Is he just deluded?

I think the track record would suggest that he overestimates his party's chances.

And that probably is the case here as well.

One of the things I found interesting in the Tswane result was that the ANC is holding up quite well in Tswane.

I was wondering about that.

The ANC is much weaker in Johannesburg than in Tswane.

And I wonder if it's the presence of government and officialdom that helps to lift the vote in that place.

think that

Invest better with Brenthurst.

Cool.

Thanks.

Uh, hello, everyone.

It's great to be back here at the BizNews conference.

Alec, thank you for inviting me.

And that, uh, snippet was from a song called Army of Me by Björk.

But that was only if one was being too cynical.

Yeah, exactly.

That's just an observation.

Um, but it is one we have made before in the sense that we say that when the government talks about economic growth pro- programs, uh, it is very much focused on spending.

So it will say, you know, we need to spend billions on grid expansion and billions on freight infrastructure and billions on ports and billions on this, that, and the other, uh, in order to get the economy growing.

But in truth, the thing that's holding back the economy is not really a lack of spending, it is rather a lack of quality spending, and more than that even, um, the type of policies that we get.

And this is where, uh, the discussion, uh, in this article, and I think also in Tshwane more broadly, doesn't really seem to be focusing- On creating the preconditions for actual economic growth short of spending lots of money.

But John, uh, are investors right to be betting on Joburg making a recovery when it's in such a difficult state?

Yeah, I mean, the important thing is we don't do any long-term damage.

Exactly, yeah.

Safety's absolutely the most number one important thing.

We're sat here in, inside a hotel right now having a coffee.

I know this isn't your idea of racing TCR.

But unfortunately, like, it's like a holistic boost, you know what I mean? Just having some space to actually decompress.

Like, we're sat inside right now, and that's incredibly helpful just to be out of the sun and out of the wind and to feel, yeah, a bit more secure in my surroundings.

Yeah

Feel any of that?

I won't lie to you.

No, I don't.

And I feel it in you.

[laughs]

When we're pedaling along, I'm quite happy to just sit an even pace.

I can feel the little surges in the power when suddenly Andrew spots someone down the road.

There's a desire to overtake.

And so what is it in this snapshot of the registration day and, uh, yeah, first race day, what's your, what are your motivations? Where's that at?

I could do with losing 10 kilograms.

Uh, the race will be suitable for that.

That's my only motivation right now.

[laughs]

...

but I'm, but just a bit cooler, and scared, more scared than Andrew, but all of that as well.

Creo que lo más interesante

sobre el TCR es la pregunta de por qué.

No es como, oh, he hecho todo este entrenamiento y voy a caminar muy rápido por todo el continente.

Es mucho más interesante para mí preguntar a la pregunta de por qué las personas regulares que trabajan en trabajos regulares, con una cantidad regular de fitness, no entrenamiento, 30 horas por semana, ¿por qué es que quieren ponerse a través de eso? ¿Por qué quieren ciclar a través de un continente? Entonces, John, ¿qué quieres de esto? ¿Cuál es tu por qué en este momento? Mi por qué es...

Hay un par de cosas, pero principalmente es... son dos cosas.

Por un lado, tienes la oportunidad de tener una aventura con Andrew, que es un amigo querido.

Creo que sería una experiencia de aprendizaje increíble para mí estar con Andrew, porque es mucho más experto que yo.

En un mundo ideal, ¿cuál sería el porqué y la respuesta a esa pregunta, en retrospectiva, en la línea final en Kalamata, en Grecia? Oh, realmente espero.

This focuses on why South Africa's strategy of waiting out the Trump administration is likely a miscalculation, and why repairing the relationship with Washington matters far more than many in Pretoria seem to appreciate.

I think it's a, it's a miscalculation to do this, um, because a lot of the, um, unhappiness with South Africa is bipartisan in nature.

In other words, it's not just the Republicans who are unhappy.

The Democrats are also unhappy, um, as you can see by those various bills that, that were put forward in Congress, uh, both in the House and in the Senate, uh, which had bipartisan support.

And those bills called, of course, for the review of the relationship between South Africa and the United States.

They pointed out South Africa's foreign policy positions, its, uh, friendliness with Iran, its hostility towards Israel.

