Big businesses and government made promises last week about rescuing Johannesburg, but the gap between announcements and action remains wide. There is still no clear project list, no published deadlines and no hard numbers attached to delivery, which means the city’s turnaround is still more promise than plan. Business and government need to sit down, agree on the priorities and turn the talk into a real programme with costs, timelines and accountability.

The rand is said to be at its strongest level since the Iran war began, while Tharisa is accelerating its shift away from Eskom as part of its mining energy transition. In agriculture, South Africa and Zimbabwe have agreed to closer cooperation in farming and agro-processing, even as the sector shed 15,000 jobs in the second quarter and Cape Town port is being readied for deciduous fruit exports.

On the JSE, last week’s main winners were AngloGold Ashanti, up 9.71% to R602.08; Sibanye Stillwater, up 6.89% to R64.58; and Naspers, up 3.83% to R5,033.24. The pattern still favours gold and selected large caps.

Before you go

The National Arts and Culture Awards are in Awards Week, Contra.Joburg is running its visual arts festival under the theme “Different is good,” and the 2026 Content Creator Awards are on the calendar with Mpho Popps hosting and Samsung Galaxy as headline sponsor. In fashion, David Tlale won Outstanding Fashion and Textile Designer at NACA, while adidas Originals has launched the Pharrell “VIRGINIA Adistar Jellyfish” at R6,499 in South Africa.

Food manufacturing remains under pressure, with Premier Foods’ proposed Tulbagh plant closure threatening almost half of South Africa’s fruit canning capacity and the next Section 189 consultation set for 26 August. Meanwhile, SACCI business confidence rose to 125.4 in July, a Madagascar-South Africa Chamber of Commerce is being established, and the Durban Chamber has launched the Durban Shipping Chamber.

For a lighter note, the most whimsically unusual event this week is The Queen’s Court, a bookish wonderland taking place at Très Jolie in Muldersdrift on Saturday, 29 August at 13:00, where book lovers dress in fantasy costumes for an Alice-in-Wonderland-style literary gathering. Tickets are available on Quicket.

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What’s happened to the small guy or gal in computing? I remember going to meet a guy in Hillbrow to buy software from him. This was in the early days of personal computers. He lived in a flat, a high-rise flat, and in those days it was a sought-after place to have a flat. The block of flats was situated to the left of Empire Road, near to the Hillbrow (originally the JG Strijdom Tower in Banket Street). I bought some specialised software from him, and took it home and read the instructions and got it operating, and it was very useful. Alas, that specific program, which was excellent, no longer has anything that resembles it. This got me thinking about what has happened to the small guy or small gal in computing these days.

Over the decades, we’ve seen that, right at the beginning of personal computers, there were many personal computer manufacturers. There were two operating systems, and then Microsoft grabbed one operating system and is still making billions out of it, and has got extremely restrictive about its use. It does updates and offers no support for the old versions. You know the story. The same happened with the internet. There were a lot of browsers and search engines in the early days, and then Google, and I’m not knocking Google, but Google got in and took over. Another giant company formed. Then came cell phones and smartphones, and various app makers were able to sell their apps on platforms like Apple and Android. Now, what’s happening to those smaller business people who come up with very handy and useful products? How is AI faring? You can see that the whole AI game now is around huge investment and big companies getting involved. Will it place the small business person out of reach of the market? Well, we don’t know for sure because things are evolving. But perhaps with AI, the smaller business person will be able to come up with artificial intelligence apps that would be stronger and more niched than what is happening in the big AI world. You also get some guys that are just philanthropic, and that means, like when I came across a transcription app for the desktop or laptop that he made while his hand was hurt, and he couldn’t type. So he came up with this app, which he continues to develop with help from friends, and it’s absolutely free. It’s not as fast as, say, one of the new voice-to-text transcription apps, but it’s pretty accurate, and it’ll do the job for most types of dictation. This is a fantastic story, and there are a lot of other people out there who are making software for free, and all they require is a donation. Where this will all go, we don’t know. But the main thing – it’s always a tragedy when the smaller business person, the guy or gal who wants to get in on the act, and has a love and passion for computing, will be shoved out by the giant corporations.

The Early Days: A Market Full of Tinkerers

That software seller in Hillbrow was not unusual for his time. The personal computer industry began with hobbyists and tiny firms, not giants. In 1975, a small electronics-kit company called MITS launched the Altair 8800, a roughly four-hundred-dollar kit that generated thousands of orders in its first few months. It spawned an entire ecosystem of add-on companies like Cromemco. By 1977, the so-called Trinity of pre-assembled machines arrived – the Apple II, the Tandy TRS-80, and the Commodore PET. They were joined by dozens of others: Atari, Sinclair, Texas Instruments, Acorn, and Japanese players like Hitachi and Sharp. Each used incompatible hardware and software. Operating systems were optional extras. CP/M from Digital Research emerged as an early standard, with more than two hundred and fifty thousand licences sold by 1981 and a large library of compatible software. It was a golden age for the small guy. Anyone with a good idea could build a computer in a garage or write a program in a bedroom and sell it from a flat in Hillbrow.

The Great Squeeze: How Microsoft Locked Down the PC

The fragmentation ended with a single strategic deal. In 1981, IBM needed an operating system for its new PC. Microsoft, then a twenty-five-person language-tools company, acquired the rights to a system called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for a total of seventy-five thousand dollars, adapted it into MS-DOS, and licensed it to computer manufacturers rather than selling it outright. This was the masterstroke. Because Microsoft retained the rights, it could license MS-DOS to the flood of IBM clone manufacturers that followed. By the late nineteen-eighties, MS-DOS ran on over eighty percent of personal computers. Then came Windows 3.0 in 1990, which cemented Microsoft’s dominance. Lotus and WordPerfect failed to transition from DOS quickly enough. Microsoft released Excel and Word for Windows with tight integration into the operating system, including early access to new technologies that competitors did not get. Soon Microsoft dominated applications too. By the nineteen-nineties, it held an eighty-five percent share of the office-suite market. The small hardware and software makers of the seventies were largely gone or marginalised. That excellent program you bought in Hillbrow probably died somewhere in this consolidation, unable to compete with a giant that could afford to give away its own software until the competition vanished.

