Top reads on BusinessLIVE Premium right now

Here's a selection of the great writing on our subscription service BusinessLIVE Premium today.

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First up, former president Kgalema Motlanthe writes about the land question under the headline 'Miriam Makeba’s cry for land resounds in citizens’ pleas to panel for change'. He writes:

Local and international singer Miriam Makeba gave voice to it in her 1960s song Mabayeke: Give us our land. It is a cry that has not yet grown quiet, 23 years into democracy. It is reverberating through the provincial public hearings being held by the high-level panel on assessment of key legislation and acceleration of fundamental change.

At the seven provincial public hearings held so far, people have come — sometimes hitchhiking great distances — to tell the panel of their problems with access to land for farming, land for housing, secure tenure on the land they occupy, access to mineral rights and beneficiation of minerals, restitution for apartheid-era land dispossession and the slow pace of land reform programmes. It is not surprising that land features so prominently. After all, the apartheid government forcibly removed about 3.5-million people in the years up to the 1960s.

Lucy Kellaway's unmissable Financial Times column makes the point 'If you trade on past glories, it suggests your present does not count for much'. She writes:

Is it ever okay to trade on past career triumphs? If so, for how long before it becomes pathetic? There seem to be different rules for different people.

If you are as famous as Bill Clinton, you can go on wallowing in former glory more or less indefinitely. So long as you are a decent speaker, people will go on paying to hear you discuss your previous greatness many decades after the event.

Otherwise the time limit is so short as to be nonexistent. As a general principle, the rest of the world stops caring for any achievement the minute it slips from the present to the past.

Also compulsive reading on a Monday is Neels Blom's regular Business Day column, which has the headline 'What is that smell? The abattoir or something fishy?' He observes:

Backtracking smoked fish could become a thing. Take the fishy banking scandal. At least one person (name withheld) known to this columnist agrees that the coincidence of collusion charges in forex trading against a slew of banks emerging so soon after the First Carcass’s spat with the nation’s lenders (aka white monopoly capital) over his pals’ dodgy ways is just too rich to be palatable.

Journalistically speaking, though, there must be a counterpoint to the narrative, and it is this: South Africans tend to forget that whenever some outrage or the other enters public life, we walk upside down; normal here is abnormal elsewhere; we are down the rabbit hole.

In the Rand Daily Mail, Justice Malala warns that there are ominous signs that Pravin Gordhan may lose his job as the budget speech looms. The growing calls from Jacob Zuma's allies in the ANC for him to be fired and the fact that Brian Molefe - widely rumoured to be his replacement - is to become an MP are among the indications that a reshuffle is planned. Under the headline 'Gordhan - The signs are ominous'
He writes:

No one knows. Certainly the man known as Number One is not saying. He is as silent as a stone. Yet others are talking, and talking keenly. The axe may come down, perhaps soon after the budget speech is delivered, or perhaps later.

Justice's column is essential reading if you want to understand the unfolding South African drama. It is available only to subscribers.

Business Day's lead story is 'Dipuo Peters fires Acsa directors' by the paper's news editor, Xolisa Phillip. She writes:

Transport Minister Dipuo Peters has dismissed four Airports Company SA (Acsa) board members, capping a dramatic week in which the nonexecutive directors thought they had been granted a reprieve.

McDonald Kenosi Moroka, Kate Matlou, Bajabulile Luthuli and Chwayita Mabude were served with notices of their immediate dismissal from the Acsa board in their inboxes just after midday on Thursday, when they were expecting to make representations at a shareholders’ meeting about why they should remain on
the board.

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Business Day's editor, Tim Cohen, has written his Monday column, 'Point of Order' on the factionalism that is wreaking havoc in South Africa.

Under the headline, 'Colossal force bestrides our local factions' he writes:

Lots of things divide what we might describe as the Treasury faction and the Zuma faction in the government. But one thing unites them; the desire for a transformative government and developmental state that leads the economy.

These are grand aims.

But I have this horrible feeling that both factions have absolutely no clue about what they are up against. And what they are up against is neatly summarised in a distant battle between two already giant consumer goods companies.

Also published by Business Day is Natasha Marrian's interview with Julius Malema, 'EXCLUSIVE: EFF to enter fully fledged coalitions for increased power'.

The interview reveals a change of tack on the part of the EFF and opens the way for an EFF-DA coalition in 2019. Natasha writes:

Malema said 2019 would usher in a new era of coalition politics. The EFF will not play kingmaker, but wanted to become a partner and a "significant player" going forward.

"Every coalition we form in 2019 … we are going to participate directly in it — we are going to take departments. The good thing about provincial government is that, once you are allocated departments with clearly defined coalition terms, you say to the DA, you are running your own thing, we are running our own thing, you are not going to interfere in our departments and that’s it."

Columnist Gareth van Onselen writes 'How do I love Zuma, let me count the ways' with his trademark searing wit. His article on the planned bronze statue of Zuma with a quote from Graham Greene:

"We are sometimes so happy," Graham Greene wrote in The End of the Affair, "and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

"It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery. But I don’t even know the design."

Fear not, we were given the design last week. And, regards our misery, it could not be more appropriate.

Bad news though, it’s not going to cost R6m.

Also on BusinessLIVE Premium today is Ann Crotty writing about the forex scandal that has rocked the banks:

The banks and individual traders identified in the Competition Commission’s referral to the Competition Tribunal do not face the prospect of criminal sanction by the competition authorities even if found guilty of price-fixing and market manipulation in the foreign exchange market.

The Competition Act was amended with effect from May 2016 to provide for criminal sanctions to be imposed on individuals for certain competition law contraventions such as those identified in the commission’s referral. However, the contraventions identified by the commission took place between 2007 and 2013, predating the introduction of criminal sanction.

Also weighing in on the bank scandal is Onkgopotse JJ Tabane, who writes: 

The markets will have to deal with a frontal attack on the Treasury that has now been bolstered by the allegation of collusion by the banks; an attack on the Reserve Bank led by the lunatic fringe; an ANC land reform policy schizophrenia fuelled by the fear of losing the initiative in holding on to political power; and a general attack on the banking sector followed by demands for its nationalisation.

 It resembles events in the mining industry in early 2002, when billions of rand left the country after the leaking of the draft mining charter. As they are doing now in metro economies, the markets may soon have to become accustomed to the ANC as opposition and a coalition national government post-2019.

All these factors, if fully manifested, will send the economy into a tailspin and point to policy uncertainty of the worst kind.

 Finally, it looks like the Lions might have got the lucky break in the Super Rugby draw. Read Mark Keohane's column here:

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