New weekly columnists for Business Day

This week in Business Day, former President Thabo Mbeki writes on the remarkable co -operation agreement signed in Addis Ababa by Presidents Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and Salva Kiir Mayardit of South Sudan. The two states agreed to set up a demilitarised buffer zone along their border and resume oil exports by next year. Disputes over the border and oil transport fees brought the countries to the brink of war in April. The deal, brokered by Mbeki in his role as African Union mediator, allows South Sudan to resume crude oil production of 350 000 barrels a day, production it shut down in January.

Also this week... former Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon returns from a tour on 'national service' as SA's Ambassador to Argentina with a sparkling new weekly column in Business Day, starting today. Widely read, well-connected and even admired by some of his former political foes, expect Leon to find novel ways to mix the ' fight back' politician with patriotic diplomat as he re-discovers his homeland after a three-year posting. He is just in time for Mangaung!

On Wednesday, one of SA's most original thinkers, Free Market Foundation chief Leon Louw, also starts a weekly column with a passionate defence of free market capitalism as the only way out of the economic crisis we are in. Governments, not capitalists, he reminds us, started the crisis.

And on Thursday one of SA's most highly regarded former politicians and a leading African National Congress intellectual, Pallo Jordan, begins a weekly column in the paper. Jordan is one of the guardians of the ANC's history and traditions - don't trifle with him.