Hi there 🙋🏾♀️
We hope you’re surviving the summer heat and are at least doing better than John Steenhuisen, who revealed yesterday that he would be stepping down as the leader of the DA. Did UberEats catch up with old Johnny boy? Find out in our analysis of his announcement. It’s not a great time for members of the GNU in general, with the Arts and Culture minister being sued… by an artist. Tough times.
In other news, Mzansi (unfortunately) made it onto the Epstein files, and we celebrate a fave’s Grammy win, but question why all African music is lumped together. In less depressing news (depending on whether you found Terminator funny), AI chatbots now have their own social media platform, plus we’ve got our AGOA spot back – for now.
So, let’s dive into these stories and more in this week’s wrap, brought to you by the explain.co.za team. 😄
Format:
▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █BRIEFS
NATIONAL
- Julius Malema has a new fix for low youth voter turnout. He argued that signing up South Africans over 18 should be law, not a personal choice, speaking at a big party meeting on Sunday in Boksburg. The EFF declined to just 9.52% of the vote in the last national election, and Malema reckons higher youth turnout could help the party, given its large youth base. He’s not wrong… But better political leadership could go a long way, too. 🙃
- A nephew of deceased deputy president, David Mabuza, was linked to an alleged arms deal. 👀 Testifying at the Madlanga Commission on Tuesday from a secret location, “Witness F” said Siphiwe Mabuza contacted him on WhatsApp about selling hundreds of locally made shotguns — complete with matching flash-bang ammo and a supposed “family price”. But the witness insists the deal never went through. At this point, the real star witness at Madlanga might just be WhatsApp itself.
- SA is still in the African Growth and Opportunity Act. 🙌🏾 On Tuesday night, Donald Trump signed a US spending bill that quietly reauthorises AGOA for just one more year, ending months of uncertainty. The extension keeps SA eligible for duty-free access to the US market, where it exported about R66 billion worth of goods under the deal in 2023. But the short runway has officials nervous, with Washington long hinting that AGOA, and our place in it, is at risk. Still, for exporters, it’s a relief.
- There’s less than two weeks left to reinstate Gabrielle Goliath’s participation at the Venice Biennale. The local artist is suing Arts Minister Gayton McKenzie after he blocked her from representing SA at the world’s biggest art event. 🫢 McKenzie labelled her video installation, Elegy, which includes a tribute to a slain Palestinian poet, “highly divisive”. Did we mention McKenzie’s documented chumminess with Israel? Goliath wants the decision overturned before 18 February, the deadline for confirming installations with organisers.
- SA is heading to the 2026 Winter Olympics with its biggest winter squad ever! The games run from 6-22 Feb, and five South African athletes will compete across four icy disciplines in Italy, from skeleton to freestyle skiing. Even though South Africa has never won a medal at the event, sports officials are hopeful this team could finally change that. If nothing else, Team SA is proving that snow sports and sunshine passports are no longer mutually exclusive. 🌞
INTERNATIONAL
- Renewed Russian strikes knocked out power across parts of Ukraine on Tuesday. Thousands were left without electricity in sub-zero temperatures, with more than 1,100 buildings in Kyiv still without power, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The attacks came as US-brokered peace talks entered a second day in Abu Dhabi. On the ground, civilians are sheltering in metro stations, and energy crews are scrambling. It’s been 1,442 days of war, with Russia taking brutal advantage as negotiations drag on.
- Human Rights Watch dropped its annual report on Wednesday with a bleak takeaway. Democracy is in retreat, and fast. Nearly three-quarters of the world now live under authoritarian rule — levels not seen since the 1980s. HRW’s executive director Philippe Bolopion pointed to Donald Trump’s second term, alongside Russia and China, noting all three are “less free today than 20 years ago”. His message to democracies like the UK, the EU and Canada: band together — or watch the rules-based order unravel.
- Gaza’s Rafah crossing finally opened on Monday… but only just. After more than 20 months shut, Israel’s limited reopening allowed a small number of sick and wounded Palestinians to cross into Egypt for medical care. Despite around 150 people crossing into Egypt and 50 being expected back, by nightfall, only 12 were allowed back into Gaza, with officials blaming Israeli security checks. Israeli attacks killed at least 21 people this week — one of the deadliest stretches since the so-called ceasefire.