From Netscape to Google: The Internet Gets Swallowed

The internet opened a new frontier, and for a brief moment the small player was back on top. Netscape Navigator, created by Marc Andreessen’s team, controlled around eighty to ninety percent of the browser market by early 1996. It introduced innovations we still use today, including JavaScript, cookies, frames, and plug-ins. Then Microsoft woke up. Bill Gates issued his famous Internet Tidal Wave memo, and Microsoft began bundling Internet Explorer for free with Windows, pressuring PC makers to hide Netscape. By 2002, Internet Explorer held around ninety-five percent market share. Netscape was effectively dead.

But the browser was only the gateway. The real prize became search. Google, founded in 1998, eventually came to dominate so thoroughly that today it holds roughly ninety-one percent of global search-engine referrals. Research shows most users never actively choose Google. They simply stick with the default. Once again, a layer of technology had consolidated under a single giant.

The Smartphone Reprieve: When the Little Guy Got a Second Chance

Smartphones could have become another walled garden dominated solely by Apple and Google. Instead, they created platform ecosystems that let the small guy back in. The App Store in 2008 and Google Play gave individual developers global distribution overnight. The numbers are staggering. The App Store ecosystem generated $1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in 2022. Small developers in particular thrived. Their earnings grew seventy-one percent between 2020 and 2022, outpacing larger developers. Research found that forty-five percent of developers earning over one million dollars on the App Store in 2021 had either not been on the store or had earned less than ten thousand dollars just five years earlier. Solo founders built apps for panic attacks, Hispanic job seekers, and service professionals, reaching millions of users. The platform layer was concentrated, but the application layer democratised. For a while, the small guy had a real shot again.

AI: The New Battleground

We are now watching the cycle repeat at hyperspeed. At the foundation-model layer, power is concentrating among a handful of American and Chinese giants. In the United States, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta dominate the headlines. In China, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu, and SenseTime are racing to build large language models. Training these models costs hundreds of millions in compute. The small player cannot build a competitor to GPT-5 in a garage. The infrastructure layer – GPUs, cloud compute, base models – is consolidating just as operating systems and search did before it.

Finding the Cracks in the Wall

But history gives a clear answer. You cannot compete at the infrastructure layer, but you can dominate at the application layer. The most saturated, dead-end markets in AI today are generic ChatGPT wrappers – writing assistants, support chatbots, meeting summarizers, and resume builders that the big players already ship natively. That is not where the small guy wins.

The wide-open categories read like a playbook for the focused entrepreneur. Vertical software for so-called boring industries like HVAC, roofing, pest control, and auto repair. These are hundred-billion-dollar industries that still mostly run on spreadsheets and phone calls. Big AI players ignore them. AI compliance and regulatory technology is exploding because the EU AI Act’s new enforcement regime, which began in August 2026, creates a deadline-driven market that generic tools cannot satisfy. Creator economy micro-tools targeted at podcasters, Twitch streamers, or newsletter writers so specific that Canva and Notion will never build for them. Domain-specific AI trained on proprietary data in law, medicine, and manufacturing, where accuracy and compliance matter most. The moat is the data and the niche, not the model.

Perhaps most importantly, AI-assisted development tools have given the solo developer superpowers. Modern coding assistants and browser-based integrated development environments let one person do the work of what used to be a small team. The fastest path from idea to deployed product is now open to individuals again.

The Main Thing

So where does this leave our small guy or gal? It leaves them exactly where they have always been in computing – scrappy, niche-focused, and forced to outmanoeuvre rather than outmuscle the giants. The tragedy is real. That excellent program from Hillbrow is gone, swallowed by a monopoly that made compatibility impossible. Netscape is a memory. Google’s dominance means most new search ideas die in obscurity. The foundation models of AI are being built by corporations with budgets larger than the GDP of some nations.

And yet. The free transcription app I found, built by a guy with a hurt hand and maintained by friends, is the same spirit that built the Altair, that coded CP/M in a bedroom, that launched a million apps from kitchen tables. The pie is enormous. The trick, as always, is to carve out a slice so specific that the giants cannot reach their fork that far. The small guy or gal with a love and passion for computing has been declared dead a dozen times before. They are still here. They will still be here. They just have to be smarter, faster, and more stubborn than the corporations trying to shove them out.

Long after sunset in Nikko, a rural town nestled north of Tokyo, an illuminated greenhouse glows against the dark landscape like a solitary lantern. Inside, under the bright glare of halogen floodlights, 36-year-old farmer Motoaki Iijima moves steadily through the rows. He isn’t working overtime to clear a backlog; he is harvesting bright pink and orange Gerbera daisies in the dead of night because working under the summer sun has become a life-threatening risk.

I picked up on this trend reading an article in yesterday’s USA Today syndicated from Reuters, titled “Japan’s farmers go nocturnal as deadly heat intensifies.” The piece highlights how soaring summer temperatures—with greenhouse interiors pushing past 40°C—are forcing growers across the globe to rewrite the agrarian clock. 

When daytime temperatures climb past 35°C outside, interior greenhouse heat surges beyond a stifling 40°C. Three years ago, after a member of his team suffered severe heatstroke in the fields, Iijima made a radical decision: he flipped his farm’s operating schedule entirely on its head. “We’ve gradually become nocturnal,” he explained in a recent Reuters report detailing the phenomenon. “It’s about protecting our bodies, and ultimately, our lives.”

There is a striking geographical irony at play in Iijima’s greenhouse. The Gerbera daisy—one of Japan’s most cherished cut flowers—is actually Gerbera jamesonii, a species endemic to the warm, sun-drenched grassland slopes of South Africa’s Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal regions. Yet thousands of kilometers away from their native home, these South African blooms now require artificial night lights in Japan just to survive the harvest without their delicate stems wilting instantly in the daytime heat.

What is happening on Iijima’s farm is not an isolated experiment—it is a snapshot of a fast-emerging global trend. Driven by accelerating global temperatures, nocturnal farming is rapidly transitioning from an occasional workaround into a vital strategy for human safety, produce quality, and food security.

The South African Floral Connection in Japan

A decade ago, Motoaki Iijima converted his family’s centuries-old rice paddy into a flower farm dedicated to cultivating Gerbera daisies. Introduced to global horticulture in the late 19th century, Gerberas became one of Japan’s most prized commercial crops.

