The Editor's Desk - Mon 26 Jan 2026: Lessons from the Kaiser and the End of an Era for Barlows

Today, I’m looking at a fascinating parallel between Kaiser Wilhelm and Donald Trump, and reflecting on the final disappearance of the industrial colossus, Barlows. With gold breaching $5,000, it’s a sobering moment to consider what happens when entrepreneurial spirit is traded for "professional" management..PS. You can book tickets for the post BNC#8 golf day sponsored by Shyft, by clicking here..Don't miss out on future episodes of The Editor's Desk. Subscribe to BizNews Premium and get the podcast delivered to your inbox daily..Listen here.Read the full transcript of The Editor's Desk podcast below.Hello and welcome. I’m Alec Hogg. You’ve seen the headlines on BizNews.com, watched and listened to the interviews on business TV and news radio. So now let’s talk about what the latest developments mean for your money. This is the Editor’s Desk exclusive analysis for Business Premium members. And today is Monday the 26th of January, 2026. I’m glad to have you with me.We’ve got a quite brilliant piece on BizNews today written by Max Hastings, the historian. He is one of the guys inside the Bloomberg Opinion camp. And whenever he writes, I love to grab his pieces and share them with our community. Today’s one was just superb. He spoke about a note that was sent to him by a fellow historian who said, "Don’t you think that there are similarities between Kaiser Wilhelm, who was the German leader who caused World War I, and Donald Trump?".I was thinking for a moment that it might be Barbara Tuchman who wrote that brilliant book, The Guns of August. But Barbara passed away, of course, in 1989. So it’s someone else of Max Hastings’ acquaintance. But still, the point is a very good one. And Hastings, in the piece that we have on BizNews, applies his mind to that and opens his piece with something that’s really worth just reading to you.An admiral writes of a world leader who is familiar to us : "He is vanity itself, sacrificing everything to his own moods and childish amusements. And nobody checks him in doing so. I ask myself how people with blood, rather than water in their veins, can bear to be about him". Well, that was—we hear from Hastings—words that were written in July 1914 by Germany’s Albert Hofmann about his king, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Reading The Guns of August, Tuchman’s masterful documentary of insight—non-fiction on the way that the First World War started —you get to understand that Kaiser Wilhelm was quite an odious character, and quite a lot to do with the way that he conducted himself was almost like a spoiled child. He had very few people who were holding him back and also had some rather strange friends.He got rid of the people who would question him, including the great Otto von Bismarck, who was fired by Kaiser Wilhelm in 1890. He then surrounded himself with sycophants, like in 1908, when the head of his military secretariat died of a heart attack at a Black Forest shooting lodge. This, Hastings tells us, occurred "while performing a ballet dressed in a tutu before a male audience that included Wilhelm".Ouch. And we know about Jeffrey Epstein and all the stories that go around there. It’s an interesting time. Donald Trump has his fans, and he certainly also has historians who are having a look at it and saying, "But hang on a minute". The guy stood up in Davos and delivered what Hastings says was an extraordinary performance littered with falsehoods, insults, and explosions of grandiloquence. Quote: "closely resembling one of the Kaiser’s public performances as he rattled his sabre in the years before playing a major role in precipitating World War I".Trump’s rants, writes Hastings, about how fast the Nazis overran Denmark in 1940 and how NATO allies allegedly avoided the front line in Afghanistan, where Britain lost 457 dead. Compared with the Kaiser’s jibes at other nations—the Kaiser constantly abused 'Slavdom' or the Russians; he despised the French as a feminine race, not manly like the Anglo-Saxons or Teutons. Hastings says he doesn’t think that Trump is likely to start a Third World War, but there are so many narcissistic, self-obsessed, and flattery-driven qualities in both him and Germany’s last Kaiser which should give all of us pause.Well, something else that is said when you have a look back at what is past is the demise tomorrow of Barlows. And before we go into this, I remember having quite a sword fight some years ago when criticising what was then known as the Times Media Group for selling their 25% stake in M-Net/MultiChoice. It was a cash cow for the company. They had hundreds of millions in dividends that would stream into the business every year. And in many ways, it kept the companies solvent while they were trying different ideas.Now the problem was the old Times Media wasn’t terribly well run since Stephen Mulholland departed. There was a succession of CEOs who made a number of missteps. But at least they were trying. And with the income that was coming from the M-Net stake—and that, by the way, was gifted to the old Times Media as it was to the old Argus company, to Naspers, and to the old SAAN at the transition to democracy. Sorry, before the transition to democracy, when the National Party government passed on the right to start a private television license in what became M-Net to the four newspaper groups in the anticipation, I guess, that they would go a little easier on the government. Up to that point, there was low-level warfare between the English-speaking media—certainly not the Afrikaans media, which was highly supportive, the forebears of Naspers, highly supportive of the apartheid government.But that’s a story for another day. I remember at the time that the chief executive of Times Media argued vociferously why it was good to unbundle the funds from that 25% of MultiChoice, which then went into Naspers, which then became the