We have always heard of one or two schools with one or two pupils that use steroids in an effort to get ahead. Getting ahead of course is quite relative because you are now taking dangerous substances simply to excel at schoolboy sport where there is not even any money involved! It is amazing now to read reports in the Sunday Times that for example in March alone 175 pupils on the East Rand tested positive for performance enhancing drugs.

It seems that there is constant and never-ending pressure on young people to try and do anything to get ahead, and it is not only silly but it is also very dangerous – what about the young man being involved in the scrum expecting to come up against a young man of a similar size, but comes up against a mismatched steroid fed monster who is 10 or 15 kg heavier than perhaps he should be, and all of it muscle, that he would never have had if his body was growing normally. It seems that children are certainly becoming more advanced in every single way and from steroids all the way through to the photographs and videos that they are taking and sending around, people are getting into things they should not do at all probably, and in some cases much earlier than they ever should.

The Sansui Summer Cup takes place Turffontein Race Course this Saturday and it is the biggest race on the Highveld. I’ve had three runners in the race and not one of them has ever even made the top 10, let alone run a place, so I will hope that their use of my horse, Soul Master, who ran last year’s race in their promotion material and on their website, is going to be a good sign that he can at least make the top 10 this year! The Summer Cup website can be found at www.sansuisummercup.co.za/page/racing/index.

I don’t think that the distance really suits Soul Master, and at 16/1 he is obviously a bit of an outsider, but if it rains a lot before the race, and they go off at a quick pace, he will definitely have a chance and for 2 minutes I will be dreaming of the R1,2 million first prize! Last year, he led with 800 metres to go and very quickly went backwards so the dream lasted a little over a minute on that occasion!

This week sees the latest edition of the Nedbank Challenge which some people still call the Million Dollar because that used to be the first prize. It is a bit more now, but that is not particularly rare in the golfing world anymore when the top golfers compete for probably at least 40 tournaments a year where the first prize is more than $1 million. The sad thing about the tournament is that few American players come now. It is a function of how far America is from South Africa in terms of a direct flight, where the flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg is 17 hours and from New York it is obviously longer and with the money not being so exciting anymore, the days of people like Tiger Woods coming to Sun City are over.

Tiger did come to Sun City and I was lucky enough to be there on that day and watch him play. We really have not had the American greats in recent years. On the positive side, the top 10 in the world is largely dominated by European players at the moment and almost all of the European leading players, apart from the world’s number 1, Rory MciIroy, will be there.
It is somewhat disappointing that Rory Mcilroy will not be there as a few years ago he pulled out, citing flu, and promised that he would return the next year. He however has never come to Sun City again and like Tiger he seems to be trying to play a very small number of events around the world and not necessarily travel. He did however pull out of the event before, and in fairness one would expect him to honour his commitment to return, and to have done so already. My money is going to be on Lee Westwood and I also think Louis Oosthuizen, who has come so close so many times this year, must be due a win and this could well be the course where he picks it up.

I have read a number of surveys of CEO’s, largely of American corporations, where typically speaking the least hours any of them work a week were 60. Many of them work 80 to 90 hours a week which if you divide it by 7 days a week is 11 hours a day Monday to Sunday. I don’t really find that strange, although obviously it does not work for one if you have small children.

I break up my week according to my travelling patterns in trying to avoid heavy traffic, but I have never been afraid to put in long hours. An advocate friend of mine, whose intellect I admire tremendously, told me when I called him on Friday evening at approximately 9 pm to discuss a matter, that I need to “get a life” because I was calling him to discuss a case so late but I have never been troubled by people calling me to discuss business at any time, and so it was not a surprise for example when my accountant phoned me at 4 pm on Sunday afternoon to discuss some of the normal issues.

I don’t think when you are running a big business that you can say that work ends at 5 pm or that work ends at 5 pm on a Friday and switch your phone off – business simply does not work that way any more and with e-mail and instant communication people typically expect you to get back to them within 24 hours. At the end of the day we all make a choice as to what we want and what hours we are prepared to work, and I think if one wants to run a business well and successfully, one cannot be scared of hard work and hard work is not generally in my opinion limited to 35 or 40 hours a week. Of course, that is if you are running your own business – if you are working for somebody else you cannot be expected to work 7 days a week and we can all be working hard on different things – it might be studying after a working day is over or indeed the incredible work associated with bringing up children!

