Listen here.Thirteen votes vanish, a city manager gets his job back, and Tshwane's bondholders are left wondering what happens to every tender signed while he was out. Kallie Kriel tells Chris Steyn that AfriForum is coming for Julius Malema again, and this time the government's in the crosshairs too. Then Ivor Ichikowitz, the famously private founder of Paramount, breaks his silence on the defence empire he built out of South Africa, and on a fresh survey showing Africa's youth quietly picking sides between Washington and Beijing. Plus: Nedbank's numbers hide a bigger story, the JSE reports on itself, Old Mutual's frozen Zimbabwe shares get a lifeline, and Palantir hands Wall Street another reason to pay attention..Episode breakdown.Alec Hogg [00:05] Hello and welcome, I'm Alec Hogg, this is your BizNews Edge.Alec Hogg [00:12] Today is Tuesday, the 4th of August, and a big day for us here at BizNews. It's our 13th anniversary of the very first day that what was then BizNews.biz made its first appearance. We knew we wanted to be called BizNews.com one day when we grew up. Well, it took us about a year before the URL became available from Russian owners. We purchased that for an independent fortune.Alec Hogg [00:42] But today, well, as with any good brand, it certainly has stood us in good stead. So welcome to our big day. And on the Edge today, well, we're going to be talking here about issues that go from institutions versus improvisation. We've got a vote in Tshwane that was rigged, that has been overturned by the court. We have an interview with Kallie Kriel,Alec Hogg [01:11] who's the chief executive of AfriForum, with my colleague Chris Steyn. And then another interview to close out our show today with Ivor Ichikowitz. He is the founder of a group called Paramount, which is one of the largest defence organisations in the world. It's based right here in South Africa. There's a defence industry. They make many vehicles, aircraft,Alec Hogg [01:40] do a lot of high-tech stuff. It is a private company, so the information is not that available. And that has brought out quite a lot of suspicion amongst certain of the, shall we say, left-wing media groups. But Ichikowitz made quite a compelling argument to me today on why what he's doing is for the right reasons. And you can watch that full interview on BizNews.Alec Hogg [02:07] On top of that, we've got a couple of clips for you on the survey that the Paramount Group sponsors every year — its foundation does, rather than the group itself. And that is surveying youth in Africa, nearly 5,000 young people who are interviewed in a one-hour face-to-face discussion. It really does give you an understanding of how the young people in Africa think,Alec Hogg [02:36] and it was on the basis of that report, which has just been released, that Ivor gave us the interview today. It turned out to be quite a surprise, but we'll give you a couple of clips on that as we go forward. Let's start off first, though, with that story about Tshwane. Now, the reason why this is relevant for a business show, and to give you the edge, is that there was a release, a report,Alec Hogg [03:02] on SENS, the Stock Exchange News Service, this morning, which says it's official. Of course, the politicians from the Democratic Alliance, because they've had a great victory, have been all over social media proclaiming their win here. But the notes that came onto SENS, and indeed the court decision, do show a very nasty side to the ActionSA-Alec Hogg [03:29] ANC alliance. Try to get hold of Mettler. They believe, or they will tell you, that it's for reasons that he's not doing a good job. The Democratic Alliance, on the other hand, say that he is. And the court said that doesn't really matter. What matters here was how they got rid of him. And in this instance, the speaker at the Tshwane Metro deducted 13 votes from the vote.Alec Hogg [03:58] And those 13 votes, which were in favour of Mettler staying, were deducted because the people, the councillors, were on leave. Clearly what has happened here was that the ANC-ActionSA alliance saw an opportunity while those councillors were away. They called a vote. The councillors came back from leave and voted to block it. But the speaker said, no, you're on leave, you can't actually give us your vote. So sorry, Mettler, you're out.Alec Hogg [04:27] And they even appointed a Dr Musa Khumalo — not the football player — to come in and take over. Well, the Democratic Alliance went to the High Court. And as the statement on SENS today says, and this is to those who've lent money to the City of Tshwane, that's been reversed. We had to tell you it is price-sensitive discussion and information. We had to explain this to you because you own bonds which tradeAlec Hogg [04:57] clearly on information within the Tshwane council, and he has been reinstated. The problem that could be arising here now for those who are doing business with the City of Tshwane is what they call in law the fruit of a poisonous tree. So tenders that had been awarded during the absence of Mettler are now going to be null and void. That could be quite embarrassing for a number of people.Alec Hogg [05:31] Onto the breaking news from the interview this morning between my colleague Chris Steyn and Kallie Kriel, who is the chief executive of AfriForum, which has been under quite a lot of pressure lately from, well, one of the news outlets anyway here in South Africa, who believe that they are wasting the money that has been provided to them by those who support them. Well,Alec Hogg [05:58] Kallie Kriel came up with a headline that nobody else has yet. And that is that AfriForum will be taking on Julius Malema. They got a court victory against Malema some years ago, when the court then ruled, with costs, that Malema was not allowed to go around telling people thatAlec Hogg [06:23] expropriation without compensation was something that was allowed. And as a consequence of that, he is now in breach of the court finding with the most recent utterances that he's made on that statement. Certainly, that's what Kallie Kriel says. And as a consequence, they have now opened a new contempt of court case against Malema, who must be pretty irritated with the amount of money that he's having to spend on losing all of these