However, these soft-stemmed cut flowers have strict physiological limits. When ambient temperatures surpass 25°C, the plants enter heat stress, and above 35°C, their stems lose turgor pressure—causing the flower heads to droop and deteriorate almost immediately upon cutting. Harvesting at midnight under floodlights solves two critical issues simultaneously:

Worker Ergonomics: It protects agricultural labor from heat exhaustion and heatstroke during dangerous peak daylight hours.

Stem Integrity: It preserves cellular moisture within the stems, eliminating the need for aggressive post-harvest field cooling.

It is a remarkable adaptation: a native South African flower, evolved over millions of years under African sunlight, now demands that Japanese growers work under halogen lights at 2:00 AM to survive modern climate extremes.

A Global Shift: Rewriting the Agrarian Clock

Across high-heat agricultural regions around the world, the traditional daylight farming schedule is being dismantled:

Vietnam & SE Asia (Paddy Rice): Farmers conduct planting and harvesting between midnight and pre-dawn to avoid lethal wet-bulb heat thresholds.

Spain & Southern Europe (Wine Grapes): Mechanical harvesters run at night to preserve grape acidity and prevent wild yeast from triggering early fermentation in collection bins.

Japan (Poultry Farming): Farmers wake layer hens at 2:30 AM with artificial barn lights to encourage feeding before daytime heat suppresses appetites.

United States (Table Grapes & Greens): Tractor-mounted floodlight rigs illuminate fields across California and Arizona so produce can be harvested cool, cutting down cold-chain refrigeration costs.

The South African Context: Adaptation Behind the Scenes

While the term “nocturnal farming” isn’t often used in local headline news, shifting operations into pre-dawn or nighttime hours is an established reality across South Africa’s commercial agricultural landscape:

Export Fruit Harvesting (Western & Northern Cape): Summer picking on commercial table grape, stone fruit, and citrus farms frequently begins at 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM. Gathering fruit in cold morning air keeps cell walls firm, prevents bruising, and maintains strict European export cold-chain requirements.

Precision Spraying (Free State & Highveld): Broadacre grain farmers apply crop protection chemicals heavily at night or dusk. Daytime mid-day heat causes expensive spray droplets to evaporate before absorption, while high afternoon winds cause chemical drift. Night applications offer stable air and higher relative humidity.

Sugarcane Management (KwaZulu-Natal): Controlled burning and manual field harvesting are strictly scheduled during early morning or late evening slots to prevent uncontrollable fire drift and protect manual labor teams from severe thermal stress.

Urban After-Hours Cultivation: In urban hubs like Johannesburg and Cape Town, an informal network of “after-hours” urban growers—including security guards, transport workers, and shift workers—tends to community gardens and rooftop plots under streetlights after their primary employment shifts end.

Agriculture Under Artificial Light

The migration of farm labor into the night hours highlights a necessary pivot in how we produce food. Shifting schedules serves a dual purpose: it acts as a critical line of defense for worker health against rising ambient temperatures, while simultaneously preserving crop yields and reducing the energy footprint of post-harvest refrigeration.

Yet, this transition introduces its own complex challenges. Managing sleep disruption for rural families, ensuring field safety around heavy machinery in the dark, and bearing the capital expense of mobile field lighting are new burdens placed directly onto agricultural producers.

The fresh produce, wine, and flowers sitting on market shelves may look unchanged, but the labor behind them is quietly changing. Around the world—and increasingly across South Africa—the most critical work of feeding the planet is no longer happening under the midday sun, but under the quiet glow of artificial light while the world sleeps.

Financial News Daily – Friday Wrap

South Africa: economic, financial and business highlights

The week was all about banks and miners printing money, while retail and property dealt with boardroom drama and aggressive expansion.

Banks and markets post solid gains

• Absa Group: Headline earnings up 8% to R12.8bn, revenue up 4% to R58.8bn, ROE at 15%. Executives are juggling credit discipline against faster rate cuts in Africa, while eyeing more Nigeria growth.
• Nedbank: H1 headline earnings R8.4bn (flat YoY, up 12% constant-currency post-Ecobank), interim dividend 1,052 cents. Management must balance rising credit losses with scaling AI automation that’s already unlocked R375m in annualised value.

Mining giants bounce back

• AngloGold Ashanti: Revenue surges to USD6.3bn, profit more than doubles to USD2.3bn. Leadership must decide how aggressively to reinvest record free cash flow into growth vs. debt reduction.
• Glencore: Revenue USD174.4bn, turnaround to USD4.4bn attributable income from a USD655m loss prior. Executives are weighing commodity-cycle positioning carefully.
• Anglo American: Agrees to sell Australian steelmaking coal business to Dhilmar for up to $3.88bn (R64–67bn). Tough call: sequencing debt reduction, portfolio simplification, and the pending Teck merger without overpaying for integration risk.

Retail and property shake-ups (the real action this week)

• Spur Corporation: This week, Spur reported a 4.1% rise in group turnover to R2.4bn for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, with South African same-store sales up 3.2% and a net increase of 14 restaurants across the group. Management highlighted ongoing cost pressures and the need to support franchisees amid a “challenging consumer environment”, while continuing to lean on value offers and digital channels to drive traffic.
• Shoprite quietly stole the show by opening 262 net new stores in its 2026 financial year – more than Pick n Pay, Woolworths, and SPAR combined in their latest periods. That aggressive expansion is putting serious pressure on rivals to rethink footprints.
• Balwin Properties: Shareholders approved a PIC-led buyout and delisting at R4.35 per share (R2.26bn), with 98.48% in favour. Management now transitions to private ownership, away from public-market pressures.

Other notable moves

• Astral Foods: Declared a 427% increase in interim dividend to 1,160 cents, driven by strong poultry demand. Management must decide how much to reinvest in capacity and biosecurity.
• WeBuyCars: H1 revenue up 7.8% to R14.2bn but margin pressure from used-car deflation. Executives face the delicate task of protecting volumes without eroding profitability further.

Economic backdrop

• Inflation eased to 4.3% in July (from 5%), giving the SARB breathing room to hold rates at 7%. But diesel and petrol hikes loom for September.
• Business insolvencies jumped 134% month-on-month in July, while unemployment hit a four-year high of 33.6% in Q2. Mixed signals all round.