major shareholder. In essence, they left the broadcasting field and then doubled down on newspapers. I mean, we know now how well that worked out. But had they remained there, the income that was flowing through to the group would have enabled the group to be in a far better position to deal with the issues that were coming down the line.And you have to wonder if it wasn't similar with Barlows. Barlows was a colossus in South Africa. It was just a huge industrial company. I remember as a young reporter visiting the office of Mike Rosholt, a giant in his day; Warren Clewlow, his successor, also very well trained; and they, of course, sat at the feet of Punch Barlow. I never had the privilege of meeting him, but from all reports, he was a fantastic businessman in South Africa, somebody who worked hard, took risks, and built an incredible business.And I’ll just ask you to stop for a while and think about these companies which were unbundled. They were part of Barlows and unbundled and distributed because the people that Warren Buffett calls "the helpers" and "the super helpers"—the consultants and investment bankers who are looking for something to do all the time to "unlock shareholder value"—convinced the Barlows board. This was at the end of the Punch Barlow era, and certainly Russell and Clewlow became increasingly driven by professional managers who felt this was the right thing to do to make shareholders happy.CG Smith owned the great Tiger and all those wonderful brands that are in Tiger today, and Tiger has done its best to mess up the business. They did a disastrous foray into Nigeria, but they’ve still got those brands, and those brands are still incredibly valuable. Tiger was part of a family business from Rudi Frankel, which was built up there, and that’s how the brands were acquired. And then it went into Barlows. And Illovo Sugar, which is now part of an international sugar group. Then there’s Nampak, which was once a formidable packaging company, the biggest in South Africa, probably in Africa. It also made a number of missteps going into Nigeria.PPC—funny how these companies, after leaving Barlows, seem to not do that well. PPC was almost taken to the brink of extinction. The cement manufacturer, Reunert, which has done... okay. They were all subsidiaries of Barlows. The great Rand Mines, which was a gold operation. Harmony was part of Rand Mines—gold and coal. Harmony continues to this day. And you wonder, if they’d stayed within the Rand Mines group, where they might be today?. Woolworths, Truworths, Spar—they were all part of Barlows. Oceana, a fishing company; Adcock Ingram, a pharmaceutical company; Plascon, a paint company.And the most recent spin-off was Zeda, separately listed. That’s Avis and Budget, the car hire giants in South Africa. There’s got to be something here. When you have a look at these businesses, you wonder if that entrepreneurial spirit had been retained. If we lived to a thousand years old and Punch Barlow was still in control, whether he would have allowed what happened to Barlows to occur. But the reality is tomorrow there’s no more Barlows. It’s disappeared. It’s gone forever. It does not exist in South Africa; it does not exist in the world.It’s being acquired by a consortium. All that’s left, really, is the Caterpillar licence for South Africa. And the Caterpillar licence will now be the major asset—the only real asset. And the part-owner is a Saudi family business which has the Caterpillar licence for Saudi Arabia. So they’re getting together with the local management through a management buyout. So it will be sitting with a lot of debt and delisting from the stock market. I wonder if this isn't just a cautionary tale for an executive who’s thinking today—let's say, for a founder of a business—"Maybe we should be selling. Maybe we should let it go. Maybe we should pass it on to professional managers".It’s an interesting world. And we close off with gold cracking through $5,000 an ounce. My word. Can you imagine how the Barlow group, which owned Rand Mines, would be celebrating that today?. Gold is being bought by central bankers—many of them in the Far East, primarily China, but also some of the smaller countries in Southeast Asia and apparently India as well. Indian retail investors have always been a huge driver for gold. Peter Major warns us that the gold price, by every conceivable ratio, is overpriced or at record levels. So you’ve got to know that if you’re buying gold today, you are taking a risk on a very unusual time. And that may be you predicting that things will get even worse.I just want to finish off with the final quote that Max Hastings uses in his story because it has a South African connection. He says: At his Berlin Palace in 1899, Kaiser Wilhelm received the British imperialist tycoon Cecil John Rhodes, a man well known in South Africa, where he made his fortune. He took his final breath as a man in his early 40s. He says, "Now tell me, Rhodes, why is it that I’m not popular in England? What can I do to make myself popular?" Rhodes answered, "Why don’t you try doing nothing, sire?".The Kaiser hesitated, then exploded into heavy laughter. He was incapable of taking such advice, and so, many of us fear, is the US President. But I’m sure there are going to be many Donald Trump supporters who are going to be gritting their teeth and firing off emails. You don't understand—I can tell you one thing: Max Hastings is one of the great historians of our age. So I take what he says pretty seriously. That’s his world. He sees parallels that maybe pass us by. And this is a parallel that has to be worrying.I’m going to leave it there for today. Keep an eye on your premium newsletter for links to our freshest published content. Thanks for trusting us with your time.I’m Alec Hogg, until tomorrow. Cheerio.

The Editor's Desk - Mon 26 Jan 2026: Lessons from the Kaiser and the End of an Era for Barlows

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