Warren Buffett, a man who carries in his walletr the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa, is 81 years old. Who will run his Berkshire Hathaway firm when he buys his way into heaven? That’s the question currently obsessing Wall Street. By RICHARD POPLAK

1Time’s new route to Mombasa, Kenya is an exciting expansion of its small but growing African network. It wants to get bigger, and – with other low cost airlines – make Africa’s exorbitant airfares a little cheaper. But it’s expanded just about as far as the continent’s governments will let it. By SIMON ALLISON.

The Economic and Business Outlook for South Africa 2012 is out. It is compiled by Business Unity South Africa and is meant to represent what Big Business feels about our economy. Well, the feelings aren’t particularly good. The odds are stacked too mightily against good growth. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

A careful look around shows that business people keep searching out new ways to do their work – melding together a careful attention to the value of providing good service with the liberating power of IT and the internet. It has always been predicted, and now, more and more it seems to be coming true. BY J BROOKS SPECTOR.

Last week, the NYPD descended on Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with an eviction notice for the Occupy Wall Street protesters. In the two months since the first activists set up camp, “the movement” has gone global and succeeded beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. So where to now? And, if nowhere, what’s been achieved? By KEVIN BLOOM.

American magazine Forbes is famous for its Rich Lists, profiling the world’s wealthiest individuals. Now it’s finally wised up to the fact that some Africans have serious bucks too. By REBECCA DAVIS.

After years of bad news at Transnet, we’re getting a flicker of some good news from Transnet Freight Rail. At a press conference on Tuesday, TFR chief executive Siyabonga Gama announced the company would be implementing scheduled rail links. The successful implementation will be one step closer to an efficient railway service and, hopefully, fewer trucks on our roads. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

President Jacob Zuma continued his tour of the Arabian Gulf on Tuesday. He is expected to sign a "Supplementary Protocol amending the Agreement for the Avoidance of Double Taxation and Prevention of Fiscal Evasion with Respect to Taxes on Income” in Oman – the so-called “sleepy Sultanate”. By KHADIJA PATEL.

No cabinet minister has disagreed with the National Planning Commission’s National Development Plan. On the contrary, the presidency has accepted it, and on Monday morning, the finance minister cited it approvingly in his speech at the Business Unity South Africa annual general meeting. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

The fine balance of the rights of landlords versus the rights of tenants is one of the big debates of our time. Or it certainly should be. It relates to how we balance the rights of rich and poor, and that old problem of property: when is a right limited and when is it not. But it must also be about wealth creation, the idea that we cannot just sit where we are now and leave it at that. By STEPHEN GROOTES.

The Development Bank of Southern Africa releases a “Development Report” each year, outlining what South Africa needs to do to become a successful developmental state. On Monday the DBSA released the 2011 report, which doesn’t make for happy reading, especially on political governance and the economy. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

Hey, someone had to write that headline. The De Beers Diamond Group will be bought by Anglo American for $5.1 billion. The Oppenheimer family is cashing out. Diamonds may be forever, but selling them, it seems, has a best-buy date. Not a desperately serious look by RICHARD POPLAK.

On Thursday the Constitutional Court heard a case involving this balance. Slightly surprisingly, several of the judges appeared to be standing up for the rights of the landlord. Yes really. STEPHEN GROOTES was in the public gallery.

You know the feeling. There was a wad of R100 notes in your wallet, and you don’t know where it’s gone. Could you possibly have dropped that much at ZAR last night? Or is the maid up to something fishy? Now, picture Jon Corzine’s pain. He’s mislaid six hundred million large, and the US government is coming to find it. By RICHARD POPLAK.

SABMiller is hoping to attract aspirant consumers, with its new cassava beer, Impala Cervejas. It's brewed in Mozambique, and currently available only in the north of that country, but will potentially be rolled out elsewhere on the continent if it proves a success. By THERESA MALLINSON.

There has been much discussion, thought and pontificating about the impact, importance and effect of Julius Malema's longish-march. But there hasn't been nearly as much examination of the other side of the coin. How did business do out of the march? Is its politicking getting any better? And what lessons has it learnt so far? It's time for a re-examination. By STEPHEN GROOTES.