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International news in brief

• Perplexity AI reportedly offered to buy Chrome from Google for $34.5bn in cash – a bold move that would reshape search and shopping.
• The US national debt has surged past 40 trillion by month-end – about $120,000 per American.

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Before you go

Musician birthdays (rock emphasis) — 21 August

• Joe Strummer (1952) – The Clash vocalist/guitarist.
• Glenn Hughes (1951) – Deep Purple & Black Sabbath bassist/vocalist.
• Serj Tankian (1967) – System of a Down vocalist.
• Liam Howlett (1971) – The Prodigy founder/keyboardist.

Also nearby: Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin) – 20 August.

Author birthdays — 21 August

• Jules Michelet (1798) – French historian who coined “Renaissance”.
• Robert Stone (1937) – National Book Award winner (Dog Soldiers).
• Denise Mina (1966) – Scottish crime writer.
• Sharon Draper (1948) – five-time Coretta Scott King Award-winning children’s author.

Also nearby: H.P. Lovecraft (20 Aug) and Ray Bradbury (22 Aug).

A couple of light jokes

• Why don’t skeletons fight each other? They don’t have the guts.
• I used to play piano by ear, but now I use my hands.
• What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.

Weird and wonderful facts

• Bananas are technically berries – but strawberries aren’t. Botanically, a berry has seeds inside the flesh, and bananas fit the bill perfectly.
• Your stomach gets a new lining every 3 to 4 days – otherwise, its own acid would digest it. You’re basically wearing a temporary internal raincoat.
• A group of flamingos is called a “flamboyance” – which is frankly the most accurate collective noun ever coined.
• The Eiffel Tower grows about 6 inches (15 cm) in summer due to thermal expansion of the iron – it shrinks back in winter.

Deep thought

The heaviest burden is not what we carry in our hands, but what we refuse to set down in our hearts.

Lighthearted quiz question

I have cities, but no houses. I have mountains, but no trees. I have water, but no fish. What am I?

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Quiz answer: A map.

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Luanda is not a city most people spend much time thinking about. That may soon look like a mistake. Forecasts suggest Angola’s capital could become one of Africa’s largest cities by 2100, driven by war, oil, migration and the relentless pull of a capital that dominates its country.

And before you protest, I know. Demographic projections can sound like the kind of thing reserved for people who enjoy bonds, interest rates and yields. But this is critical stuff for anyone who wants to understand where Africa is heading, and where capital, infrastructure and economic gravity may be heading with it.

Zero Hedge recently ran a piece on the world’s biggest cities by 2100, and it caught my eye because I read it alongside the Economist, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. The article is here: By 2050, The World’s Most-Populous Cities Will All Be In Africa Or Asia.

Luanda is expected to be among the cities that expand dramatically over the coming decades. That is an extraordinary prospect when one considers how little attention the city gets compared with Johannesburg, Cairo or Lagos. Yet that may be part of the point. The cities that matter most in the long run are not always the ones that dominate the news cycle today.

The reasons for Luanda’s projected boom are not mysterious. Angola has lived through decades of conflict, displacement and rural poverty, all of which pushed people towards the capital. Once those migration patterns become established, they are difficult to reverse. People move for safety, for work, for schools, for hospitals and for the possibility of a better life. Cities become magnets, and Luanda has been one of the strongest magnets in Africa.[1][2]

There is also the matter of opportunity. Luanda is Angola’s political and economic centre, and that matters enormously. When government, finance, trade and services are concentrated in one place, the city begins to pull more people and more investment towards it. In that sense, urban growth becomes self-reinforcing. People follow jobs. Businesses follow people. Infrastructure follows both, though often too slowly.[3][4]

Oil has given Luanda an added lift. Angola’s urban expansion is tightly linked to offshore oil wealth, which has helped finance construction, roads, housing and the physical building-out of the city. That is why Luanda keeps spreading, even when planning is uneven and services lag behind population growth. The city is not just growing on paper; it is growing in concrete, in informal settlement, in transport pressure and in the daily scramble of urban life.[5][6][7]

There is also a historical irony that should not be missed. Angola was once a major sugar producer, with a long agricultural history that included significant sugar production in earlier decades. That matters because it reminds us that Angola’s productive potential has never been small. The country has always had resources and promise. The tragedy is that so much of that promise has been channelled unevenly over time. Today oil is the dominant story, but the deeper question is whether that wealth can support a broader and more balanced urban economy.[8][5]

That is why Luanda matters beyond Angola. Cities do not grow in a vacuum. They grow because national systems push and pull people in the same direction. If rural areas remain weak, if the capital continues to monopolize opportunity, and if infrastructure struggles to keep pace, then the city grows not just larger but more dependent on the same centralizing forces that created it.[9][1]

For South Africans, there is a familiar lesson here. Big cities do not become big by accident. They grow when the rest of the country fails to spread opportunity evenly and one place becomes the obvious destination. Johannesburg has long played that role. Lagos has too. Luanda may be heading the same way, only faster and from a lower base.

So yes, Luanda on fire may sound provocative, but the phrase has a point. The city is not literally burning. It is igniting in demographic terms. It is becoming a symbol of Africa’s urban future: fast-moving, uneven, resource-linked and impossible to ignore.

The real story is not just that Luanda may become one of Africa’s great megacities. It is that the future of African urban growth is being shaped right now by history, migration, oil and the stubborn imbalance between capital cities and the rest of their countries. That is why Luanda deserves attention today, not in 2100.

