Listen here.Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube — DA insider, former party spokesperson and one of the organisation's most recognisable faces — gives BizNews a candid read on a turbulent week. She pushes back on Dr Frans Cronje's assessment that education is in a mess, making the case that systemic reform cannot be judged in two years. On the Steenhuisen fallout, she is careful but clear: the DA must stop looking inward and turn its full attention to voters, and to winning Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay decisively in November. Her bottom line: 2029 is the DA's to win or lose. Also today: Dr Anthea Jeffrey warns SA is about to repeat Europe's net-zero mistakes; a Russian fertiliser oligarch sounds the alarm on Putin; and Nvidia's trillion-dollar drop looks like an entry point, not a red flag..Read the full transcript below.Alec Hogg: Welcome to the BizNews Edge. It's Thursday the ninth of July. I'm Alec Hogg.On today's show: DA insider, former party spokesperson and now Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube on the fallout from John Steenhuisen's explosive News24 interview, on whether DA ministers have actually delivered, and why she says 2029 is the DA's to win or lose. What an interview. But first, three stories you need to know today.DR ANTHEA JEFFREY: DON'T REPEAT EUROPE'S NET-ZERO MISTAKEDr Anthea Jeffrey, whose argument is published on biznews.com, warns that South Africa is about to repeat Europe's costliest mistake. Dr Jeffrey is the head of research at the Institute for Race Relations. She sees it clearly and tells it as it is.The DA's new environment minister, David Manie — remember, he's taken over this role following the reshuffle that saw Steenhuisen demoted and Philly O'Camp move into agriculture, opening the way for Manie, who did a solid job running the Western Cape Education Department — has a hot potato on his desk. Draft climate change regulations that include mandatory carbon budgets, heavy fines, and even jail time for directors of companies that fail to comply. Eskom is squarely in the crosshairs here, along with its coal-fired fleet — which the parastatal has only recently said it wants to keep running for considerably longer than many anticipated. If this legislation goes through, Eskom could be facing enormous penalties.What Dr Jeffrey explains in her article — and it's not the first time this argument has been made; I was bombarded with this evidence when I attended the ARC conference in London last year — is to simply look at where the road to net zero actually leads. Germany has lost 300,000 industrial jobs chasing it since 2019 alone. Another 150,000 jobs are expected to go this year. Four in ten German manufacturers are today considering leaving the country because they cannot operate under the rules politicians have imposed. In the United Kingdom, business electricity prices are up over two-thirds since 2019. Oil refineries have collapsed from eighteen to just four. Chemical output is down forty-five percent.And all of this from parts of the world that are a fraction of global carbon emissions — compared with China, whose carbon emissions are going up. So what is it all about? And why is South Africa — a speck on the global carbon emissions table — choosing to hurt itself in this way? It looks like self-harm. Dr Jeffrey's full report is on BizNews.THE RUSSIAN FERTILISER KING AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR SA FARMERSThe second story comes from The Economist — their lead editorial today, also republished on biznews.com. It's about a man called Andrey Melnichenko. You may not have heard of him, but he's the largest industrialist in Russia and widely known as the world's fertiliser king. That matters here. Melnichenko's companies are among South Africa's largest fertiliser suppliers, which means our farmers' input costs are effectively held hostage to decisions made in Moscow.The Economist spoke to Melnichenko — a Putin-aligned insider — across some sixty hours of interviews before publishing a story that is rocking the Kremlin today. He warns that a code of silence within Russia is steering the country towards one of three bleak futures: anarchic collapse, domination by China, or North Korean-style isolation. None of which appeal to him, and none of which would appeal to anyone seeking economic growth.There's a historical echo for us here. South African business leaders made exactly the same case to the National Party in the late apartheid years. That time, the National Party eventually listened, because it could see that instability would gut the economy. In 1985, after P.W. Botha's infamous speech in Durban — subsequently called the Rubicon speech because he spoke of crossing the Rubicon and then did anything but — the Rubicon reference having been removed from the original text in a last-minute change — the world's response was swift and brutal. International creditors froze South Africa's debt and demanded immediate repayment. Those who were around will remember twenty-five percent interest rates as capital dried up.The point: when the people who profit most from the status quo — Russia's oligarchs — start sounding an alarm, that is a signal worth taking seriously. And it complicates Pretoria's bet that Russia is a stable BRICS partner. Farmers should watch this story very closely.NVIDIA: ENTRY POINT, NOT RED FLAGThe third story today is a value investing observation. Nvidia, which has shed roughly a trillion dollars in market capitalisation since May, has now reached a point where its