- France has had enough of Elon Musk’s internet chaos. On Tuesday, French authorities summoned Elon Musk for a “voluntary interview” and raided the Paris offices of X as part of a widening probe into political interference, Holocaust denial and sexual deepfakes. The investigation also targets Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, accused of generating sexualised deepfake images, including of women and children. With parallel probes underway in the EU and UK, Europe is signalling it’s done asking the world’s richest person nicely. 💪
- Meet your new spectator sport: bots talking to bots. 🤖 Moltbook is a Reddit-style platform built entirely for AI agents — systems that can act on their own, not just answer prompts. The bots argue, upvote and even start religions, while humans just watch. More than 1.5 million agents have already been signed up by humans. Experts say it’s fascinating but risky, especially if bots get access to files or logins. Still, it’s a vibe, with one asking: “Anyone else’s human obsessed with bread?” 😂
▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █ BIG STORIES
1️⃣ What Steenhuisen’s exit tells us about the DA’s ceiling
The rumours swirling earlier this week turned out to be bang on. John Steenhuisen will not be running for a third term as leader of the DA. “It’s mission accomplished for me,” Steenhuisen said during his highly anticipated announcement on Wednesday morning in Durban — the city where his political career began, and where it now, more or less, plateaus.
Behind the scenes, the move looks less like a victory lap and more like a tactical retreat. Steenhuisen was reportedly staring down a humiliating defeat at the DA’s elective congress in April and is believed to have struck a deal to retain his ministerial position in the Government of National Unity (GNU). By stepping aside now, he clears the runway for the more popular Geordin Hill-Lewis, Cape Town’s mayor, to take over. Hill-Lewis is a long-time friend of Steenhuisen’s, and according to sources cited by News24, both were keen to avoid a bruising, public battle.
At his conference, Steenhuisen tried to bow out on a high note, listing his achievements — from nurturing younger leaders to his much-hyped “moonshot pact”, later rebranded as the multiparty charter ahead of 2024’s national election. The idea was to prevent the so-called “doomsday coalition”: an ANC alliance with populist parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe Party. Under Cyril Ramaphosa, that outcome was avoided via the GNU, though the moonshot pact itself never quite left the launchpad.
That failure largely comes down to the DA’s underwhelming electoral performance under Steenhuisen. The party famously ousted his predecessor, Mmusi Maimane, after its vote share dropped from 22.23% to 20.77% in 2019. A string of high-profile departures by black leaders followed as the party drifted rightwards. Steenhuisen, however, failed to reverse the slide, managing only a modest bump to 21.81% in 2024 — a ceiling the increasingly white DA appears stuck beneath.
Add to that a series of uncomfortable scandals: a public spat with fellow DA minister Dion George, who was removed at Steenhuisen’s behest; awkward questions about Uber Eats charged to the party credit card; and grumbling within DA ranks that he was too cosy with the ANC.
Still, Steenhuisen gets a notably soft landing — more than Maimane ever did. He used his speech to pivot to his ministerial work, highlighting the growing crisis facing cattle farmers as foot-and-mouth disease spreads.
Now, the spotlight shifts to Hill-Lewis. He is widely viewed as a rising star within the party and enjoys backing from senior DA figures like former leaders Helen Zille and Tony Leon, who called him “a remarkable individual” and predicted he would be “a very effective leader of this party”.
Whether that prediction holds is the DA’s next big gamble.
2️⃣ Zuma, Epstein and a London dinner that might never have happened
Just when you thought Jacob Zuma’s news cycle couldn’t get wilder, his name pops up in the newly released Epstein files.
After years of court drama, conspiracy theories and a whole lot of delay tactics from the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the world finally got a massive document dump last week Friday.
The files are the result of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by Donald Trump back in 2025, under pressure from journalists, survivors and campaigners – and his own MAGA faithful. The DOJ stalled for a bit, only releasing bits and pieces last year, but the full thing is finally out — with an additional three million pages, 180,000 images and 2,000 videos. Thank goodness for Chat GPT. 😆
They detail the crimes of convicted paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, and his creepy Rolodex of powerful friends.
