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Daily Maverick
08-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
June 2025 round-up of Daily Maverick's #LiveJournalism
At Daily Maverick, our events and webinar department links public service journalism with audience engagement. We host webinars to deepen community connections, enhance understanding of key issues and bring stories to life through interactive experiences. We hosted five webinars in June, all of which can be found on our dedicated webinar platform or YouTube channel. Here's a round-up our latest live journalism webinars, the topics covered and key takeaways, just for you. Small business, big problems: What the government could be doing June started with a webinar for the small business owners in the Daily Maverick community and the systemic challenges throttling South Africa's small business sector. Neesa Moodley, editor of Business Maverick, was joined by Joshua Kadish, co-founder and CEO of Sourcefin, and Dr Shaheim Patel, academic dean at Regent Business School. Together, they examined hurdles to success such as access to finance, red-tape, digital infrastructure and more. An audience member said the session was 'brilliant' and that '[we] need more conversations like this'. Watch the full recording here. Antarctica's Precipice: Reimagining the South Pole Without US Commitment As winter took full effect in South Africa, the cold Antarctic took the agenda. As global tensions rise, the once-stable Antarctic Treaty is under strain. Antarctic investigative journalist Tiara Walters was joined by polar geopolitical experts, professors Klaus Dodds (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Alan Hemmings (Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury). The conversation included the growing likelihood of shifting power dynamics and nationalist agendas jeopardising the treaty's future ahead of negotiations in Milan. One attendee said it was 'great to see these growing issues being highlighted'. Another said they felt inspired ahead of their master's dissertation. Watch the full recording here. One Small Step: How parkrun Built a Global Community In a more lighthearted webinar, Mark Heywood, a social activist and avid parkrunner, was joined by Paul Sinton-Hewitt CBE, founder of the global parkrun and author of One Small Step, as well as South African running legend and parkrun SA CEO Bruce Fordyce. They reflected on how a small Saturday-morning run in London sparked a global movement that now spans five continents and 10 million participants. What made this webinar special was the personal stories of parkrunners in South Africa whose lives were changed after joining their local parkrun. 'Incredible incredible incredible… thank you so, so much for this discussion,' said one attendee. Another was grateful to the panel for 'gifting this lovely event to the world'. Watch the full recording here. Children in Crisis: Exploring ways to better protect SA's most vulnerable The sad nature of this webinar was offset by its solutions-focused panel. Maverick Citizen journalist Tamsin Meterlerkamp was joined by Sinah Moruane from Unicef SA and Miranda Jordan-Friedman, founding director of Women and Men Against Child Abuse. After giving appropriate attention and context to the brutal realities facing South Africa's children, the session was a call to action for anyone committed to a safer, more just future for the country's youngest citizens. One attendee said: 'Wow. Thank you for this. We need to have more of these and get more of the people who make major decisions nationally on these platforms to hear this information and be part of the solution.' Watch the full recording here. Just Energy Transition: Debating the role of nuclear in South Africa's energy mix Our Burning Planet's Ethan van Diemen hosted this timely webinar examining nuclear energy's place in the Just Energy Transition. With Professor Mark Swilling (Stellenbosch University), Emmanuel Montwedi (SAYNPS chair and nuclear engineer) and activist Makoma Lekalakala (Earthlife Africa), the panel unpacked the heated debate: is nuclear essential for stable, zero-emission power, or a risky, costly distraction? The debate was hot, respectful, full of insight and worth your while to understand the Just Energy Transition. One viewer said it was 'great to hear both sides of the story'. Watch the full recording here. DM
Daily Maverick
24-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
How South Africa's poor continue paying for the privileges of the rich