shares are better value than the average of the other 499 companies on the S&P 500. Yet Nvidia's profits keep climbing and its share of the server AI chip market remains above ninety percent. The shares are cheaper than the Nasdaq average and cheaper than the S&P 500 average.This is not a company in trouble. This is a rotation — desk traders chasing memory chip makers like Micron rather than staying with Nvidia. Analysts still overwhelmingly rate Nvidia a buy, with price targets implying over fifty percent upside. When sentiment, not earnings, drives a share price down, that is not the moment to look away and certainly not to sell. That is the moment to take a much closer look. Nvidia is one we will be watching carefully in the BizNews portfolio, which is reviewed on the last Tuesday of every month.LEAD-IN TO INTERVIEWAnd now to today's main event. Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube has been at the heart of the DA for many years — she joined the party at nineteen. That's half her life spent in the organisation. She was its national spokesperson, its public face. And this week she's fielding pointed criticism, particularly after yesterday's BizNews Edge interview with Dr Frans Cronje, who said that education is one of the DA's portfolios that is, in his words, in a mess — and that he struggled to name a DA minister who has truly shone in government.I put that and other questions to Minister Gwarube. The full interview — running to over half an hour — is on the Director's Cut. But here we begin with her answer to a question about xenophobia and how it affects the children of undocumented foreigners attending South African schools.INTERVIEW: MINISTER SIVIWE GWARUBEAlec Hogg: South Africans, in my view, are not intrinsically xenophobic — they're frustrated. It takes hours to get into a clinic. It's hard to get children into school. Jobs are scarce. Nearly seven out of ten young South Africans are unemployed. The frustration often comes from the sense that someone who arrived from another country seems to be making it when you can't. Is that your read?Minister Siviwe Gwarube: That is often what we have to deal with, and it's what I often explain to people. Section 29 of the Constitution is unequivocal: every single child has a right to education. Not every South African child — every child. And this was affirmed by a High Court judgment in 2019, which noted that many South African children themselves are undocumented. If you start making documentation the criterion, you risk discriminating against children who had no say in whether they were documented or not. We have many children raised by grandmothers, by relatives, whose parents walked out — and they are not documented.One of the things we've been examining is just how many South African children are undocumented. That's partly why we want to bring Home Affairs closer to our processes, and why the inter-ministerial committee on Early Childhood Development is important — so we can begin documenting children at the ECD level itself. These are complicated issues. But I think we must always be guided by the principles of humanity and by our commitment to the Constitution. If we do that, we will fare well. And all of us as elected leaders — local, provincial, national — have to pull our weight. When one sphere of government fails, it has a ripple effect on everyone else. I come from the Eastern Cape, and I have seen the profound failure of local government there firsthand. Buffalo City is a shadow of its former self. No young person would choose to live there. We all have to play our part.Alec Hogg: I spoke to Dr Frans Cronje yesterday and I need to give you the opportunity to respond. He started by saying agriculture was a mess under Steenhuisen, then said DA ministers haven't really shone in government — and then specifically mentioned education. How do you respond to that?Minister Siviwe Gwarube: People are at liberty to criticise — as much as they wish. But one of the things I think the party has learned, and perhaps something Frans could consider, is that we have always understood that education is an investment. I am not in the business of cutting ribbons. If your measure of success is how many ribbon-cuttings you attend, how many schools you hand over, then there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the national minister's role is and what she is responsible for. Changing a system at this scale takes time. It's going to take time for us to see children thriving by the age of five. It's going to take time to bring down that number — eight out of ten children who cannot read for meaning by Grade Four. Those are the things I'm obsessing about.I'm less concerned about opening a school somewhere, and more concerned about whether the curriculum branch is asking the right questions: what does the rest of the world tell us about teaching foundation-phase mathematics? Are we doing it right?And let's be clear about scale. This department is responsible for 13.7 million children. If anything goes wrong with any one of them, you answer for it. Twenty-four thousand schools. Half a million teachers. Substantial delegated and concurrent powers that limit direct control. At the end of the day, an investment is just that — you invest now for a future outcome. I would say to Frans: it would be deeply unfair to call it a mess two years in. Judge my performance when we leave. Judge whether the reorientation of the basic education sector — the inversion of the pyramid, the focus on the early years — was what was needed. I think when he looks