Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for episode 25 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla.Africa.

The Trump administration has announced targeted visa restrictions for foreign nationals involved in race based discrimination, repeating its claims that South Africa is persecuting Afrikaners. Rob, Zuks and Patrick ask why Washington remains committed to this distorted picture, what it could mean for business and diplomacy, and whether anyone can repair relations between the two countries.

The conversation turns to the women whose bodies were found across Ekurhuleni. The team examines South Africa's failure to confront gender based violence, the collapse of trust in the police and why crime has not become a major election issue.

They also unpack Fikile Mbalula's court battle with Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma over allegations of vote buying within the ANC. Mbalula denies the claims. The episode ends with Africa's successful campaign for the United Nations to use maps that show the continent at its true scale.

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Rob Rose and Zukile Majova return for episode 24 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla.Africa.

The ANC failed one of the most basic tests facing any political party: submitting all its candidates for an election. Nearly 200 ANC candidates across several municipalities could be affected after the party missed the IEC’s deadline. Rob and Zuks ask what the failure reveals about the collapse of the ANC’s internal machinery and whether secretary-general Fikile Mbalula will be held accountable.

With November’s local elections approaching, Mbalula has admitted that a disastrous result could bring down the ANC leadership before its 2027 conference. The conversation turns to the succession battle and why electoral chaos could strengthen Paul Mashatile while Patrice Motsepe and Zweli Mkhize remain possible challengers.

Then comes the bigger question: what happens to South Africa if the ANC collapses? Rob and Zuks examine whether the DA is broad enough to replace it, the danger of the EFF and MK Party filling the vacuum, and why the ANC’s decline may need to be managed without allowing the country to collapse alongside it.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for episode 23 of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on politics, money and power from the Financial Mail and Scrolla.Africa.

The week began with two Airlink jets flying dramatically low over Cape Town Stadium ahead of the Springboks and All Blacks Test, sparking a global safety debate. Rob and Zuks use it as the perfect metaphor for a party that never seems to plan ahead, the ANC, which missed the IEC's deadline to submit candidate lists in several Eastern Cape municipalities, risking being locked out of contesting those areas entirely.

From there, the conversation turns to deputy president Paul Mashatile's prolonged and largely unexplained absence from public life, and Zuks makes the case for why Mashatile may have little incentive to campaign hard for an ANC win right now.

Patrick joins for a deep dive into Zambia, where president Hakainde Hichilema was sworn in for a second term this week under deepening controversy. Notably absent from the inauguration was South Africa's own president, Cyril Ramaphosa. The team unpacks the international response, the ongoing legal fight over former president Edgar Lungu's body, and asks a bigger question, why doesn't popular anger over stolen elections and rising costs ever seem to topple governments in this part of Africa?

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.

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are back for the eighteenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa.

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.