Category: News
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Cape Town’s governance lead, quantified: $12bn ahead of Joburg
Equal-sized commercial property markets, wildly different fortunes: office space in Cape Town now costs roughly double Johannesburg’s, and a new Gmaven study pins the difference squarely on governance rather than economics. Johannesburg’s strained finances, poor service delivery and corruption scandals are pushing capital, jobs and skilled workers toward the coast, while Cape Town’s construction boom,…
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Matisonn: Ramaphosa’s impeachment fight set to drag through November’s election season
ATM leader Vuyo Zungula has taken his impeachment push to the Constitutional Court after last week’s high court order halted parliament’s Section 89 hearings. Two judges split on how far that order actually reaches, leaving room for preparatory work to continue even as witness testimony stays frozen. A separate September review will test whether the…
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SK Hynix’s $600bn rout shows cracks in the AI boom
One of the AI boom’s biggest winners has become its biggest worry: SK Hynix shares have dropped 47% from June’s high, wiping out close to $600 billion in value on fears of overcrowding and now a report of Chinese progress on chipmaking tools. The stock still trades on a fraction of its earlier multiple even…
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BN portfolio star ASML slides on report of China starting DUV tool production
A report that an unnamed Shanghai-based firm has started mass-producing deep ultraviolet lithography machines sent ASML shares down as much as 8.3%, dragging equipment peers like Applied Materials, Lam Research and Japan’s Nikon and Canon lower too. The machines are far behind ASML’s cutting-edge EUV kit, but any dent in China’s reliance on Western chip…
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BN Daybreak: SARB rate shock; US-Iran tensions; Zuma MK finance battle; SAPS Estate raid
Listen here In today’s episode, we cover the US-Iran diplomatic talks and escalating tech wars with China’s new DUV lithography machines. Locally, Jabulani Khumalo warns of Jacob Zuma’s alleged plot to seize MK Party finances. We also examine a warrantless SAPS and Home Affairs raid on a Western Cape estate. Finally, Alec Hogg unpacks the…
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Zuma in crisis: Disgruntled MKP members to vote ARU – Jabulani Khumalo
Listen here In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, the real founder of MKP, Jabulani Khumalo, comes out in support of The African Renaissance Unity Party (ARU) founded to lobby for the interests of traditional chiefs and their communities. With Khumalo’s battle to reclaim control of the party – “hijacked” by former President Jacob Zuma…
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Eva Crouwel – When the State comes to your Gate….
Listen here An anti-immigration raid on a private housing estate in the Western Cape is causing a furore. In this interview with Chris Steyn, Eva Crouwel, a property owner on High Riding Estate, describes how police in a fleet of about six vans – accompanied by Home Affairs officials – descended on the estate last…
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BizNews Edge: Rand slides on steady rates, Musk’s AI warning, shake-up at IDAC, and more…
Elon Musk tells The Economist that AI will out-think the whole of humanity within five years, and he sounds strangely at peace with that. Back home, the Reserve Bank blindsided everyone with a shock rate hold, the Rand took its worst knock in months, and Citigroup walked away from a bet it had believed in…
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Uber’s Durban-based African partner says EV demand turbocharged by Iran
Forget the green pitch, it’s the Iran war doing the selling. Fuel price shocks are pushing Uber drivers in Johannesburg onto electric cars, with Durban-based fleet manager Valternative expanding its 360-car pilot fast and eyeing seven more African countries. But the South African reality bites hard: freezing winter mornings with no heater, hours lost queuing…
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FT: Kenya’s sacred Mrima Hill sits on a rare-earth fortune the US, China and Australia all want
Seven mining consortiums, American, Chinese and Australian, are now shortlisted to dig into Mrima Hill, a sacred kaya on Kenya’s coast holding a $62bn stash of niobium, neodymium and radioactive thorium. For the Digo people who’ve guarded the site for generations, it’s not a resource, it’s their Tree of Souls. The stakes stretch well beyond…