It is South Africa's political-economic structure, its 'relations of power', that need transformation, if the objective is to reverse our shameful poverty, unemployment and inequality. This transformation begins with the rejection of what has shaped the fundamentals of our economy since 1994 – neoliberalism. The poor continue to be the constant losers regardless of the specific crisis afflicting the economy at any time. Some 20 years ago, for instance, the collapse of the rand against the US dollar, British pound and the EU's euro was offered as part of the explanation why most people were experiencing economic hardship. Then – as hard as it is to remember or imagine – the opposite happened. The rand began to strengthen, doubling its value against the dollar. But the hardships of most South Africans remained unchanged. Indeed, the very strength of the rand was presented as the cause of growing poverty and unemployment. Without our predilection for producing remedial plans for every problem, I wonder how many people have ever heard of – or remember – AsgiSA, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa, launched in February 2006. The initiative was supposed to introduce policies and interventions to achieve sustainable economic growth of 6%, which would halve poverty and unemployment by 2014. No sooner was it announced than the global economic gurus, to whom our government is beholden, warned that too much growth was inflationary and then, as now, inflation was presented as a deadly disorder. Interest rates around the world accordingly began increasing to counter the excessive inflationary growth rate. Following this lead, our Reserve Bank claimed that a growth rate of only 4.1% was sustainable if inflation was to be controlled. Leap into the present and the same pattern persists. South Africa's 2025 Budget shows that only some of the particulars of the pattern have changed. The urgency of economic growth as the means to solving our myriad problems – growth being the only issue on which all members of the GNU agree – was central to the brouhaha over the new national Budget. All the GNU's 10 members claimed that the interests of the poor were primary in either shaping or opposing the first two versions of the Budget. The third and finally agreed version was supposedly based on the same objective, with creating jobs as the main one. The finally agreed Budget, however, still left most South Africans the victims of the same macroeconomic policies accepted by all parliamentary political parties since 1994, notwithstanding the occasional rhetoric of some of them. Under the headline of ' Education and health funding slashed while fuel levy increased ' – despite the appalling state of both education and health – Daily Maverick's Neesa Moodley details the impact of the Budget's austerity impact on additional items such as social grant recipients, the early retirement programme for the public sector, the zero rating of more essential food items, and Home Affairs. That VAT is the most regressive of all taxes didn't deter the ANC from wanting to impose a 2% VAT increase, or inhibit it from still seeing itself as speaking on behalf of 'our people'. Indeed, the wanted VAT increase caused the SACP such internal conflict that it pledged itself to stand against the ANC in the next national election – the municipal one in 2026. But, hedging its bets, the SACP remains loyal to its alliance with the ANC. Neoliberalism, with its standard characteristics – austerity, tax rates for the rich that are untouchable unless being reduced, conservative monetary policies, public debt that is unpayable yet remains both permanent and the primary budget line item, growing inequality and dependence on the global 'market' – remains sacrosanct (for those wishing to know more about my understanding of neoliberalism). There is one standout issue, however, that is permanently free from the austerity cuts and restrictions the government says are unavoidable, if, as it must, it prevents getting into even heavier debt by borrowing money. The Employment Equity Amendment Bill, the Mineral Resources Bill, the R100-billion Transformation Fund and the legally binding BEE legal sector code for the greatly enhanced involvement of black (ie African) lawyers are current examples of this exemption. 'SA is busy intensifying BEE', as the former editor of Business Maverick, Tim Cohen, noted in February 2025. He considered this intensification to be the movement from BEE's first wave to its second and third waves. A commitment to this intensification was a central theme of President Cyril Ramaphosa's keynote address at the Black Business Council's (BBC) Annual Conference on 5 June 2025. 'Transformation', apart from being a constitutional mandate as Ramaphosa reminded the BBC, remains legitimised by its claim to be designed to help 'our people' by the imperative of reducing poverty and unemployment. Transformation rich in reassuring rhetoric The reality is less righteous. It is the African rich who feed off the in-your-face African poverty as the rationale for still more measures to promote their wealth. Then-President Thabo Mbeki, rather than feeling the need to camouflage this reality, made it the key theme of his address to the Black Management Forum's annual conference in December 1999. He declared: 'I will speak only to the question of the challenge of the formation of a black capitalist class, a black bourgeoisie'. Despite such frankness, he still felt the need for euphemism. The implicitly all-inclusive 'black bourgeoisie' being one such euphemism. Yet only some five months earlier, the ANC had reaffirmed, at its 50th