treasury’s shock move to pull the plug on 69 Municipalities — Joburg Included
National Treasury has withheld its July 2026 cheques from 65 municipalities, including Johannesburg, for persistent financial mismanagement and unpaid bills to Eskom, water boards and suppliers. It’s part of a broader crackdown touching 69 municipalities in total. To get the money flowing again, councils must prove they’re cutting wasteful and irregular spending, holding officials accountable,…
-
Boardroom Talk: A R57bn handshake – How Chery cashed in on two subsidies
Cameras loved the Rosslyn ribbon-cutting on Friday. As did the controversial politicians Paul Mashatile and Panyaza Lesufi. The substance is thinner. Chery didn’t build a factory — it inherited Nissan’s ageing one – once listed on the JSEW as “Automakers” – promised to retain a few hundred existing workers, and dressed it all up as…
-
Boardroom Talk: Welcome back Michael Sachs – The man who said no to Zuma — and yes to SA
Michael Sachs headed National Treasury’s budget office from 2015 to 2017, a period when President Jacob Zuma was pushing a multi-trillion rand nuclear build programme that economists warned would have bankrupted the country. Sachs was among the officials who resisted. He left government in 2017 and moved into academia. President Cyril Ramaphosa has now appointed…
-
Boardroom Talk: SA’s municipalities are bleeding billions — and the woman tasked with stopping it can only watch
Annually, Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke tables a report documenting the precise dimensions of local government failure. The latest one (2024-25) was released this morning. True to form, the numbers continued to worsen or stagnate. R145 billion in irregular expenditure since 2021, R36 billion last year. Only 39 of 257 municipalities with clean audits. Not a single…
-
Boardroom Talk: Steenhuisen’s fall and what it tells us about Geordin Hill-Lewis
In this Boardroom Talk, BizNews editor Alec Hogg unpacks the political and practical unravelling of John Steenhuisen’s tenure as South Africa’s Minister of Agriculture. From the foot-and-mouth disease crisis that exposed a fatal mismatch between parliamentary skill and executive capability, to three damning High Court cost orders, Hogg traces how one of the DA’s most…
-
Boardroom Talk: Joburg in freefall — who has the will — and the skill — to fix it?
Johannesburg is facing a fiscal reckoning. With a R220 billion infrastructure backlog, soaring debt impairment costs, and local elections on the horizon, BizNews editor Alec Hogg digs into the city’s own budget documents to ask the question no one wants to answer: can any incoming administration actually fix this? By Alec Hogg There’s a document…