The response to Steven Paul Jobs passing, on 5 October was not measured. The encomiums flowed like, well, encomiums usually do in our culture. But in many important respects, Steve Jobs deserved the accolades. He was a lousy person who shepherded amazing technological products into being. Steve Jobs, the just-released biography by Walter Isaacson, will remain the definitive account of his life for decades to come. By RICHARD POPLAK.

Facebook announced on Thursday plans to locate its next batch of server farms in a town on the edge of the Arctic Circle. The cold has its uses, it seems. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

We rejoin our ongoing drama, The Patent Wars in the consumer electronics space, with doddering giant Microsoft revealing that it is far from being out of top-spot contention. Microsoft signed a patent agreement with Compal, which means that companies accounting for half of all Android devices on the market have entered into patent licence agreements with it. How long before we see a vicious war erupt between Apple and Microsoft? By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

It’s the fastest growing of the planet’s giant industries, a trillion-plus dollar business that reaches three out of every four people alive, and a technology that’s changed the way we work, play and communicate. Now, based on the findings of an 18-year study that examined over 350,000 subjects, it appears that the core product of this industry – your own mobile phone – is not going to kill you. By KEVIN BLOOM.

Research in Motion has recently announced a new direction for its smartphones and tablet devices that will place it closer to its rivals in terms of integration between the two. Much like the way Apple and Google operating systems work, the BlackBerry smartphones and tablets of the future will share a single OS. SIPHO HLONGWANE spoke to the managing director for Benelux, Central Europe and Africa at RIM as well as the director for product management in Africa about the new developments.

Why are we using remuneration systems that seriously should have gone out of style with the end of the industrial age, or that are commonplace in sweat shops in economies that have no respect for human rights? With research showing that more money doesn’t bring better performance, isn’t it time we stopped handling talent like workhorses and started treating them like humans? By DAVE DUARTE and MANDY DE WAAL.

The world’s largest book retailer offers royalties to authors of self-published digital editions that traditional publishers can’t hope to match. But this is not the real reason that Amazon may be about to upend the publishing game as we know it. With 122 titles set for release this season, Amazon’s own imprints have the major New York houses in a panic. Who will the upheaval benefit? By KEVIN BLOOM.  

On Friday, the Competition Tribunal disallowed a proposed merger between the US-based Pioneer Hi-Bred International with Pannar Seed of South Africa. The merger would reduce the number of maize suppliers in the country, the commission said, and thus the prospects of maize prices going up were increased. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.

The Occupy JSE protest on Saturday proved only that the white middle class in SA has no stomach (or, possibly, no reason) for protest, and that black activists have more immediate concerns than aping a global trend. There'll be mass demonstrations in South Africa, all right, and soon, but they'll be in the home-grown mould and centred around local issues. BY OSIAME MOLEFE and PHILLIP DE WET.

New York bankers dismiss the Occupy Wall Street protests as the doings of out-of-work hippies. But on 15 October, as the campaign spread to 951 cities in 82 countries, the moneyed “1%” may be watching their flat-screen TVs in silent panic. As protests turned violent in Rome, a global manifesto endorsed by the likes of Noam Chomsky is lending the movement some long-awaited coherence. By KEVIN BLOOM. 

In what may be the first major natural resources buy for a Chinese parastatal in North America, Sinopec is buying Canadian oil and gas explorer Daylight Energy Ltd. This could herald the arrival of the Chinese in the North American commodities market in a big way. By RICHARD POPLAK.

Not since Rudolph Giuliani brought down Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky has the world seen an insider trading scandal this big. But 22 years later, with hedge fund tycoons among the most powerful players in global finance, the scale of this type of fraud has only gotten exponentially larger. Who is Raj Rajaratnam and what did he do? By KEVIN BLOOM.

Much to the chagrin of politicians on both sides of the political spectrum, the campaign to Occupy Wall Street is gaining momentum by the day. The weekend saw the appearance at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park of one of the world’s most famous philosophers, and with long think-pieces now appearing in sober mainstream newspapers across the nation, the movement looks set to kick up yet another gear. By KEVIN BLOOM.

After two successive days of either broken or sluggish BlackBerry Internet Service across three continents, have Research In Motion finally made the blunder that will cost them their last remaining powerful asset: user loyalty? By SIPHO HLONGWANE.