Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for the 19th episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa.
This week Zuks makes the case, from his own reporting and personal experience in the Eastern Cape, that the FF+, long seen as an exclusively white party, is quietly winning support across racial lines. Minister Pieter Groenewald’s prison bakery fix becomes the episode’s clearest example of efficiency beating ideology, and Patrick brings an outsider’s eye to why rural and urban South Africans are experiencing the same parties so differently.
From there, Julius Malema’s public attack on MacG’s Podcast and Chill becomes a window into something bigger: whether podcasts are depoliticising young South Africans or simply giving them somewhere else to go. Patrick then walks through the real story behind this week’s chaos in Ceuta: how a staged political moment obscured the fact that migrant crossings into Europe are actually down this year, not up.
The episode closes on Jacob Zuma stripping disgraced judge John Hlophe of the post of first deputy president of the MK Party and handing it to his own son, Duduzane, a move both hosts read as the clearest sign yet of where the party is really headed.