The Nkandla-story is not going away and obviously people are leaking papers left, right and centre at the moment, with the Mail & Guardian revealing that President Jacob Zuma does indeed have a bond over the property. The bond, for a total development of approximately R235 million is R900 000,00, so clearly that is not the real source of finance. The Mail & Guardian newspaper revealed that in addition to that he was provided with exhaustive details about the progress of the security project at his Nkandla complex. Cabinet Ministers were involved with overseeing the work and hurrying up certain parts of the work. The documents that the Mail & Guardian say they have in their possession also show that the three residences that President Zuma told Parliament were entirely paid for by his family received “large contributions” from the Department of Public Works. They say that his share of the entire project will be R10,6 million.

The Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, which seats 80 000 hosts Wales vs New Zealand this weekend. It’s a magnificent rugby stadium in a quaint, but modern little city which I had the fortune of visiting during the London Olympics earlier this year. I attended the Bronze medal play off between Korea and Japan, which was won by Korea 2 – 0, and I would certainly be happy to visit Cardiff again, not something that I could say for example about Blackpool, where I saw the British Open earlier this year.

Cardiff, with those of you who have seen London, is not that different, except much smaller. It has a vibrant little city centre and because of its size everything is pretty close together. All the hotels are within easy walking distance of the stadium itself, the stadium is right next to all the major transport routes and bus facilities, not to mention trains to London and various other areas, and as a result it is pretty easy to get in and out of the stadium fairly quickly. The small but compact city has a lovely castle at the one end with a magnificent huge park and it is the kind of city where, if you are in the area and you hear a sports event is taking place, you would want to go because it really is optimised beautifully for such events.

The Apple retailers often sell a rechargeable credit card sized device, thicker than a credit card, called a Mophie. Its a battery which once charged, you can use to recharge your iPhone. It’s one of many gadgets I bought for my iPhone, including a blood pressure monitor, but this one I actually do use a lot and it’s saved me quite a few times recently, when my phone has run out of power and I’ve been able to plug it into the Mophie quite quickly and recharge. Whether of course this is going to work on the new iPhone is another question and I’ll guess it’s probably not! It’s certainly a product I would recommend for anybody who does own an iPhone.

The Hawks are apparently going to arrest a number of people in connection with fraudulent garnishee orders. The debt collection industry seems to be a very interesting one, with certain courts favoured by the industry as given order more easily than other courts and as we saw with the Marikana incident debts, and overextended creditors, can lead to tragedy as that was one of the underlying problems in that dispute, not only just the issue of salaries.

A Moneyweb investigation revealed that in one case the debt collecting firm had charged R20 000 all in, for the repayment of a R1 000 loan! There are far too many companies extending far too much credit, at very high interest rates, rather recklessly to too many consumers and that is already weighing down our economy. One then ends up with products where the name of the game is trying to work out on what day the money will be deposited by the employer into the employee’s account so the debit orders for the loans can all go off on exactly that day, because a day later there’s often no funds. Some companies have products that submit the same debit order to the bank day after day, for a number of days, until the money is paid in and it can be debited, because many employers as a result now pay the money in on different days.

To now hear that court documents in matters involving these orders can’t even be found at the courts where the orders were supposedly granted, puts a whole new twist onto the story and the National Credit Regulator or NCR for short, really needs to do a lot more to curb the indebtedness amongst the working population and rein in these companies that recklessly extend credit to people who cannot possibly afford one more loan on top of all the debts they already have.

I get horrific tales all the time of people who had to pay out at the CCMA, despite all sorts of terrible things that their employee has done. A perception has developed, and to an extent it is true, that the CCMA really sides with employees. Part of the problem however is that people don’t hold disciplinary hearings, and often just fire somebody on the spot for things like theft, etc and as a result they end up paying out not because there was merit to the employee’s case, but because they never followed the correct procedure.