Sources
[1] Concept0Projec000MOSAP30000P177305.docx https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099120012092126895/Concept0Projec000MOSAP30000P177305.docx
[2] Civil society notes: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/57a08c7ced915d622c00139f/R8257AngolaCaseStudy.pdf
[3] HABITAT-MINOTH COUNTRY PROGRAMME DOCUMENT … https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2019/10/31_10_2018_hcpd_-angola_en.pdf [4] [PDF] Luanda city profile Paul Jenkins, Paul Robson & Allan Cain http://bibliotecaterra.angonet.org/sites/default/files/luanda_city_profile.pdf [5] Capitalism and Modularity in the Making of Contemporary … https://www.ijurr.org/article/blocos-urbanism-capitalism-and-modularity-in-the-making-of-contemporary-luanda/ [6] Angola https://habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda/preparatory-process/national-participation/angola/ [7] 7 Housing for whom? – Development Workshop Angola https://dw.angonet.org/wp-content/uploads/cain_2020_housing_for_whom-_rebuilding_angolas_cities_after_conflict_and_who_gets_left_behind.pdf
[8] ANGOLA. TECHNICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE SUGAR INDUSTRY (13101.en) https://downloads.unido.org/ot/48/04/4804370/10001-15000_13101.pdf
[9] rcd 5/3/10 – Development Workshop Angola https://dw.angonet.org/wp-content/uploads/DW-Angola-Narrative-Proposal-.doc

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Let’s not start with politicians. They’re the easy target, the low-hanging fruit. State capture, tenderpreneurs, Eskom—we’ve all heard the rant a thousand times. It’s exhausting.

Let’s start at the bottom. With us. With the small stuff.

You know the type. The guy who dodges his tax because “the system is corrupt anyway.” The neighbour who applies for a grant she doesn’t really need, because “everyone does it.” The friend who borrows 500 bucks and then develops a sudden, mysterious inability to reply to WhatsApps.

Then there’s the car that vanishes at 3am. The house that gets hit. The loan that never comes back.

And here’s the weird part: when someone pulls a fast one and gets away with it, we don’t always gasp in horror. Sometimes we smirk. “Sharp, hey.” “Street-smart.” “He knows how to work the system.”

We’ve started cheering for the escape artist.

So what’s actually going on? Is it just survival? After decades of inequality, unemployment, and watching connected people swim in gravy, maybe the rules started feeling like a joke. Why be the mug who plays fair when the field is already tilted?

Or is it something simpler? Greed? Example from above? A bit of everything?

This isn’t a sermon—nobody wants that. But let’s be honest: when honesty takes a back seat, trust evaporates—and life gets expensive. You can’t do business without a contract. You can’t trust the contract without a lawyer. You can’t trust the lawyer without another lawyer. Suddenly you’re spending your whole day just trying to figure out if someone actually means what they say.

Honesty is the cheap lubricant of society. Without it, trust vanishes, and everything grinds to a halt.

And we all know the little voice. That quiet nudge when we’re about to take the shortcut. “Nobody will know.” “They owe me.” “It’s just this once.”

The low road is tempting. It’s also crowded.

But here’s the twist: we’ve got plenty of good people left. The pensioner who pays every bill on time, even when it hurts. The small business owner who scrapes to make payroll and still does it. The person below the breadline who refuses to steal, even though stealing might feed their kids tonight.

The teacher who shows up. The cop who actually investigates. The prosecutor who won’t look the other way. The businessperson who says “no” to the bribe.

They exist. In numbers. They’re just quieter than the noise.

So where does the reset start? Not in a commission. Not in a new law. Not in another committee to investigate the committee that investigated the first committee.

It starts at home. At school. At the workplace. In that small decision that nobody else will ever see.

Do I pay back what I borrowed? Do I tell the truth when a lie would be easier? Do I return what isn’t mine? Do I do the right thing when doing the wrong thing would be so, so convenient?

That’s it. No fireworks. No tender. No grand national strategy.

Just the quiet, unglamorous, deeply uncool act of keeping your word and being straight with people.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly where the great South African reset has to begin. Not with a bang. With a shrug that turns into a habit.

Because if we can’t be honest with each other, we’ve got nothing. And we all know it.

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One thing you can say about SPAR retailers: they are passionate about retail.

I first encountered SPAR in Johannesburg, where some Greek store owners ran superb businesses. The Northcliff and Greenside stores were memorable. More recently, the SPAR in Broadacres has impressed me. Its catering section is as good as anything found in a hotel.

Unlike the centrally controlled supermarket chains, SPAR’s strength lies in its independent retailers. They are not technically franchisees. They are members of the SPAR Guild, operating under a voluntary trading model that gives independent retailers considerable autonomy.

It is an unusual arrangement. SPAR supplies the infrastructure, buying power, distribution and brand. The retailer supplies the entrepreneurial energy.

Judging by some of the stores I encounter in the Western Cape, the retailers haven’t forgotten what retail is about.

They know their customers. They promote specials aggressively. Some have their own apps. They run community noticeboards and loyalty schemes. They know that a supermarket is not merely a warehouse with tills at the exit.

The curious thing is that the people at the top of SPAR seem to have had rather more difficulty keeping their shelves stocked.

On Monday, chairman Mike Bosman and deputy chair Shirley Zinn resigned with immediate effect. Lwazi Koyana has stepped in as interim chairman while a permanent chairman is found. It is the latest change at a company that has had more than its share of boardroom movement.

The SPAR model is one of its great strengths. A 2025 Supreme Court of Appeal judgment described SPAR as a wholesaler supplying independent Guild retailers, with the Guild established to facilitate, promote and regulate the voluntary trading system.

The shopkeeper is the entrepreneur. SPAR is supposed to make the entrepreneur better.

That sounds almost quaint in an age when listed companies are expected to become international groups, buy things in foreign countries and produce a strategy document thick enough to stop a door.

SPAR did all three.

The result has been expensive.

The group has been retreating from its international adventures. Poland, Switzerland and the UK are now classified as discontinued operations. In 2025, discontinued operations contributed to a loss of about R6.1bn.

Meanwhile, the South African business has had its own problems.

The infamous SAP implementation at the KwaZulu-Natal distribution centre is a good example of what happens when corporate machinery gets in the way of the people actually selling the groceries. SPAR estimated that the botched implementation cost R1.6bn in lost turnover and R720m in lost profit in 2023.

That is quite a lot of groceries to lose because a computer system didn’t behave itself.

The latest numbers are hardly comforting.

For the six months to March 2026, revenue from continuing operations increased 3.6% to R67.5bn. Operating profit, however, fell 45.3% to R740.5m. Operating margin dropped from 2.1% to 1.1%, while headline earnings per share fell 53.9% to 199.9 cents. Net debt rose to R7.3bn.

In other words, SPAR can still sell a great deal of groceries. It is just finding it considerably harder to turn them into profits.

That brings the discussion back to the listing.

SPAR was listed on the JSE in 2004 after being unbundled from Tiger Brands. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In its earlier years as a listed company it delivered impressive growth.