Annual Conference, that it had a much narrower understanding of who was black. In practice, as well as selected public use, it meant Africans in particular (Thesis 8 of the National Question in South Africa). This dual meaning of black has become sufficiently common for people to clarify their meaning when black is not used generically to include everyone who isn't white. Hence the term black African. President Ramaphosa's response to the question put to him in Parliament on 27 May 2025 by the leader of the Freedom Front Plus, Corné Mulder, is among the clearest and most comprehensive analyses demonstrating that the Budget was not alone in omitting the needs of poor Africans. Transformation does the same, despite the trillions of rands their poverty legitimises when spent on the creation, consolidation and expansion of the African bourgeoisie. Ramaphosa merits quoting at some length. Although himself using the formula 'black people in general and Africans in particular' in 2017, and, more especially when presenting the ANC's President's Political Report in 2022, he reverted to the more inclusive 'black people' in his answer to Mulder's 2025 Parliamentary question (as he frequently did in his aforementioned address to the BBC, in June 2025): 'I am rather surprised and taken aback when I hear that policies of black economic empowerment militate against the growth of our economy. That, I find quite surprising because I work from the starting point that our economy was held back over many years by the racist policies of the past. 'Black people were brought in as hewers of wood and drawers of water and they were just brought in as labourers. They were not even seen as consumers. They were not seen as active players in the economic landscape of our country.' The reality of apartheid, including the wholesale exclusion of black South Africans from the economy, could not be forgotten, as if it were merely 'a bad dream', Ramaphosa reminded Mulder: 'So I am really baffled, I am baffled by people who still hanker for policies of the past and to have you, Sir, say black economic empowerment is holding our economy back.' Ramaphosa was particularly incensed by the accusation that transformation was the major impediment to achieving the reduction of poverty and unemployment. All his GNU member parties agreed that cutting poverty and unemployment was the sine qua non for the way forward. They further agreed that this couldn't be achieved without economic growth. For him, there is no inconsistency between growth and 'black' wealth: 'Why can't black people be made to own productive aspects of our economy, why can't they be rich as well?' He claimed that both the World Bank and IMF had, in separate reports, agreed with him. Ramaphosa said that both institutions had identified an excessively over-concentrated economy as the roadblock to growth. Ramaphosa's still-intact apartheid mindset selectively equated this unhealthy concentration as being the continuation of apartheid, where the white minority enjoyed state protection of their ownership and management of the major sources of wealth. Given his misunderstanding of 'concentration', he was baffled by the new, sustained and growing fashion of attacking transformation, in both South Africa and the US. His expectation is applause for transformation, for its explicit intention is nothing less than forcing open the bolted doors of white wealth, with the keys still secured in white safes. His apartheid-cemented mindset made him unable to comprehend that, as used by both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (and economists more generally), concentration referred to sector/s of an economy dominated by a small number of very large corporations. These oligopolies, as they are called in standard economics, or monopolies in Marxian terminology, are sufficiently powerful both to set market prices and deter others from becoming competitors. (It seems that some of the established beneficiaries of BEE prefer not having additional competitors created by the continuation of BEE.) In either case, oligopolies are considered to constrain supposedly free markets, which is why most developed economies, including South Africa, have statutory institutions formally mandated to control such anti-competitive behaviours. Provided they don't take this mandate too seriously. If they do, even our (mostly) toothless Competition Commission is lambasted for 'thwarting growth '. This, despite the commission's acceptance of the normalisation of anti-competitive behaviour worldwide and the need for South Africa's corporations to be 'competitive' in markets controlled by much larger corporations than South Africa's large ones. Hence, too, the Treasury's response to pressure from Parliament's Finance Committee to expand the VAT zero-rated food basket. The Treasury explained that zero-rating was a blunt instrument, for it also benefited retailers and distributors who did not pass on the price reductions to consumers. Such additional profiteering was just presented – and accepted – as an unchangeable fact of economies. Capitalism