I do think that the CCMA does favour employees more than employers, but if you hold the correct procedure and fire somebody for valid reasons, you will go there on a far stronger footing. An employer obviously always has his or her revenge in terms of the reference that they give, and it is very difficult for anybody to have a hole in their CV or if any call to that former employer will result in a negative reference. On the other hand, if you take a policy of holding fair hearings, and fighting any case that may be brought afterwards, you will find that you are going to win far more cases, as opposed to simply giving in at conciliation and making an offer.

In my firm we object firstly to the conciliation and arbitration process being held on the same day and simply demand that the Commissioner issues a certificate that the matter cannot be resolved and we fight the case the whole way, with the result that, and certainly in the last five years, we have never lost a CCMA case.
The bottom line is, if you are prepared to fight and the facts are on your side, you will not lose – or very often.

The inflation figures we get are always based on a basket of goods as well as interest rates. Changing what is in the basket obviously also will change the inflation rate as different items go up differently and so it is always interesting to discover how the nuts and bolts are changed – or in this case, for example, that the inflation figures which have relied on, amongst other things, the increases in the price of nuts and lentils will be replaced with the cost of Vodka and cheese going forward!

The new basket of goods will also leave out the cost of Vienna sausages but making it more modern, it will include the cost of tablet computers, which one would imagine will bring down the inflation rate because those things generally come out of the higher price and then are reduced. Realistically however, they are also going to give a heavier weighting to electricity and fuel, which are both items that make a larger impact on any person’s monthly “basket of goods” as it were and which are both going up all the time, so that could see inflation going up. At the moment inflation is at approximately 6% and obviously that is a key figure to all employers when they start salary increases in February and March 2013.

I recently got some of the new notes, and I am sure by now most of you have come across the R100,00 and R200,00 notes which I was really impressed with. They are probably a little bit too modern for the average person’s taste, looking very much like money designed by some young artist with fluorescent sparkling green on the R100,00 note indicating the amount, but hopefully they achieved the purpose of it being less easy to copy and I am sure everyone will be very happy to see Nelson Mandela’s face on the notes. I hope that they can keep some of the animals, because I think that is a tourist attraction in itself, as there cannot be too many countries that have buffalo and wild animals on their notes, and certainly not the kind of wild animals we have, but having Nelson Mandela on the notes is also something to certainly be proud of. Let me know your opinion on our new notes?

The hail that has been falling recently seems to be out of this world. At de Broglio Inc we’ve already had two company cars damaged by it, and it is amazing to see pieces of hail, falling on a regular basis, that are literally almost the size of apples and in some cases even bigger. The picture alongside shows an apple with some of the hail that fell on 8 November 2012, damaging another car of mine but the previous storm about two weeks ago, did considerable damage to cars and it must have been a very frightening experience for anybody caught on the roads at that time.

I generally try to avoid driving in heavy rain, because it is particularly dangerous and one often finds multiple car pile-ups. I guess also, in our line of work, doing personal injury claims, we hear far too many stories about people who have bad accidents during adverse weather conditions and it is best to avoid it if one has the choice.

I recently had occasion to have an MRI scan again, to investigate some tension headaches that I’ve been having, and apart from terrifying me, as they always do, with thoughts of cancer, brain tumours and who knows what else they seem to find inside my head, I must say that it’s probably the least pleasant examination, while you’re awake, that I’ve been through with a doctor. I’d far prefer to have root canal treatment, something I didn’t enjoy very much, with a dentist any day of the week than go for an MRI scan.
There is something about being laid down, and having a cage fitted over your head before being slid into an incredibly narrow space after which the machine starts bombarding your with noises that seems to induce panic. I didn’t have any medication before the exam, but I was told that approximately 30 to 40% of all people having MRI scans have pills to calm them down, but they can’t drive afterwards. An attorney I know, was sent by the Road Accident Fund, when he brought a whiplash claim against them for an MRI scan. He had to be sedated before he would go into the machine and while that’s probably a severe reaction, I must say that I do understand why people suffer from claustrophia or panic attacks. Once you get used to it, it’s quite calming to actually have some relief from the ringing telephone at the office and the non-stop emails.

