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.