Podcast: The White Party Winning Black Votes

Rob Rose and Zukile Majova are joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential for the nineteenth episode of Sharp Sharp, the weekly podcast on South African politics, money and power from Currency News and Scrolla.Africa.

This week’s focus is Zuks’ own reporting on the Freedom Front Plus, a party many South Africans still associate with the old order, now fielding Black candidates and printing its manifesto in African languages and Braille. Correctional Services Minister Pieter Groenewald’s fix for an overpriced prison bread contract becomes the episode’s clearest example of the party’s pitch, that efficiency, not ideology, is what’s winning it new support. Zuks draws on her own experience in the Eastern Cape to explain why rural communities often have a different relationship with the party than urban South Africans assume, while Patrick brings an outsider’s perspective on how incumbent parties everywhere tend to lose the cities first while holding on longer in rural areas.

The conversation turns to Julius Malema’s public attack on MacG’s Podcast and Chill, and what his frustration reveals about podcasts reaching young South Africans in ways traditional political messaging no longer does. Patrick then unpacks the real story behind this week’s chaos in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, including how European far right leaders staged a political moment around it, despite migration crossings into Europe actually falling this year.

The episode closes on Jacob Zuma stripping a senior MK Party figure of his role in parliament and replacing him with his own son, Duduzane, a move Rob and Zuks read as confirmation of a family succession plan already underway.