on neoliberal steroids The effects of this modern-day economy (which dominates much of the world) go way beyond the austerity cuts and restrictions of South Africa's current Budget. As argued elsewhere, it is the South African form of neoliberalism that creates and reproduces the very poverty, unemployment and inequality the GNU is committed to reversing. Most of the 187 countries identified by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 2020 as austerity-stricken are committed to GDP-measured growth as the antidote to austerity. South Africa, along with the others, sees the antidote as being an injection of foreign capital into their economies. With the world awash with capital seeking profit-maximising investments – there are about 215 other investment destinations that capital can seek, according to Professor Adrian Saville of the Gordon Institute of Business Science – countries are obliged to be even more 'business-friendly' than their immediate competitors. The World Bank Group's President, Tim Young Kim, alerted governments as far back as 2017 to what this means: 'If the conditions are not right for private investment, we need to work with our partners to de-risk projects, sectors and entire countries.' 'De-risking' means maximising the freedom enjoyed by the capital of would-be investors. In addition to the Competition Commission's (standard) impotence, this is why profit shifting from the Global South continues unabated, despite the $242-trillion known to have been involved for the period 1990-2015 (constant 2010 USD). The global amount is $492-billion per year. A 2022 estimate for South Africa's losses is $329-billion over five decades. The Dennis Davis Tax Commission of 2022 put South Africa's losses at more than R100-billion. The free movement of capital is taken as given by foreign capital. This is why calls to tax the rich in the world's most unequal society can only but fall on deaf ears. This is why we are expected to celebrate when the export of food increases, while at the same time attacking the government – whether or not it's in a GNU formation – for the worsening unaffordability of food at home. This – along with a more generalised poverty and despair – is why some of us cry when mothers sell their children, while others applaud when the mothers and their accomplices are given life sentences. And we know well that the self-imposed restraints on budgets compel even well-meaning governments to increase the cost of petrol, notwithstanding their awareness that this will aggravate hunger and poverty, for the imperative of profit maximising will force businesses to increase their prices. The way forward? With the DA still being labelled a 'white' party, it is easy to dismiss their opposition to race-based laws because they oppose transformation that threatens their apartheid privileges. But, apart from such party-political opportunism, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Willie Aucamp, the DA spokesperson – or most DA members, for that matter – when, in dismissing the anti-transformation accusation, he added: 'We believe that genuine redress must uplift all South Africans and remove the obstacles that continue to exclude millions from economic participation.' Given the reality of 'transformation', as Thabo Mbeki's brother, Moeletsi has noted: 'As the ruling party, the ANC had the role of nation-building. Instead, it has adopted policies that benefited only the African elite and alienated everyone else.' And because this reality is too discomforting for most of the ANC's political leadership and the more specifically business members of the 'black' bourgeoisie, they, too, probably sincerely endorse the sentiments expressed by the ANC's economic transformation subcommittee head, Zuko Godlimpi. Those opposed to transformation, he contended, have 'routinely tried to turn the legal system into their fighting stick against policies aimed at structural transformation. The grammar of this effort changes over time to be about inadequacies of this legislation, but the substance is the same: retain relations of power that privilege the same historically defined group in terms of economic access, employment opportunity, higher education access and overall social upward mobility.' South Africa's social stability, in his assessment, required nothing less than successful transformation. Ramaphosa developed these themes during his address to the BBC. While acknowledging that 'black African' households had experienced a 46% increase in real income between 2006 and 2023, the average income of 'white' households still remained nearly five times greater than African ones and, thus, failed to meet the demographics required by the Employment Equity and related acts. Since the persistence of 'poverty-stricken' Africans in post-apartheid South Africa is the fundamental rationale for African wealth, as expressed as recently as 9 June 2025 by CEO of Business Leadership SA (BLSA) Busisiwe Mavuso, with white-dominated institutions that 'look like outposts of Europe', Ramaphosa's playing with statistics is not