The more interesting question is whether a business built around independent entrepreneurs benefits from being managed like a conventional listed conglomerate.

Public companies like growth. Management teams like acquisitions. Investors like earnings. Boards like strategy.

And somewhere between all those requirements, a good supermarket can become surprisingly complicated.

SPAR’s executive remuneration is another reminder of the difference between the shop floor and the boardroom. Chief executive Angelo Swartz’s total remuneration for 2025 was about R18.2m.

That is a lot of rolls, milk and chicken.

It is also about 169 times the remuneration of SPAR’s lowest-paid employee, according to reporting based on the company’s annual report.

The independent retailer, meanwhile, still has to get up early tomorrow morning and make sure the hot food is ready.

There is a temptation, when a share price falls and profits come under pressure, to change the strategy, change the executives and change the chairman.

There is, of course, a tempting solution. Take SPAR off the JSE. If the public market has become such an uncomfortable place for a business whose real strength lies with independent retailers, perhaps it should return to private ownership.

Except that delisting is not a magic trick.

The debt does not disappear when the share listing does. SPAR would still have to service its borrowings, and somebody would have to buy out the existing shareholders. With the share price already battered, that would not be a cheap exercise. A private buyer would be taking on a sizeable balance sheet at precisely the time when SPAR is trying to repair it. The shareholders might have to sell for a song. The lenders would still want their money.

So SPAR is caught in an awkward middle ground. It may be too unwieldy for the stock market and too heavily indebted for a graceful escape from it.

Perhaps that is the real price of becoming a listed conglomerate: getting out can be almost as difficult as getting in.

The irony is that the people at the counter appear to have held on to the SPAR idea rather better than the people in the boardroom.

The retailers know what they are selling. They know their customers. They know that a good supermarket is a local business, not an international strategy.

The corporate SPAR has spent years discovering that lesson the expensive way.

So perhaps it is time to stop asking whether SPAR should be bought, sold, delisted or restructured.

Perhaps it should simply become more like the businesses it was created to serve.

That might be the best way of getting the SPAR back into SPAR. For a company whose business is selling groceries, it may be time to stop moving the top dogs around and concentrate on the people actually filling the baskets.

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If you blinked over the weekend, you might have missed the latest salvo in the AI wars. Anthropic just made a power move: the company announced it’s making Claude Sonnet 5’s introductory pricing permanent — that’s $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, scrapping a planned September price hike that would have pushed costs up by 50%. The reasoning? Keep developers locked into their ecosystem ahead of a rumoured IPO and, more importantly, fend off the Chinese AI onslaught.

And what an onslaught it is. In just the past week alone, we’ve seen Grok 4.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM 5.3, and Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B all hit the market in rapid succession. OpenAI has slashed GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80%, while Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 at half the price of its flagship Fable 5. Even DeepSeek — once the undisputed “price” leader — has raised prices fourfold, yet still remains cheaper than most Western competitors.

The message is clear: the AI battlefield has shifted from who has the smartest model to who can offer the best value. And the Chinese players are winning on price.

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On the JSE This Week

Thungela Resources (TGA) kicked off the week with a bang this morning, releasing its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2026. The numbers are impressive:

· Revenue rose 2% to R15.17 billion
· Profit for the period surged 461% to R1.39 billion
· Headline earnings per share jumped 150% to 480 cents
· The group declared an interim dividend of R5.50 per share — up 175% from last year’s 200 cents

Also worth watching: Efora Energy (EEL) remains under a cautionary announcement after its board decided to defer court proceedings related to provisional liquidation while it pursues a potential transaction. And the JSE itself welcomed a new actively managed ETF listing today — the PWM Extra Interest Prescient Feeder AMETF (PWMEXI) — bringing the total number of ETFs on the exchange to 141, with a combined market cap exceeding R273 billion.

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Trivia Corner: The Weird and Wonderful

A giraffe in a sinkhole? Yes, you read that correctly. Over the weekend, the Democratic Alliance decided to draw attention to South Africa’s pothole crisis by… stuffing a real giraffe’s head and placing it in a sinkhole in Mogale City. The plan backfired spectacularly when wildlife rescuers rushed to the scene believing a live animal was trapped inside. The party has been widely slammed for the stunt. One has to admire the creativity, even if the execution was… questionable.

Sardine mystery solved? Scientists have detected pilchard herpesvirus genetic material in the mass sardine deaths along the West Coast. While the virus appears to be a factor, researchers believe environmental conditions may also have played a role. The first samples were collected off Saldanha Bay on 1 August.

And if you’re in Cape Town, keep an eye out for a giant corn flakes bowl that was reportedly blown off a shipping container in Nyanga by strong winds. It’s become an unlikely social media sensation.

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On this day in South African history: 17 August 1920 — Bevil Rudd won the first of his three Olympic medals, taking bronze in the 800m at the Antwerp Games. And in 1969, Dr Philip Blaiberg died in South Africa, 19 months and 15 days after receiving a heart transplant — a survival record at the time.

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Should foreigners be allowed to buy South African property without restriction? It is a question being asked with growing urgency in local communities, particularly here in the Western Cape.

While headlines focus on the eye-watering sums paid along the Atlantic Seaboard, the reality goes much deeper. In coastal villages like Kommetjie and Scarborough, foreign buyers have changed the landscape. Five decades ago, Kommetjie was a sleepy holiday town, and Scarborough was barely developed. Today, luxury houses and sprawling developments dominate parts of the coastline, changing the character of communities where generations of local residents have lived. Giant mansions block sea views.

And this trend is no longer confined to affluent coastal suburbs.

Earlier this year, while visiting Vanrhynsdorp, locals told me how many international buyers are buying property in the town. The same pattern is playing out in parts of the Karoo, where small farms and lifestyle plots are being snapped up by foreign buyers.

SADC neighbours take a far more protective stance. While countries such as Namibia permit foreigners to buy urban residential property, they impose strict controls on foreign ownership of agricultural land. In South Africa, by contrast, foreign buyers can participate in the property market with relatively few restrictions.

The core driver of this squeeze is the difference in purchasing power created by the currency.