cases. Be interesting to seeAlec Hogg [06:53] who he ropes in as his counsel. They're also going to be attacking the South African government on the basis of expropriation. But I don't want to steal Chris's thunder. Go onto BizNews, go and have a look at that story. It is up now either on BizNews TV or on biznews.com, and you can pick up some very, very interesting discussions between her and Kallie Kriel.Alec Hogg [07:23] Well, from the court's undoing decisions to a market that's reopening one — if you've held Old Mutual shares in Zimbabwe any time in the last six years, your money's essentially been frozen, literally untraceable. Well, that changes next week. And the good news there is that the government of Zimbabwe decided that Old Mutual share trading was manipulating its currency, and did this six years ago.Alec Hogg [07:53] And as a consequence, it actually prevented anybody from trading in those shares. Well, the private sector has always got a way of finding its route around these crazy decisions that the politicians bring in. And on the 12th of August, trading starts on the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange — the VFEX, not the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange. That's where the listing has been shifted to. And as a consequence, Zimbabweans who own the sharesAlec Hogg [08:22] will be allowed to trade. Another indication that, as try as you might — and my goodness, the Zimbabwean government certainly has done so — there will always be a way around it for sane and logical options. And here is one. Close one exchange, well, someone will start another one.Alec Hogg [08:53] Right. Well, after a market reopening to a market that's clearly wide open for business, let's talk money and investment news, starting with South Africa's most improved bank. Nedbank released interim results this morning. And if you want one number to remember from those figures, forget the headline number: headline earnings per share were virtually unchanged. That's a decoy. It looks almost flat. It isn't. Nedbank had aAlec Hogg [09:23] particularly good year, a good six-month period. Its bottom line is up 12% on a year ago when you strip out the impact of a deal that was done with ETI, with a sale there of the West African operation. Remember, it's now bought into East Africa with NCBA, a push into that side of the continent which investors are really enjoying. The share price was up today by four and a half percent.Alec Hogg [09:53] Nedbank is looking pretty solid at the moment. You can, well, if you're an investor there, you can be pretty comfortable holding on to your stock. And then onto the JSE itself. Here's one that you don't usually hear from directly, because it's normally just the address where everybody else's news happens. But JSE Limited is listed on its own stock market, and it's just posted its own numbers.Alec Hogg [10:23] And they are strong. Headline earnings per share again for the six months to the end of June, just like Nedbank, were up here by nearly 19%. Net profit after tax nearly 17% higher. They are, however, starting something which knocked back the figures a little bit. They've got a process called Forge 2031 [see editorial flag 1], and that's something the new chief executive, Valdene Reddy, is driving.Alec Hogg [10:52] She has been handing back money to shareholders in the past six months. There were 175 million rand [see editorial flag 2] worth of share buybacks that the JSE has concluded. The stock exchange's own share price is pretty solid at the moment, and it is trading now at a significantly higher price than it was yesterday.Alec Hogg [11:22] Well, significant doesn't even start to describe the performance of Palantir, as we move from our own stock exchange to the biggest and most ideological earnings story on Wall Street so far this week. Palantir's chief executive, Karp, didn't just beat estimates — he used his letter to shareholders to declare a war of ideas, as he tends to do. And this one's personal for a lot of you.Alec Hogg [11:49] Palantir sits in our BizNews Ricardo US dollar portfolio. It's going to jump another 16% when Wall Street's trading opens this evening, our time. And the reason for that is that the figures so impressed the pre-market in the United States that the share price is up by more than 16%, after a 2% gain yesterday. This is a company that continues to excite.Alec Hogg [12:18] It's in a whole new area. It is different to pretty much anybody else in the software field, because it's embedded with its clients, and the second-quarter profit got to a record $1.1 billion [see editorial flag 4]. Now, it's a record, not surprisingly, because Palantir only started breaking into profit relatively recently. It's been at it for well over a decade, and the building process is now over. It's now in theAlec Hogg [12:47] harvesting process. Its profit margins there are 86%. So you can see that the hard work that was done in the past is now certainly paying off. Its US commercial business — and this was the area that investors were worried about, because they're quite happy that Palantir is doing well in the government area. It's almost like the governments of, especially the US government and different parts of the US government, have liked what Palantir is offering,Alec Hogg [13:15] by breaking down the silos between the information that is available and using artificial intelligence to make that palatable. Well, the commercial side of Palantir's business is up 149% in the quarter under review. The share price's market cap is now over $300 billion, but you get a feeling it isn't going to stop there.Alec Hogg [13:49] Well, every story today has really been about institutions and who controls them. So it's fitting to close with a man who spent 35 years fighting for a different type of sovereignty — defence industrial sovereignty for Africa. What does that mean? That means: why should Africa have to buy its defence products from other countries and other operators around the world? Why shouldn't it be producing its own? And he's just publishedAlec Hogg [14:20] the biggest survey on young Africans, and what young Africans think, and who they believe we should be trusting to run their world. Ivor Ichikowitz is the founder of the Paramount Group. He says, in