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Roelf Meyer can’t stop the US refugee exodus – and shouldn’t waste his time trying: Corrigan
Ambassador Roelf Meyer wants Trump’s refugee order for Afrikaners revoked, and says as much on radio. Terence Corrigan argues he’s chasing the wrong target: the order is a symptom, not the disease. The real rupture is South Africa’s foreign policy, its expropriation law, its ICJ case against Israel, its warming ties with Iran and Russia,…
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WSM: Remembering Bill (RW) Johnson
This article was first published by PoliticsWeb He predicted ANC decline when the rest of the world was still cheering the Rainbow Nation, and it cost him his place in South African journalism for years. William Saunderson-Meyer looks back on a 40-year friendship with RW Johnson, the Durban-born, Oxford-trained political scientist who died this week…
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Saudi Arabia’s oil escape route is closing fast. Plan B won’t be cheap nor easy: Javier Blas
The Houthis have made good on threats to blockade the Red Sea, and Saudi Arabia is scrambling for a workaround to its workaround, leaning on old pipelines and secretive Israeli infrastructure to keep 5 million barrels a day moving. Oil is already back above $100 a barrel, a number that lands directly on South African…
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BN Daybreak: SA-Israel tension; Nvidia-OpenAI deal; US tariffs; Fed rate outlook; Energy Risks
Listen here In today’s BizNews Daybreak, we explore global market pressures, starting with new US Section 301 tariffs affecting South Africa and 60 other economies. Former Israeli adviser Mark Regev discusses strained Pretoria-Israel relations and ICJ genocide charges. Furthermore, we preview upcoming central bank rate decisions, Nvidia’s potential $250B OpenAI data center deal, tech mega-cap…
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Why not just invest in South Africa
By Charize Beukes* It’s one of the questions I hear most often, and a fair one: why invest offshore when you live in South Africa, earn in rands, and understand the local companies well? I’ll admit it, the JSE has served investors well recently. Over the past 10 years it has returned close to 12%…
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The NdB Sunday Show – Mark Regev: Israel and SA, Israel and the US, and the end game of the Iran War
In the latest NdB Sunday Show, Chris Steyn spoke to Mark Regev, the former senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On the bilateral relationship between South Africa and Israel, he says: “… it’s clear we’re going through a difficult period. South Africa says it wants to promote peace and justice in the Middle…
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The Economist: The rise of the deserving rich
New data compiled by The Economist across roughly 7,000 billionaires over 25 years shows a striking shift: for the first time, half of all billionaire wealth now comes from competitive, self-made ventures rather than “uncompetitive” sectors like mining, construction, gambling and inheritance. Post-Soviet oligarchs and property tycoons have lost ground, while founders in tech, finance,…
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Does safari tourism stress out wildlife? A dung study on a Gauteng reserve has an answer
Researchers spent a year at Somabula Nature Reserve in Gauteng, testing over 500 dung samples from impala, zebra, wildebeest and giraffe to see whether tourist traffic raises stress hormones. The answer: mostly no – three of the four species barely noticed visitors, with breeding cycles and dry-season food scarcity driving stress far more than game…
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Roelf Meyer will prioritise mending SA’s ties with Trump
Roelf Meyer – the veteran negotiator who helped architect South Africa’s 1994 transition – took up his post as ambassador to Washington this week, replacing Ebrahim Rasool, who was expelled last year. His top priority: getting Trump to revoke the February 2025 executive order that cut US aid to Pretoria over the (disputed) “white genocide”…
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Rooftop solar boom pushes South Africa toward a new energy era
South Africans have quietly built the equivalent of another Medupi or Kusile on their own rooftops – rooftop solar capacity reached 9,107.4MW by June 2026, up 35% year-on-year, driven by falling battery prices and Eskom’s above-inflation tariffs rather than load-shedding this time. The flip side is Eskom’s “death spiral”: as paying customers self-generate, its shrinking…