I have always enjoyed science fiction, although Star Wars is not really the kind of science fiction which I like, which would be more of a serious nature. Star Wars has had too many “cute” characters and also often takes more of a jovial, comedian approach to science fiction.

While most people who thought that they got to the end of Star Wars, the announcement by Disney on 30 October 2012 that they had bought LucasFilm from George Lucas caught everyone by surprise. George Lucas is 68 and wants to take more of a backseat and I guess, having sold his creation for $4,05 billion he will be quite happy to relax and enjoy his money. Disney has announced that they are going to revive the Star Wars franchise, and having spent that amount of money to buy it, you can imagine what is going to be spent on marketing, etc and that the seventh film in the series will be released in 2015 and thereafter there will be new Star Wars movies every two to three years. George Lucas gets half of the money in Disney shares and the other half he gets in cash, so he will now have to think how to spend, at the age of 68, $2 000 million..

I was great to see the result of the Census come out. I am someone who really likes to take part in these types of surveys, which are for the good of the country, and I must say, with some embarrassment, that because I moved at the time and did not complete the form in time, that my family, to our embarrassment, are not included in this year’s figures. So the population is a little bit bigger than the 51,8 million that South Africa now has!

There is going to be a lot of news that will come out in the weeks ahead from the Census as the data slowly sinks into people’s consciousness and different aspects of it are investigated. The notables, that the media has already jumped on, are of course that the number of people with no education in South Africa at all, has more than halved, which is a fabulous sign, although we have a long way to go, especially when one looks at the text book deliveries in Limpopo. Friends of Julius Malema have apparently also won tenders for food that is supplied to pupils at school who, to no-one’s surprise, are now not getting the deliveries. The other thing that I found of interest was something that is taking far longer than one would have expected, and that is the move to the big city and the economic powerhouse of South Africa.

The reality of the matter is that Johannesburg and Pretoria provide the financial capital and drive, not only in South Africa but much of Africa, and it was surprising that for quite some time Gauteng was not the most populous Province, but that continual movement into the Gauteng Province has seen that it is now not only the richest Province in South Africa, which it has always been, but also the Province with the most people. Of course the job market and more money in Gauteng compared to smaller places like Durban, will continue to drive people to move to Gauteng. Only 56% of all people living in Gauteng were in fact born in Gauteng and I am one of the minority having been born in Addington Hospital on the Durban beachfront.

Of the population 23,7% live in Gauteng and we will no doubt continue to see it exploding, in Johannesburg in particular. One only has to look at Fourways which only 20 years ago was a semi-rural area, which is now expanding rapidly and of course we have the next mega development being launched soon, namely Douw Steyn City, right next to Dainfern.

Last December a 14 year old girl died in America after drinking two large cans of Monster Energy drink. The drinks contain 240 mg of caffeine, and under new Canadian laws drink with that much caffeine in them are going to be banned. This is going to affect the caffeine levels in products sold in Canada such as Red Bull.

While doctors believe that adults can have up to 400 mg of caffeine per day, they have concerns that this limit is not safe for teenagers and young people and can lead to heart-related problems. It seems particularly to affect people who may have an irregular heartbeat. I don’t have any information in this field of law on our personal injury website at www.personalinjury.co.za, but it is no doubt going to become a growing field of law in due course with many products that are sold as food and drinks and not necessarily always safe and subject to the same controls as, for example, new medicines would be.

I was surprised to hear that the JSC once again turned down Jeremy Gauntlett. He is one of the great legal minds in our country and represented attorneys when the Road Accident Fund tried to implement direct payments. He is terribly entertaining in Court, perhaps a bit biting and sarcastic at times as he doesn’t suffer fools well, but he is a man with a sharp mind, and there is no doubt, from a legal point of view that he will be an absolute asset to the Bench.
The most common thing you hear amongst attorneys, whenever they talk about him being turned down again (this is the fourth time now) is that it is wonderful for clients, etc that he is not becoming a Judge, because they will be able to continue to have access to his wonderful legal abilities. It is amazing that an advocate who is in such high demand, and is obviously making a fortune, even wants to take the huge reduction in salary that becoming a Judge will entail but I do hope that eventually the JSC will make a non-political decision, and appoint him as a Judge. He is certainly, from an attorney’s perspective, one of the sharpest legal minds at the Bar and if he wants to become a Judge, they should really snap him up.

