Rob Rose and Zukile Majova pay tribute to country music icon Dolly Parton, who died this week aged 80, before turning to the ANC's election manifesto, launched this weekend in Diepsloot, one of the areas where the party has failed to deliver basic services for three decades. Rob and Zuks pick apart promises of free electricity and water that ring hollow given municipalities owe Eskom over R110 billion, and electricity costs have risen 900% in twenty years. They then dig into the real story behind the ANC's continued refusal to name its mayoral candidates for Johannesburg and other metros. Incumbent Dada Morero remains in the running despite the city's collapse, Loyiso Masuku carries the taint of a Covid-19 era procurement scandal, and veteran Reverend Frank Chikane is being floated as an alternative, though his family reportedly has doubts. Zuks explains why the ANC is stalling right up against the IEC's deadline, fearing a repeat of Jacob Zuma's 2024 strategy of peeling off disgruntled councillors ward by ward. The conversation turns to the Democratic Alliance's own headache, the fallout from finance spokesperson Mark Burke's exchange control scandal, and what it might mean for donor confidence and the party's carefully built reputation for clean governance. The episode closes on a story about a motorist who called South Africa's 10111 emergency line to report a mob attack in progress, and was hung up on, and what that says about the state's relationship with the people it's meant to serve.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for episode 21 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla.Africa. Patrick unpacks Zambia's disputed election, where incumbent president Hakainde Hichilema was declared the winner with 60% of the vote, but mismatched turnout figures between the presidential and parliamentary ballots, an opposition leader now in hiding after an armed raid on his home, and a jailed bishop have left many unconvinced. Rob, Zuks and Patrick ask why SADC, the regional body meant to hold governments to account, stayed almost entirely silent on it. From there, the conversation turns to South Africa's own Zama Zama crisis, the illegal mining economy that has become impossible to ignore, and the wider pattern of artisanal mining stretching from Ghana to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The episode closes on a brewing scandal for the DA. Finance spokesperson Mark Burke is accused of moving R4 billion offshore in breach of exchange controls, and Zuks and Rob ask what it could mean for Helen Zille's campaign to become mayor of Johannesburg.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are back for the twentieth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla.Africa. A new poll from the Social Research Foundation has the ANC at just 18% in Johannesburg, down from 30% in March, in a city that's been the party's political heart since before 1994. Rob and Zuks unpack what that collapse actually means, and Zuks reveals an exclusive detail from his own reporting, ActionSA has told him they'd genuinely consider a coalition with the DA after the election. From there, they turn to Zuks' own column on the DA's new manifesto, and whether South Africa's problem is the wrong policies or simply years of bad implementation. Zuks pushes back hard on "efficiency" as a fix, pointing to who actually holds economic power in the country, and revisits why the DA's past coalitions in Tshwane and Ekurhuleni fell apart. The episode closes on the case against seven special forces soldiers and one military police officer charged with murdering Hawks detective Frans Mathipa, and what it says about whether South Africa's military answers to anyone at all. Zuks makes the sharpest case of the episode: nothing will happen to the generals involved, because they're simply carrying out what the ANC wants, and an outgoing president has little authority left to stop them.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for the nineteenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa. This week: Zuks makes the case, from his own reporting and personal experience in the Eastern Cape, that the Freedom Front Plus, long seen as an exclusively white party, is quietly winning support across racial lines. Minister Pieter Groenewald's prison bakery fix becomes the episode's clearest example of efficiency beating ideology, and Patrick brings an outsider's eye to why rural and urban South Africans are experiencing the same parties so differently. From there, Julius Malema's public attack on MacG's Podcast and Chill becomes a window into something bigger, whether podcasts are depoliticising young South Africans or simply giving them somewhere else to go. Patrick then walks through the real story behind this week's chaos in Ceuta, how a staged political moment obscured the fact that crossings into Europe are actually down this year, not up. They close on Jacob Zuma stripping a senior MK Party figure of his role in parliament and handing it to his own son, Duduzane, a move both hosts read as the clearest sign yet of where the party is really headed.