Um, and for that reason, I think that it's, it, it might be a long shot to be able to wait this out from the South African side and just say, you know, just because today is bad, maybe tomorrow will get better.

But an agenda saying, we don't really need the United States, we don't really need the West, we're gonna get the money in from China anyway.

Your reading though is a little different?

Yeah, I think it's, it's important to look at the, at the big number, and the big number's the 13.7%, uh, fixed investment rate, which South Africa, um, recorded last year.

It's been, uh, under 15% for a number of years, where the global average is 26% and emerging markets are over, often over 30%.

And I think until we see that number shifting, then we really can't, uh, talk about seeing a turnaround in South Africa.

Uh, in my conversations overseas, I refer to that as skin in the game money.

In other words, as an investor, you know, if you buy some bonds or some stocks, uh, you can divest very easily if you get nervous.

But if you're doing fixed investment, you are pouring money into concrete and steel and glass, and that is not easy to move.

And, uh, on top of it, uh, well, he says uninformed, uh, was the quote, "And on top of it, some of his policies are racist." I guess that didn't go, uh, down too well in Washington.

It's such an interesting time that we're going through in South Africa on this basis, but one of the other areas that you've been looking at at the IRR is would we be able to get those million South Africans, mostly skilled, who've left the country, back here? Now, what, uh, you brought out a report, and you can tell us about that, but I'd also love to hear your sense of the, uh, face-to-face conversations that you might have had with South Africans abroad, and whether we can hold out any hope that they are going to be reversing that trend, which I think the last numbers you gave us were 70%, uh, actually preferred to emigrate rather than only 30% coming back.

Yeah, so what we're doing is, uh, we're launching a diaspora survey where we'll ask diaspora South Africans about, um, their reasons for leaving, and maybe also the factors that would bring them back to South Africa.

My sense from conversations is that the emotional ties that might bind people who have left the country to South Africa and persuade them to return weaken substantially over time.

In other words, you know, if, if, if you've left South Africa, um, and you've been overseas for a year or two, and you get a job offer to come back, or, you know, you've still got friends, you've got networks, uh, in South Africa that, that make it easier to come back.

But the longer you've been overseas, and if it's been 10 or 20 years, I think you, you know, you might marry somebody from that country.

You'll have, um, raised your family over there.

You'll have built networks of friends or business contacts, and you'll have less and less reason to want to return to South Africa.

And ju- just to sum up with, John, when you came back from your, your adventures abroad, what did you bring back here from all of those conversations? What, what was your, the nutshell, if you could give us that?

What does that mean and what does it tell us about the potential political impact?

So I think that the Treasury is expressing its frustration with the degree of mismanagement, especially financially, in so many of South Africa's municipalities.

And it is doing this by firing a shot across the bowels of the municipalities and saying, look, you guys depend on us, National Treasury, that is money from the central government fund, for a significant part of your income.

And if you don't clean up your act, we are going to hold back that money.

I think that that is going to be a process of escalation.

So this first iteration of that might be quite mild compared to what could follow down the road.

In other words, they'll say, okay, here's what we want from you.

And just to sum up with John, when you came back from your adventures abroad, what did you bring back here from all of those conversations? What was the nutshell, if you could give us that?

So John, the question to you is, has South Africa's politics actually changed post-2024?

Mm.

I understand why people say that it hasn't, um, in a form for much of the same reason that you've just pointed out.

And I, I like to call that the Madonsela argument because Thuli Madonsela, after the 2024 elections, made precisely that point, and she said, "You know, you must not think that just because the ANC has dropped to 40%, this means that South Africans don't want transformation." Um, and that on the face of it was a convincing argument because as you say, you add it together, the ANC and its offshoots, uh, MK and the EFF, you got I think to 62, 63%, broadly in line with what the ANC and later, uh, the F- EFF as its offshoot had managed to gain in previous elections.

But, um, I thought that analysis didn't quite ring true.

Um, and the reason for that is that if people wanted more transformation, uh, and if they'd felt that the ANC was not delivering it, then I would have expected a stronger swing towards the EFF, which is not quite what we saw, because we saw the EFF actually going back in terms of vote share.

It dropped from, um, was it 11% to around 9% from 2019 to 2024, and it lost about 400,000 votes, which was about a third of it, the number of votes it got in 2019.

MK as well.