I recently watched a movie called “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” which is a movie by Joe Cross which is really about weight loss and eating healthily. There is a website that has followed the movie called “Reboot your Life” and you can find it at www.jointhereboot.com .

What is really inspirational about the movie is that it shows you people that are terribly out of shape, starting with Joe himself, and then followed by a truck driver called Phil, and how they lose a tremendous amount of weight. When you see with your own eyes how dramatic the change is for these individuals, one cannot help but feel inspired.

Basically the idea is to stop the junk food, get a juicer and go on a liquid food and vegetable diet for 60 days while losing a tremendous amount of weight and getting one’s health back. Of course you can do it for shorter time frames and the message is not that you must have a juice diet, but it is ultimately that we need to stop putting rubbish into our bodies and understand that the vast majority of diseases and illnesses that we currently face are really self-inflicted. The movie itself has won a number of documentary awards but it is not going to suit everybody – you need to be open to hearing that what you eat and drink is bad for you, as otherwise you are not going to enjoy the film.

Defamation cases generally end in embarrassment for all the parties involved, and that certainly proved to be the case for President Jacob Zuma. We heard the huge impressive stories, many years ago, as to the millions he would be suing Zapiro for over some of his cartoons and last week he backed down and reduced the claim to R100 000,00 and demanded an apology.

When the Sunday Times and Zapiro refused to give him that apology, he dropped his case altogether and agreed to pay their legal costs. They congratulated him, as I guess the winning team must do, in showing good sportsmanship for recognising that in South Africa the President can be criticised, but it is a terrible embarrassment for him and whoever advised him to bring this legal action to have had such a high profile case in the media for so many years end like such a damp squib. You make such a song and dance about the millions you are going to be suing for, and then you withdraw your case and pay the other side’s legal costs while pretending you did it all in the interests of media freedom. Best not to waste time with defamation cases most of the time.

I was interested to read recent research indicating that chewing gum, as long as it is sugar free, leads to children having up to 60% fewer cavities! The key appears to chew gum that is flavoured with xylitol, which is a natural sweetener from fruits and has less calories than sugar and it apparently works best just as your children’s adult teeth come in at about ages 5 and 6.

Chewing gum increases saliva production which helps you neutralise acid and apparently that causes the teeth to re-mineralise - actually reversing some cavities. Another benefit of the gum that uses xylitol, because obviously gum using sugar like most do wont help, is that it inhibits the growth of bacteria. In fact, the benefits even seem to extend to reducing ear infections in children by up to 40%! I don’t think it is going to take off in schools, but a journalist writing for the New York Times wrote that the best way to tackle teeth problems is to encourage children at school to chew gum three to five times a day for 5 minutes each time.

Those following the news at all will note that a very impressive homestead is being built for President Jacob Zuma in Nkandla and of course there are also proposals to build and develop a nearby town. We were being told that this is all in the name of making the house more secure, although the costs of some R200 million, one may as well build a small town, and not just make a house secure. Apparently, Jacob Zuma has advised that he had no idea how much it was costing the government and said, “When people see my house on the TV, they must be thinking that government has built this for me. No, a large part of that has been done by the family.”

R582 million has been spent on a network of roads linking this home village with nearby towns, including Eshowe and now of course a proposed town is to be developed just 3 kilometres from his private home at an estimated cost of R2 billion. Newspaper reports indicate that of the R200 million being spent on upgrading his house, and this is the money the President does not know about, approximately R10 million is being paid by him and his family, so his suggestion that they are paying “a large part of that” is, and one would have to assume he did not realise, a huge exaggeration.