through that lens, he may come to agree.Alec Hogg: How has the Steenhuisen interview landed inside the DA? You were the party's spokesperson for years. You are the face of the organisation. If anyone knows the internal temperature, it's you.Minister Siviwe Gwarube: Every political party goes through ebbs and flows, differences of opinion. Part of the reason I put my hand up to run for a leadership position — I stood as deputy chairperson in April — is because I never wanted to outsource the future of the DA to other people. I wanted to be part of the team that grows this organisation. I've been a member since I was nineteen. I want to be part of the solution.And the message I want to give the party is this: we need to be far less inwardly focused. We need to talk to voters. We need to show them what we are trying to do and what we have managed to do where we have been in government. Navel-gazing is not a strategy. We need to be future-focused — so that we can win those critical votes and become the biggest party in 2029.Alec Hogg: You're right at the centre of the DA. Given the fallout from the interview — the speculation about the election impact, the questions about why Steenhuisen remains as deputy minister — what is your honest read?Minister Siviwe Gwarube: I think it was important for John to be able to set the record straight about his performance as Minister of Agriculture and his handling of the foot and mouth disease crisis. It would have been deeply unfair to deny him that opportunity. Any person who has put in two years of work deserves the right to reflect on what they did.But I want to be clear: I am not in a position to weigh in on the specific allegations that came out of that interview. I have had no interactions with the individuals or the company mentioned, and I am not privy to those matters. What I will say is that as a party, we must now shift our gaze firmly to November and to how we enthuse voters who have never voted for the DA before.One of the key things, in my view, is that we cannot be a party of competence alone. We also have to be a party of compassion. We need people to say: I see myself reflected in this organisation. These are people who understand my reality. As the most diverse political party in South Africa, we can do that. And that is why I say 2029 is ours to win or lose. We can become the biggest party. But we need to be outward-facing and voter-focused, not consumed by internal battles.Alec Hogg: It sounds rather like what Maria Ramos once said — don't waste a good crisis. Is that, reading between the lines, what you're telling the DA right now?Minister Siviwe Gwarube: There is plenty to learn from the last two years since the election. We've also learned something quite remarkable — how to run a coalition government that nobody wants to call a coalition government, and how to do that alongside an organisation that is still going through five stages of grief. Some days there's acceptance; other days there's denial. There are plenty of lessons. And that is exactly why I believe we have a unique opportunity to be the biggest party in 2029. But it means performing well, winning Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay — and winning them decisively, not as we did in 2016. And coalescing with people who share our values so that we can govern for a full term and have a lasting impact.Nine mayors in eleven years in Johannesburg has been catastrophic for the city. We have to win these metros and demonstrate what we are capable of — particularly to poor black South Africans, so that they can start choosing the DA. We have seen what we can do in Emfuleni. I believe we can replicate that across the country.EDGE CLOSE — ALEC HOGGThe full interview is well worth your time. I particularly liked Minister Gwarube's reference to the idea that wise men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. That is where she says she is focusing her attention — on the very youngest learners, the under-tens. It is an area, her critics will admit, where she has had genuine success. The investment being made in early childhood education, she says, will be there for keeps — even if she is no longer running the portfolio or in government at all when the returns come through. That is her most satisfying work: reform as a slow-burn investment. And as a party insider, she tells us the DA's current turmoil could yet be its making — if it has the discipline to stop looking inward.So what does today's show mean for you?Watch those draft carbon regulations. If Pretoria pushes ahead regardless, energy-intensive sectors — Eskom, Sasol — are going to carry very heavy regulatory risk. It would mean that once again ideology is trumping practical economic thinking at exactly the wrong moment. Dr Anthea Jeffrey argues that the DA minister holding that environment portfolio cannot afford another self-defeating exercise like the one his cabinet colleague John Steenhuisen managed in agriculture.Watch Russia's stability as closely as the weather, if you're a farmer — because nobody knows what will happen to fertiliser output if the oligarch who has now spoken out, the largest industrialist in Russia, is punished for doing so.And treat Nvidia's trillion-dollar decline in market value as a possible entry point, not a red flag. If the analysts covering the company are right — and they are overwhelmingly bullish — you may look back on this moment as a very good day to have paid attention.That's the BizNews Edge for today. For more, head over to biznews.com. I'm Alec Hogg. Until Monday — cheerio.