This week covers South Africa's culture of paying for political access, ANC gala dinners selling seats next to the president for up to R2 million, set against Donald Trump's Truth Social selling millisecond trading access to his own posts for $100,000 a month. Rob and Zuks pick apart where legitimate lobbying ends and buying influence begins, and look at just how little of this actually gets declared to the IEC. From there it's another blow to Ramaphosa's New Dawn, IDAC head Andrea Johnson's resignation after damaging Madlanga Commission testimony, a Public Investment Corporation with no board and no CEO, and the growing risk that South Africa gets greylisted by FATF all over again. They also revisit Zuks' own column making the case for a grand ANC-DA coalition to keep the EFF and MK Party out of South Africa's hung municipalities, before closing on Jacob Zuma tightening his personal grip on MK Party finances.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for the seventeenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa. This week: the Public Investment Corporation, Africa's biggest single asset manager, is in freefall. The CEO was suspended, five directors have resigned, and two of the ANC's most powerful finance figures are locked in a turf war over who actually runs it. Rob and Zuks unpack why a body managing R3.7 trillion in government pensions keeps ending up here, and Patrick brings in comparisons from across the continent, including Zimbabwe's opaque Mutapa fund and Nigeria's own pension fund troubles. From there, the conversation turns to business's fading faith in Ramaphosa, why replacing bad ministers with worse ones keeps costing him credibility, and what a looming super El Niño could mean for South African farmers and food security across the continent. They close on Air Zimbabwe's resumed London route, and why the story behind it isn't quite the comeback it looks like on the surface.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are back for the sixteenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa, and this one's a first, our debut video episode, filmed live in studio. This week Rob and Zuks start with the sorry state of South Africa's diplomatic missions abroad, from a London embassy where staff are reportedly told to bring their own toilet paper to work, to a shuttered mission in the Netherlands still waiting on renovations a year later. They ask what institutional neglect at home and abroad says about the country's priorities. Then it's the Public Investment Corporation, the R3 trillion asset manager now mired in fresh scandal, before Julius Malema's link to the Madlanga Commission and what it could cost the EFF ahead of November's municipal elections. The DA's Tony Leon finds himself at the centre of a lobbying row, and Rob and Zuks weigh up whether it'll actually cost the party any votes. Then it's on to the MK Party's pick for the eThekwini mayoral race, and what that says about patronage over principle in KwaZulu Natal politics. Rob closes with two takeaways: sympathy for KZN voters stuck choosing between bad, worse and inept options, and a warning to stay off the Stella Artois this weekend.

Three scandals, one theme. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova, joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential, dig into the week the Democratic Alliance turned on itself. Former leader Tony Leon's lobbying firm has been securing audiences with government ministers on behalf of clients including SpaceX, and John Steenhuisen has gone public claiming Geordin Hill Lewis backstabbed him after striking a deal on the leadership transition. Then they turn to the ANC, where Dina Pule, fired by Jacob Zuma himself back in 2013 over a corruption scandal involving her boyfriend, has just been brought back into cabinet in a portfolio the ANC Women's League has controlled for over two decades. Patrick draws the global thread through both stories, tracing the political revolving door from Dick Cheney and Halliburton through the Blair government to Donald Trump pausing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and asks what happens to a body politic when insiders can freely monetise their old government connections. They close with the continental fallout from the June 30 xenophobia deadline, South African foreign policy's uncomfortable contradiction of exporting billions in goods to Africa while expelling Africa's people, and a World Cup catch up featuring the giant killing run of Norway, the heartbreak of Cape Verde, and a Paris bar full of French football fans cheering for the underdog.

The June 30 deadline came and went, and South Africa held remarkably steady. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova, joining from Mount Frere in the Eastern Cape, unpack what actually happened and why the anticipated chaos never materialised. Then they go deep on who is really behind March and March. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, the former Vuma FM broadcaster whose movement grew out of a contract dispute with an ANC MEC. Ngizwe Mchunu, the former Ukhozi FM presenter and self-declared president of the AmaBhinca Nation, previously charged over the July 2021 unrest. And Nkosikhona Ndabandaba, the Shaka iLembe actor who leads the disciplined, king-endorsed Amabutho regiments. Rob and Zuks trace the direct links between March and March and Jacob Zuma's MK Party, including a treasurer who ran on MK's 2024 national election list, and ask whether this entire movement has become a secret weapon for MK ahead of the November elections in KwaZulu-Natal, where the ANC stands to lose the eThekwini Metro outright. They also dig into the economics of xenophobia, the R600 million cost of policing the marches, and why chasing out immigrants will not fix an economy growing at under 1 percent. They close on a lighter note with South Africa's historic World Cup run and the giant killings that have defined this tournament. Sharp Sharp is a weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa. New episode every week.