surprising. It is to be expected that he would fail to mention that the 46% increase in African income reflected the huge inequality between the African rich and poor, an inequality that plays a major role in making South Africa the world's most unequal society. It is, indeed, most probable that he is not able to acknowledge this reality even to himself. Such a denial would be wholly consistent with the disjuncture between reality and his illusions on display in his glowing report to the BBC on health, education and unemployment. What he and the DA – like all the other parliamentary parties – are most fundamentally not able to accept is that it is South Africa's political-economic structure, its 'relations of power', that need transformation, if the objective is to reverse our shameful poverty, unemployment and inequality. This transformation begins with the rejection of what still remains nameless in Parliament, even though it has shaped the fundamentals of our economy since 1994: neoliberalism (as I've already revealed). While this first step to the DA's 'genuine' transformation remains beyond Parliamentary thinking, this is unlikely to apply to most of you, the readers of this article. After the experience of 31 years of neoliberal practice, it is a tiny step to guarantee its continued failure – and the consequential growing instability in all its many areas in our society. This knowledge is powerful. It makes it possible for us to increase in size sufficient for our voices not only to be heard in Parliament, but to be represented in Parliament. DM
Daily Maverick
23-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
Crypto Corner: Slow growth in crypto payments is a good thing
Many exchanges and payment options are available in the cryptoverse – but none of them, at least in Mzansi, is as elegant as tap-to-pay. Daily Maverick held a series of morning talks at the Hermanus Fynarts Festival in June. Business Maverick editor Neesa Moodley and I were on stage to discuss the future of money. There was a pensioner who kept nodding off when the conversation turned to cryptocurrency and the role of bitcoin in an investment portfolio – and I can't blame her, as the conversation was being hijacked by a very crypto-clued-up commenter. It's a common problem when you don't have any skin in the game. If she were paying for her weekly Pick n Pay groceries with crypto, she would have been more engaged. But that would mean fumbling at the till point with QR codes and payment apps. As part of its Youth Month dataset, Binance reports that 54% of its user base in Africa is part of the Gen Z demographic. This checks out – Africa has a young population – but at the same time it seems a little low, especially when considering that the platform's growth rate in that age group since January 2023 is 107.6% globally. The exchange also crossed the 275 million user threshold last month, with 9.1 million of those using Binance Pay identified in the youth segment, which is defined as being born between 1997 and 2012. The caveat on this data is the many other exchanges and payment options available in the cryptoverse – but none of them, at least in Mzansi, is as elegant as tap-to-pay. What was encouraging is the revelation that 56% of Gen Zers using Binance are low-volume traders, averaging between one and five trades per month. This tracks with the dual identity of crypto I told the Hermanus crowd about – and broke the snoozing senior from her slumber. Because bitcoin has emerged as a viable store of value. Dabbling with trying to make a quick buck trading crypto is this generation's version of playing the stock market. Although the marketing rhetoric will have you believe that the narcoleptic tannie sitting two rows from the stage has nothing in common with tech-savvy Gen Z, they both have similar money motivations. They're also equally dismissive of crypto for day-to-day transactions because it isn't as convenient as the options already available. But they are also both beginning to see the benefit of savvy investing. DM This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
Daily Maverick
04-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
Crypto, AI, plastics and dry taps — Daily Maverick's May round-up of #LiveJournalism
At Daily Maverick, our events and webinar department links public service journalism with audience engagement. We host webinars to deepen community connections, enhance understanding of key issues and bring stories to life through interactive experiences. We hosted six webinars in May, all of which can be found on our dedicated webinar platform or YouTube. Here's a peek of our latest live journalism webinars, the topics covered and key takeaways, just for you. To Crypto or Not To Crypto: A personal finance perspective We started this month with a Money Cents personal finance webinar, led by Neesa Moodley, editor of the Money Cents newsletter and Business Maverick. She was joined by her colleague, Lindsey Schutters, a Business Maverick journalist and editor of the Crypto Corner newsletter, to figure out how cryptocurrency fits into