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Public Works Minister Dean Macpherson tells BizNews the infrastructure debate is no longer about money but procurement: of 2,800 big tenders published in a year, only one in six was awarded, and 90% of failures trace to weak feasibility work. His department now spends R600 million over three years preparing projects itself. A political commentator reviews the week: commission hearings,...

“If we're going to look for angels in this stuff, we're not going to find angels. It's the list of the devils, it's where do we choose, what is the thing to focus on, the least worst thing to focus on.” These are the words of political commentator Solly Moeng in his latest chat with Chris Steyn. Moeng slams Cyril Ramaphosa for “forgetting” that he is President. He also comments on the latest...

In December 2011, Rael Levitt brought the hammer down on Quoin Rock, Dave King's Stellenbosch wine estate. Within months, Auction Alliance, the business he had spent 20 years building, was gone. In studio with Alec Hogg, Levitt went back over the auction that undid him: the vendor bidder he placed in the crowd, the lie he told billionaire bidder Wendy Appelbaum, and the attempted fix after the...

The Private Prosecution Unit of AfriForum has taken up a number of cold cases in which the police have failed to trace or arrest or re-arrest known suspects. In this interview with Chris Steyn, the unit’s Barry Bateman, reveals details of some of those cases as well as the responses received from the Acting National Police Commissioner to questions from Advocate Gerrie Nel. In one of these cases,...

Gayton McKenzie told Alec Hogg he had never been wrong with a prediction, then put the DA at 38% in Cape Town and named the councils he expected the PA to win outright. The real obstacle in Joburg, he said, was not the DA but Helen Zille, though he still left the door open to working with her. The morning after Ramaphosa's address on gender-based violence, Ian Cameron told Chris Steyn the...

David Lupafya spent 25 years at AT&T, Microsoft and Lockheed Martin before coming home to grow grain on 1,300 hectares outside Potchefstroom. He did what careful farmers do: planned a season ahead and put more than R5 million of his own money down on tractors, a combine and implements, counting on the Land Bank's blended finance scheme to cover the rest. Then, weeks before planting, the phone...

In his latest interview with Chris Steyn, Ian Cameron, the chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Police, has a very blunt response to President Cyril Ramaphosa's latest address to the nation in which he outlined measures to deal with gender-based violence: “The president lied”. One “blatant lie” was increased police visibility in Kempton Park where there has been a spate of femicide....

Gayton McKenzie said he had no time to sue Helen Zille, but plenty to say about her. Five weeks before the local government elections, the Patriotic Alliance leader and Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture gave Alec Hogg his account of the Joburg coalition deal he said the DA had broken, called the DA a younger brother of the ANC, and ran through the councils he expected the PA to win outright. He...

Comrades board member Rory Steyn tells Alec Hogg that Swimming South Africa, whose top two officials are suspended by World Aquatics, needs the governance overhaul cricket went through - a majority of independent directors, with Olympian Tatjana Smith the ideal candidate. Fourteen months after their daughter's murder, her parents are still waiting: the suspect was released from a police station...

In two years, Comrades runners threw out a board accused of vote-buying and steering tenders to friends, and cut ties with the provincial and national athletics bodies to run their own race. Swimming South Africa had to wait for an integrity panel in Switzerland to act. Rory Steyn, Nelson Mandela's former bodyguard and now a Comrades Marathon Association board member, told Alec Hogg why one could...