June 30 is days away. March and March have set their deadline and all foreigners must leave South Africa. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into what happens when the deadline hits, whether the security forces can hold it together, and what the Zulu king's extraordinary intervention ahead of June 30 actually means for how this plays out. They also get into Jordan Hill-Lewis removing John Steenhuisen as agriculture minister, the loyalty versus capacity debate in the new DA, and Hill-Lewis's visit to the Zulu king as a blueprint for building a political base beyond the DA's traditional support. Then Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential joins to take it continental. Mnangagwa pushed a constitutional amendment through the Zimbabwean parliament last week to extend his presidential term. Wicknell Chivayo and Kudakwashe Tagwirei bankrolled the votes. The sovereign wealth fund that controls all of Zimbabwe's utilities and mineral wealth has no public oversight. And three million Zimbabweans in South Africa are the direct result of that misgovernance, meaning the pressure on South Africa will not ease until Zimbabwe changes. Sharp Sharp is a weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa. New episode every week.

Fifty years after the Soweto uprising, South Africa's schoolchildren are still being failed. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova mark June 16 with a retrospective that asks not what went wrong but what went right — and finds that racial harmony, against all the odds and against the global trend, is the unexpected success story of post-apartheid South Africa. Then they turn to the ledger of failure. Eighty-one percent of grade four learners cannot read for meaning. Almost a million children drop out before matric. The pass rate is a statistical illusion. BEE has been treated as a goal rather than a tool and produced legalised looting — R65,000 to fix one pothole, R26 for a single-ply toilet roll at Eskom. And the first trillionaire in human history was born in Pretoria three years before June 16 1976, but South Africa blocks his satellite internet service from connecting 5,000 schools that still do not have textbooks by June. They also get into Geordin Hill-Lewis removing John Steenhuisen as agriculture minister, the DA stamping its authority on the GNU, and the World Cup — Bafana losing badly, African nations trolling South Africa with Mexican jerseys, and the Japanese fans who cleaned up the entire stadium after their match. Sharp Sharp is a weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa. New episode every week.

But the Human Sciences Research Council data tells a different story — those willing to welcome all immigrants dropped from 26% to 15% in four years, while the bloc that wants no immigrants at all grew from 30% to 42%, the highest hostility on record since 2003.
Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined this week by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential to dig into the real story behind the headlines.
Zuks has a different answer to the data — in his village in Mthatha an Ethiopian shopkeeper has lived inside a South African homestead for decades, protected by community norms, because that is how things actually work on the ground. The marches are real, the frustration is real, but the target is wrong. The real story is a decade of state failure, porous borders, broken promises, and politicians from the ANC to ActionSA using immigrants as a scapegoat in an election year. Patrick widens the lens — Nigeria expelled three million West Africans in 1983, Ghana kicked out half a million Nigerians in 1969, and from Texas to Middlesborough this is a global moment of ethno-nationalism being weaponised by governments everywhere. They close with the World Cup curtain raiser — Bafana Bafana play Mexico tonight and Zuks wants a 2-1 win.
Sharp Sharp is hosted by Rob Rose of Currency News and Zukile Majova of Scrolla.Africa.

Maki Tshabalala, the DA's new Ward 28 councillor in Emfuleni in the Vaal Triangle, wiped the floor with a party that had 90% of that ward in 2011 and is now down to 31%.
Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into what it means for the November local government elections, why communities always know their own people better than any party headquarters does, and whether Helen Zille can replicate it in Johannesburg. They also get into the fuel price hitting R28 a litre, the government's decision to quietly reverse the fuel levy relief, and why Joburg residents are paying 65% more for water while being told it is only 12% more. And they close with SAFA, the World Cup, 12 players on the pitch against Nicaragua, visas not ready for Mexico, and the question of whether Bafana getting knocked out early might actually be the best thing that could happen to South African football.
Sharp Sharp is hosted by Rob Rose of Currency News and Zukile Majova of Scrolla.Africa.

Zukile Majova and Rob Rose dig into a week of high political drama as President Cyril Ramaphosa files his affidavit arguing why the Phala Phala impeachment report should be set aside - and why the whole saga looks set to drag well past the November election. The ANC elders are breaking ranks, caretaker presidents are circling, and the succession whispers are getting louder. Then: Johannesburg. Africa's richest city is effectively bankrupt, its roads are disintegrating, and the mayor wants to hire more executives to oversee the chaos. Rob and Zuks debate whether anyone - Helen Zille included - can actually fix a city that needs a miracle.
And Bafana Bafana head to the World Cup. Can they finally escape the group stage? Rob and Zuks dare to hope.
Sharp Sharp is hosted by Rob Rose of Currency News and Zukile Majova of Scrolla.Africa.