And the latest big name to be mentioned? Our infamous former president. 😬
According to emails in the files, an intimate dinner was allegedly planned for Zuma at the Ritz Hotel in London on 5 March 2010. Disgraced former British diplomat Peter Mandelson was looped in, and later described Zuma in an email as “more impressive than expected”. Weird flex, but okay.
Thing is, Zuma really was in London at the time — on an official state visit. But SABC’s US correspondent, Sherwin Bryce-Pease, pointed out Epstein was under house arrest in Florida from mid-2009 until mid-2010. He legally couldn’t leave the country — so how exactly did he manage a ritzy dinner in London?
Zuma’s foundation has dismissed the whole thing as “intellectually dishonest”, and frankly, the timeline just doesn’t add up.
Several other South Africans are also mentioned in the files, including Patrice Motsepe, former Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg, controversial mining heir Rob Hersov and the late hotel magnate Sol Kerzner — all linked through business or contact records. Crucially, there is no evidence that any of them were involved in wrongdoing.
There’s much spicier new revelations and fallout around Bill Clinton, ex-Prince Andrew and Mandelson, with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer under huge political pressure for appointing him previously, despite knowing about his Epstein connection.
As for Zuma, the bigger story in our opinion is this week’s High Court ruling about his endless “Stalingrad” strategy to avoid facing justice in the notorious early noughts arms deal. Yes, we’re still talking about that. His latest appeal was dismissed, but the court kicked the can down the road to April to make a final decision on the state’s bid to force proceedings regardless of any additional appeals Zuma makes – a potentially precedent-setting move.
Photo Credit: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
3️⃣We’re stoked for Tyla’s Grammy win — but the African category still misses the beat
Our fave, Tyla, has done it again. On Sunday night (early Monday morning for us), the Grammy Awards rolled around, and our popiano princess picked up Best African Music Performance for Push 2 Start from her self-titled debut album.
It’s Tyla’s second Grammy in this category, after winning it in 2024 when the award was first introduced. But it also puts a spotlight on an uncomfortable question: how exactly do the Grammys see African music?
Because while we’ll happily be looping Push 2 Start all week, the Best African Music Performance category remains controversial. The Recording Academy says it reflects a commitment to diversity and the global rise of African music.
But critics have long argued that the category flattens an entire continent’s sound into a single lane, forcing African artists to compete only with one another instead of across genres. There’s already grumblings from fans of hugely popular Nigerian stars like Davido and Burna Boy, who were also nominated, that they’re losing to Tyla. She’s controversially won best Afrobeats at other high-profile awards (her genre is more R&B and pop-inflected amapiano), and has tried to point out the categorisation problem.
The argument is simple — African artists should be allowed to compete across categories.
Adding insult to injury, the award wasn’t even shown during the main broadcast. As she joked on the red carpet: “I’m so mad. Like, I almost made it.” It’s also worth noting that the album itself, which was eligible for last year’s Grammys, was completely snubbed with zero nominations despite critical acclaim.
Elsewhere at music’s biggest night:
- Another South African export, Trevor Noah, who hosted the awards for the sixth and final time after being begged to return (love that for us), upset Donald Trump with jokes about Greenland, Epstein and Bill Clinton — prompting Trump to threaten legal action on Truth Social. 🤭
- Artists used the stage to protest raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with pins, speeches and visible support for immigrants.
- Bad Bunny made history by winning Album of the Year for a fully Spanish-language record — and his quiet, emotional reaction stole the show.
A big night. Big wins. And still, big questions about who gets to define “African music” on the world’s biggest stage.
Read our full explainer here.
That’s it from us at The Wrap, an award-winning product of explain.co.za – simple news summaries for busy people. 💁🏾♀
The Wrap is sponsored by explain’s agency division. We specialise in content marketing for purpose-driven organisations, often with a pan-African reach. Mail info@explain.co.za for a quote.
🇸🇺🇧🇸🇨🇷🇮🇧🇪
Remember to share the love. 💫
Tell your friends to sign up:
📩 Email: http://explain.co.za/subscribe
📲 Our new WhatsApp channel: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vac06yM8kyyLmOulb80J
_Till next time, goodbye from the team, Verashni, Kajal, Tshego, Fatima and Kamogelo._ ✌🏽