A foreign buyer looking at a R5 million home in Scarborough sees a property priced at roughly $270,000 or €250,000 — the cost of a modest one-bedroom apartment in parts of Europe or North America. To a South African earning in rands, however, that same property represents a life-changing financial commitment.

Armed with stronger currencies, international buyers can sometimes afford to pay considerably more than local buyers, pushing prices beyond the reach of South African families.

The human cost of this open-door policy falls particularly heavily on the younger generation. Young South Africans starting families and hoping to buy a starter home and build some generational wealth can find themselves priced out before they even begin.

Compounding the problem is the rise of empty properties and short-term holiday rentals. In places like Scarborough, Kommetjie and Cape Town, some properties owned by foreigners sit empty for much of the year, while others are converted permanently into short-term tourist accommodation.

That removes long-term rental stock from the market, pushes up rents and can turn close-knit coastal communities into seasonal ghost towns.

Of course, there is another side to the argument.

Local homeowners in places like Kommetjie, Scarborough and the Atlantic Seaboard who bought properties decades ago, or inherited them, have benefited enormously from rising valuations. Some have effectively become millionaires simply because they own property in an area that has become highly desirable.

Local municipalities also welcome the expanding rates base that comes with higher property valuations.

So this isn’t simply a question of whether foreign buyers are good or bad for South Africa. They bring money into the country, spend locally and can contribute to the development of areas that might otherwise have attracted less investment.

The question is whether South Africa has the right balance.

Many other countries have introduced targeted controls without shutting the door on foreign investment entirely.

Foreign surcharges and duties: Countries such as Singapore, Australia and Canada impose additional taxes or duties on certain foreign or non-resident property buyers. These measures can discourage speculative buying while generating revenue for government.

Primary residence restrictions: New Zealand has restricted non-residents from buying existing residential property, while allowing exceptions and investment in certain new developments. The principle is that foreign capital should, where possible, add to housing supply rather than simply compete for existing homes.

Agricultural protections: South Africa could also consider a framework that gives greater protection to agricultural land, particularly where productive farmland risks being converted into lifestyle properties.

So where does South Africa’s current trajectory end?

Foreign investment is not the enemy. Nor is there anything inherently wrong with an overseas buyer purchasing a South African home.

But when people with substantially greater purchasing power compete for a finite supply of property, the consequences for local residents cannot simply be ignored.

South Africa needs to decide whether an entirely open property market is really in the country’s long-term interests.

Because if young South Africans continue to be pushed further away from home ownership, the price will be high.

They will not only struggle to buy a home. They will struggle to build the wealth that previous generations built through owning one.

That is a price South Africa’s young people should not have to pay.

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For no rhyme or reason I’m celebrating Rory Gallagher the Irish Blues rock guitarist. Actually, I do have a reason – I heard “Racing the Breeze” on one of the older Chris Prior Rock Professor podcasts. And it just uplifted me. I was so filled with energy and happiness, I can’t describe it. That’s the power, the emotional power of Rory Gallagher’s music to me – I can’t describe it, but I love it.

I first heard Rory Gallagher in the early 1970s, probably at Cavendish Square in Cape Town where I used to buy my records. And from the album Irish Tour ’74, I absolutely loved “When the Crow Flies”. I know it was a Tony Joe White song, but the energy that Rory Gallagher put into it is amazing. Over the years I’ve listened to many guitarists and loved many of them. But for me, among them all, Rory Gallagher stands out. I just find his career amazing, his dedication to his music amazing.

I was saying to someone the other day, you know, you get many musicians, and as the world’s population has increased in size since the early 1970s, there are so many more musicians, but why does a musician like Rory Gallagher stand out for me? I think – and this is very subjective – I think it’s because you can almost sense and feel that he’s got music in him. He is a musician. I listen to a lot of other music on the radio and other places, and often you find the singer, the guitar player, the saxophonist – there’s just something missing. With Rory Gallagher, for me, there’s nothing missing. It’s the same as his countryman Van Morrison – I don’t want to go into Van Morrison now, but that tour de force of an album Astral Weeks, which my late friend Alfie Caplan played for me for the first time. And ever since then, anything that Van Morrison has done is fantastic. He’s also a musician. He has music in his soul. Anyway, back to Rory Gallagher. We’re taking a deep look at his life today.

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The Early Years – A Promise Revealed

Rory Gallagher was born William Rory Gallagher on March 2, 1948, in the small town of Ballyshannon, County Donegal, in the northwest of Ireland. He didn’t grow up in a musical vacuum – his father was a musician, and his mother was a singer, so the family home was always filled with records and live performances. That early exposure lit a fire in young Rory.

He got his first guitar at the age of nine – a cheap acoustic that he quickly outgrew. By the time he was twelve, he had already won a local talent contest, and he used the prize money to buy himself a better instrument. But the real turning point came when he was just fifteen years old. With money earned from odd jobs and a hire-purchase agreement, he bought his legendary 1961 sunburst Fender Stratocaster – the very same battered, weather-beaten guitar that would become his lifelong companion and one of the most recognisable instruments in rock history.

Even as a teenager, he was already playing professionally in Irish showbands, cutting his teeth in front of live audiences. You could say he was born to play – and he never stopped.

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The Bands – From Taste to Solo Stardom

Rory’s first major band was Taste, a power trio formed in the late 1960s. Taste was raw, loud, and intensely bluesy – they gained a massive following in the UK and Ireland, even opening for bands like Cream and Fleetwood Mac. They released a couple of studio albums and a legendary live album, Live at the Isle of Wight, which captures Rory at his most ferocious. But by 1970, the band had run its course, and they disbanded.

That same year, Rory launched his solo career – and that’s when his legend truly took off. From 1970 until his untimely death in 1995, he released a steady stream of studio albums and toured relentlessly. His solo discography comprises roughly twelve studio albums and three official live albums, with Irish Tour ’74 standing as his absolute masterpiece – the album I remember buying in Cape Town.

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Outstanding Career Highlights – Awards and Recognition

Rory may have been shy offstage, but onstage he was a force of nature. In 1971, he was voted “Top Musician of the Year” by the influential British magazine Melody Maker – beating Eric Clapton in that poll. The very next year, 1972, he was named “Guitarist of the Year” by the same publication. At a time when the world was overflowing with guitar heroes, Rory was consistently voted above giants like Clapton, Page, and Beck.