This week, Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into the case of taxi boss Joe "Ferrari" Sibanyoni, and the prosecutor who was too scared to show up in court. From cut-price hired hitmen to the brazen killing of AKA on Florida Road, they ask whether the rule of law has simply collapsed in the face of organised crime. The taxi industry's grip extends far beyond South Africa. Special guest Patrick Smith, editorial director of Africa Confidential, joins to unpack the Matatu strike that brought Kenya's capital to a standstill, and what it reveals about who really holds power across the continent.
Then: the Iran war's ripple effects on African fuel prices, shipping backlogs, and food security — and why one man is coining it. Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote, has built the world's largest single-process oil refinery. With oil at $105 a barrel and the Strait of Hormuz closed, his timing looks like genius.
Sharp Sharp is hosted by Rob Rose of Currency News and Zukile Majova of Scrolla.Africa.

The Constitutional Court ruled last week that Parliament failed in its duty when it buried the section 89 panel report on Phala Phala. An impeachment enquiry is now required. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into everything you need to know about how $580,000 in cash ended up stuffed under a couch on Cyril Ramaphosa's game farm, why a Sudanese businessman left without his buffaloes, and why the president who nearly resigned in 2022 is not going anywhere this time. They also ask the big question: has Ramaphosa actually been good for South Africa? Rob gives him 65 percent. Zuks gives him 80. You decide. Then they get into the construction mafia story of the week — a JSE listed company paid eight and a half million rand to a mafia boss for what was invoiced as strategic security services.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova used it as the perfect metaphor for what is happening to ordinary South Africans right now. Paraffin is now R28 a litre at the regulated price and R40 by the time it reaches a village spaza shop. It is the fuel of the poorest South Africans heading into winter and nobody in government seems to care. Rob and Zuks dig into the cost of living crisis that is eating through people's pockets, the HSRC survey showing support for democracy has collapsed from 65% to 36% since the mid-2000s, why that collapse is pushing people toward strongman leaders like Jacob Zuma and Donald Trump, the NSFAS disaster and the deeply questionable new appointment to fix it, and the Chad Du Plessis award of the week which goes to Gwede Mantashe's department for getting the fuel price calculation wrong by a rand.

The March on March movement is shutting down CBDs, politicians from the ANC to ActionSA are fuelling it, and the police are taking selfies with the march leaders instead of stopping them. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into why this lawlessness is possible and why the leadership vacuum in law enforcement is letting it happen. Then they get into Sisisi Tolashe, the Social Development Minister and ANC Women's League president who registered two government cars in her children's names, one of whom sold the car and handed back a different one to Luthuli House. Cyril acted on Masemola but cannot seem to act on her. Zuks explains exactly why. And finally, Solly Malatsi launched South Africa's AI policy and then had to pull it because it was full of AI hallucinations. Rob and Zuks ask whether the government is half a step away from incompetence at all times and introduce the man responsible. His name is Chad Du Plessis.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into South Africa's road rage crisis and what the numbers actually say — 1,453 murders in a single quarter linked to road rage and provocation, SA ranked first in the world for aggressive driver behaviour, and 34 people shot dead every single day. What makes SA uniquely lethal is not just the anger — it is that the guns are legal. They also get into the xenophobic violence building in KZN, what it means that every political party except the DA is using anti-immigrant rhetoric ahead of the local elections, and the one figure who has the moral authority to calm things down. Plus Fannie Masemola charged and what it tells us about Ramaphosa's decision-making.

Then they get into the big one: the DA just elected Geordin Hill-Lewis as leader and the question is whether another white guy at the top is enough of a break from the past. Zuks's grandmother wouldn't open the door for a big white man knocking. Would she open it for Helen Zille? Almost certainly. And that tells you everything about the DA's problem. They also get into the ANC's generational rot, the Phala Phala report and why Ramaphosa was never really a leader — just the only option available.

Trump threatened to wipe out an entire civilisation, then chickened out an hour before his own deadline. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova unpack the TACO moment heard around the world and what it means for South Africa's foreign policy in an era of creeping authoritarianism. They also get into the rebel faction inside the ANC that wants to collapse the GNU and replace the DA with the EFF and MK, why that would be catastrophic for the rand and investment, and whether South Africa's environment actually allows entrepreneurs to thrive after SA born Natie Kirsh sold his US company for R500 billion.

Trump's war on Iran has sent the fuel price through the roof and South Africa is feeling it hard. Rob Rose and Zukile Majova dig into the three rand a litre relief cut and whether the government can sustain it, Ramaphosa's investment conference and the smoke and mirrors around two trillion rand, the fascinating poll showing 47% of ANC voters want Patrice Motsepe as their next leader, why Ramaphosa cannot fire his police minister even when he knows he should, and Helen Zille swimming in a Joburg pothole.