the interview that we had — it's a rare interview with this man, clearly, because he's in the defence business — he hasn't really... well, as I mentioned to him after theAlec Hogg [14:50] interview, you aren't exactly a media hound. He doesn't really go out there and bang his own drum. But clearly he now feels that he's got something to say. And the Africa Youth Survey, which surveys nearly 5,000 young Africans across 16 countries, with interviews of an hour each [see editorial flag 9] — it does have something to say. And let'sAlec Hogg [15:19] kick off with, well, why China is winning the argument for Africa's youth that America used to own.Ivor Ichikowitz [15:24] What we find is that when we started the survey, there's no question the United States was perceived to be Africa's most important partner. It was also perceived to be Africa's most influential partner. And it was perceived to beIvor Ichikowitz [15:45] the ideologically driven partner that most African youth wanted to pin their flags to. However, as things evolved, post-COVID, that changed exponentially. Because during the COVID experience, the United States was nowhere to be seen in Africa. But what was left on the continent were the telecommunications infrastructure that the Chinese had invested in and built, the dams that China had invested in and built,Ivor Ichikowitz [16:15] the stadiums China had invested in and built, the roads that China had invested in and built, and frankly, even the jobs that China had invested in by building mines and industrial activities. And I think that in that vacuum, the evidence of China's tangible, really measurable activity in Africa became very real to most young Africans, and then it was no longerIvor Ichikowitz [16:43] about ideology, it was no longer about perception, it was about lived reality. And I think that's the reason why China today is respected as much as it is. Young Africans are no longer — what the survey is telling us is that young Africans are no longer interested in ideology. They're no longer interested in backing a political system. They want partners that are going toIvor Ichikowitz [17:12] partner with them as equals, that are going to respect them, and that are going to invest in creating high-value jobs and taking the continent to the next level. Now the United States is falling behind fast, because young Africans are sick and tired of being lectured to.Alec Hogg [17:22] And another cut that really hit my sweet spot is Ichikowitz on the industry that he actuallyAlec Hogg [17:41] built, and the national asset, he says, South Africa doesn't even know it has.Ivor Ichikowitz [17:46] You know, there's no country in the world that has gone from a developing economy to a developed economy without a strong defence industry. The innovations that we have been able to maintain and develop in South Africa through the defence industry are unbelievable. My biggest sadness is that South Africans, and the South African government, don't understandIvor Ichikowitz [18:08] the national asset that we sit with here. Today, Paramount is sadly the last man standing. It was inevitable that the state-owned defence industry, despite passionate, very capable people that were in it, has been denuded to virtually nothing. And that, for me, is an absolute tragedy. At a time when the rest of the world is hankering after defence industrial sovereignty, we have it.Ivor Ichikowitz [18:35] We have the ability to build an aircraft from scratch and put it into the international market. I mean, one of the very few — probably five in the last 50 years — military aircraft that have been developed in private hands and gone from concept all the way into commercial production in the world has happened here in South Africa, and sits within the Paramount Group. We are the world's leaders in landmine-protectedIvor Ichikowitz [19:01] armoured vehicles, still today, in the world, with more than 4,000 units in active service in the world. And South Africans don't even realise this. And I'm afraid part of the reason that we talk about Afro-optimism, part of the reason that we talk about whether the youth in Africa are optimistic or pessimistic, is because that perception is what drives reality in this country. Because South Africans tend to be so pessimistic about what's going on around them, they don't engage with these things.Ivor Ichikowitz [19:31] You know, although today I'm no longer active in the defence business from an operational point of view, I'm still very, very much a proud founder of Paramount, which is today a global business. South Africa and our footprint in South Africa represents a very, very small part of our global business. And I'm very proud of what we've managed to achieve as Africans in the defence industry, which is such an incredibly complex and competitive industry around the world.Alec Hogg [20:04] I'm reminded of what Herbert Spencer said, and I can't quote it directly, but to give you an understanding — he said, when you make up your mind about something before investigating it, you are guaranteed to keep yourself in a state of perpetual ignorance [see editorial flag 7]. I suggest that you don't make up your mind about Ivor Ichikowitz until you go and watch that interview, that discussion that I had with him. I did say to him,Alec Hogg [20:34] admittedly, that it wasn't a gotcha interview. I didn't take the work that has been done by investigative journalists at amaBhungane, or the allegations that have been made by many of the media organisations in South Africa which have landed them up in court because he is litigious. I didn't take that information and gotcha him on that. That wasn't the interview's purpose. It was to find out: what is this Paramount Group about? What is he about? And indeed, what's his story?Alec Hogg [21:04] And the survey that came out as well does give us some useful insights. Well, all of that worked out, I thought, in quite an interesting conclusion. And I do suggest that you go along and watch it. Well, that has been your Edge for today. Thank you for spending part of your morning with us. Don't forget to pick up those full interviews with Ichikowitz and Kallie Kriel, and everything else that's moving markets today.Alec Hogg [21:33] Head across to biznews.com. Until tomorrow. Cheerio.