He is often referred to as “Ireland’s first rock superstar” – a title he earned not through flashy antics or manufactured image, but through sheer musical brilliance and relentless hard work. He played thousands of gigs, often multiple shows a night, and gave everything he had to every single one.

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The Man Himself – Personal Life

Rory Gallagher was famously private and deeply shy. He never married and had no children. Some say he was married to his music – and that’s not just a cliché. He lived for the stage and the studio. His brother, Donal Gallagher, served as his manager for most of his career and remains the steward of his estate to this day. Rory’s shyness was so pronounced that he would often hide backstage before shows, letting Donal do all the talking, and then walk on stage and transform into a completely different animal.

Financially, exact figures of his personal income were never made public, but he enjoyed a comfortable and successful career. Since his passing, his estate has continued to earn substantial royalties from reissues, streaming, and licensing – a testament to his enduring legacy.

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Record Sales, Popularity, and His Most Beloved Albums

Globally, Rory Gallagher has sold over 30 million albums across his entire catalogue, both during his lifetime and posthumously. And here’s the beautiful thing – he is still incredibly popular. New generations of guitarists discover him every year, and his music keeps finding fresh ears. Record labels regularly reissue his albums with bonus tracks and remastered sound, and box sets continue to sell.

His most popular and best-selling albums include:

· Rory Gallagher (1971) – his powerful solo debut.
· Deuce (1971) – which cemented his style.
· Blueprint (1973) – a fan favourite.
· Irish Tour ’74 (1974) – the iconic live album that captured his raw, sweaty, brilliant stage presence.
· Photo-Finish (1978) – a hard-rocking return to form.
· Top Priority (1979) – another muscular blues-rock classic.

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What Was So Good About His Music? And How Did He Do It?

Rory’s playing was raw, passionate, and completely improvisational. He never played a song the same way twice – every live performance was a unique, one-off creation. He fused blues, rock, folk, and jazz into a fiery, soulful brew that sounded completely organic. There were no studio tricks, no overdubs, no pretence. What you heard was what you got – a man pouring every ounce of his being through his amplifier.

Technically, how did he get that sound? He used a heavy right-hand strumming attack, often using his fingers rather than a pick, which gave him a warmer, more percussive tone. He played his 1961 Stratocaster almost exclusively, and he achieved his signature cutting, singing tone by cranking his Vox AC30 and later Fender amplifiers to their absolute limit – he ran them so hot that they were nearly breaking up. He also used a treble booster pedal to slice through the mix. But really, the secret wasn’t in the gear. It was in his hands and his heart. When Rory played with his eyes closed, head down, completely lost in the moment, he was communicating something that words simply cannot capture. That’s why “Racing the Breeze” made me feel so uplifted – it wasn’t just a tune; it was a transmission of pure human energy.

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His Famous Guitars – Including That Steel Guitar

His undisputed number one was the 1961 Fender Stratocaster – sunburst finish, so heavily worn that the paint had almost completely worn off from years of sweat and strumming. That guitar has become an icon in its own right.

But he owned several other beauties:

· A 1958 Fender Stratocaster.
· A 1966 Fender Telecaster.
· A 1959 Fender Esquire.
· A 1968 Gibson Les Paul Junior (a single-cutaway with a P-90 pickup).
· A 1959 Gretsch Chet Atkins hollow-body.
· A striking 1965 Airline “JB Hutto” – a res-o-glass guitar with a very distinctive futuristic look.

And yes, he did play a steel guitar – specifically a lap steel guitar, which he used on certain tracks to get that crying, sliding country-blues sound. He also played slide guitar, and he wasn’t limited to six strings – he also played mandolin, harmonica, and even saxophone on some recordings. He was a multi-instrumentalist who simply loved making music on anything he could get his hands on.

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Trivia – A Few Bits and Pieces

Here are some nuggets about Rory:

· He was a devout Catholic and made a point of attending Mass regularly, even while on tour in foreign countries.
· He had an obsession with detective novels – he would devour them backstage and on long bus rides, always carrying a stack with him.
· He had a notorious fear of flying. He often travelled by boat, ferry, or tour van to avoid getting on aeroplanes. This made touring the US particularly stressful, but he did it anyway because he loved his fans.
· He was incredibly humble and shy – despite his fame, he never acted like a rock star. He hated interviews and would rather let his guitar do the talking.
· Sadly, he struggled with alcoholism in his later years, and his health deteriorated significantly. In early 1995, he underwent a liver transplant in London. Tragically, complications arose, and he passed away on June 14, 1995, at the age of just forty-seven. The world lost him far too soon.

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How Other Guitarists Rate Him – Praise from the Greats

A measure of Rory’s genius is how he is regarded by his peers.

· Eric Clapton once said: “The guy who made me go back to the blues was Rory Gallagher.”
· Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin) said: “I really liked Rory. He was a fantastic guitarist, singer, and a lovely man.” Page rarely gives such warm personal endorsements.
· Ritchie Blackmore (of Deep Purple) called him: “Probably the most natural player I’ve ever seen. I never heard him play the same thing twice. He was the ultimate performer.” Coming from a guitarist known for his own improvisational brilliance, that’s high praise.
· Brian May (of Queen) called him a “genius” and said his playing was “beyond the beyond.”
· Slash (of Guns N’ Roses) has repeatedly cited Rory as a major influence on his own style.
· Joe Bonamassa, the modern blues powerhouse, flatly states: “Rory Gallagher is the greatest blues guitarist that ever lived.”

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Music inside

So why does Rory Gallagher stand out among the millions of musicians who have come and gone? You can sense the music living inside him. There’s no affectation, no empty showmanship, no glossy production covering up weaknesses. When he played “When the Crow Flies” or that electrifying “Racing the Breeze”, you aren’t just hearing a guitar – you’re hearing a man pour his entire soul out through six strings.

He was born in a small Irish town in 1948, he picked up a guitar at nine, he won a talent contest at twelve, he bought his beloved Strat at fifteen, he played in Taste, he went solo, he never married, he sold over thirty million records, he died too young at forty-seven, and he left behind a body of work that still lifts people’s spirits decades later. That’s not just a musician. That’s a force of nature.

Rory’s music still fills us with energy and happiness – and that’s a legacy no amount of record sales can ever measure.