your personal investment portfolio. A cloud of scepticism around digital currency and Bitcoin was dissipated by Schutters's sobering sentiment that as cryptocurrency becomes more mainstream, it needs to be taken more seriously. An audience member said the webinar was 'very insightful and addressed various important questions'. Watch the recording here Dumpster Dive: Where is our recycling going? As South Africa grapples with mounting waste and a struggling recycling system, tough questions are being asked about what really happens to the materials we toss in the bin. We followed Our Burning Planet journalist Kristin Engel in conversation with the founder and co-director of Waste-ED, Candice Mostert, and the acting CEO of the Waste Management Bureau in the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Masopha Moshoeshoe. The audience learnt that only a small portion of the country's waste is actually recycled once it leaves the blue bin. One attendee said: ' The reality is that plastic is the number-one profit-making product of the fossil fuel industry. They're on record to double plastic production by 2040. Single-use won't end without bans.' Watch recording here Practical AI: Tools Worth Your Time (and how to use them) Sarah Hoek, Daily Maverick's audience development and community manager, sat down with Jeremy Caplan, director of teaching and learning at City University of New York and Wonder Tools newsletter editor, to explain how to make artificial intelligence work for you. The overarching message: AI is changing the world as we know it, just as the internet, social media and smartphones changed our approach to life. So, according to Jeremy, you might as well know how to use it, and use it well. One viewer said it was ' an hour well spent – will take up the challenge i.e. try something new each week'. Another said: 'For a person who has not wanted to give AI airtime, especially in my work as a lawyer, I'm convinced that it is not bad after all. Let me go check these out. Thank you.' Watch the recording here Decrypting Crypto: The building blocks of digital assets In a follow-up to the crypto personal finance webinar, Lindsey and the webinar team kicked off his three-part webinar series, Decrypting Crypto, featuring Christo de Wit, country manager at Luno, and Diketso Mashigo, head of the Financial Sector Conduct Authority's licensing department. The big takeaway: research the product, know what you're buying into and understand the risks. 'Thank you to the presenters and Daily Maverick. A very necessary discussion, particularly for novice investors,' said one attendee. Watch the recording here Holding out for H₂O: Examining water loss in SA cities Across South Africa's cities communities are waking up to either a trickle from their taps – or no water at all – while treated water spills down streets from leaking pipes. In this webinar, Our Burning Planet journalist Julia Evans had a chat with Dr Ferrial Adam, executive director of WaterCAN, and Professor Mike Muller, former director-general of Department of Water Affairs and adjunct professor at the Wits School of Governance. They explained and reaffirmed much of what South Africans have come to realise on their own: that the country's water problems are complex and multifaceted. Moreover, it's not enough for civil society to keep playing watchdog – a concerted effort on infrastructure repair, municipal debt and reinvestment is necessary. Audience input: 'Besides supply of adequate quantities of water to all, the other discussion is management of quality of supply and sewage plant effluent.' 'Private sector generally struggles to manage provision of water to indigent users. Free water provision and the reticulation network to get to poorer residents is financially challenging.' 'Thank you for this even-handed and informative discussion. I have a much better insight on where the problems are.' Watch the recording here Single-use shake-up: Rethinking plastics and policy in South Africa Following the recycling webinar we noticed an appetite for a conversation focused solely on plastics. And, with the Global Plastics Treaty's goal to end plastic pollution by 2040, South Africa's position in the global initiative may be worth considering. Kristin Engel, joined by Dharmesh Shah, a senior campaigner of the treaty at the Center for International Environmental Law, alongside Johann Conradie, co-founder of Myplas and vice-chair of the South African Plastics Recycling Organisation, the implications of the treaty for big plastic producers in South Africa are arguably profound. The overall view from the audience? Extended producer responsibility regulations, which require plastic producers to reduce plastic packaging waste and fund recycling efforts, are essential and long overdue. 'I am Buyback Centre in Durban where I educated households to bring all their household products to us to buy as they were dumped into rivers. We need tough laws from government to charge all companies.' 'My entry is that government must enforce laws that make the manufacturer of plastic pay a green levy.'
