I can understand the embarrassment of a State President being booed by large numbers of a crown in front of foreign dignitaries.   I cannot understand why people are not more interested in investigating why the people are booing than who the people were booing.  The ANC has apparently promised a full investigation of this matter and they are going to get to the bottom of who was booing.  When you read something like that, as a lawyer, you just want to laugh.  

Unless they are going to come up with some nonsense, without any names, facts or figures, that the people booing were from an opposition party, what on earth do they hope to achieve?  What crime have the people booing committed?  Will they be charged for bad manners?  They seem to forget that there is such a thing called “freedom of speech” and while it has limits, such as hate speech, booing somebody is not going to constitute any criminal offence.  Apart from that, I wonder how they plan to prove who was booing – by reviewing video footage?  Does the fact that somebody’s mouth was open indicate that they must have been booing or could they have been doing something else?  The story is so ludicrous that I am surprised that they ran with it for about 2 days threatening the action and it is one of those where you almost dare the people to say please, go ahead and arrest 3,000 people for booing and see what happens next.  Unlike Putin’s Russia, we do actually have some rights and while quite honestly, if I was in the crowd, I would not have booed, despite my feelings towards the President, because I don’t think it was the right occasion for that, I cannot possibly imagine what they hope to achieve other than stopping booing at other events by making people believe that actually if you do boo the President, you could be prosecuted.  The people who really walk away with egg on their faces are those who stand up and announce to the press that action is going to be taken!  Oh please, who do you think you are fooling?

It is hard to separate the booing of President Jacob Zuma at the memorial service of Nelson Mandela, from what is going on with the e-tags.  They definitely appear to be linked to a general dissatisfaction with the way things are in South Africa at the moment.  That however can be said in many countries around the world at many times, and there is only one thing that counts and that is how people vote.  I would be surprised if we see election results next year that are any different to the results of previous years.  Perhaps we will see 2% or 3% of votes taken away from the ANC and going to smaller parties, but I don’t believe that the vast majority of our people are going to, because they are upset with e-tags, suddenly now start voting for the Democratic Alliance or some new party.  If they don’t, then there is not much one can argue about – if you elect the same people year after year, and they make decisions that you don’t like, then you will simply have to abide by them.  One gets a chance every five years to choose new leaders and you cannot on the one hand vote for the same people and on the other hand continually boycott their proposals.  The problem for the other political parties is that it is only the ANC who has struggle credentials and I think most voters will ultimately vote on that basis and not on the basis of a R200 million house or e-tags or all the various other issues that have so infuriated people recently.  If the ANC is returned to power with its usual majority, they will also do so then with a sense that regardless of what decisions they take, they will remain in power and so, just like Zimbabwe before us, it is an interesting phase that we are going through and I think it is probably still too early for people to forget that it was indeed the ANC who liberated South Africa, but one thing is for sure, if they continue their unpopular policies, then they will have more embarrassing results than just the booing that we saw of Jacob Zuma in years to come.

I have been running my own law firm for more than 18 years now.  It does not seem long to me, because I know how quickly that time has flown by, but when I think about it in the context of some of my staff then I realise it is a long period of time.  I have staff members that are 20 or 21 and it means when I started my business they were 1 or 2 years old!  That also tells you how quickly life goes by and whereas the average 21 year old does not believe that, and believes that their time is now and their moment in the sun is going to last for a long time, the reality is that time really does fly, and every year it gets faster. Those are all clichés, they have been said by many people before, and when I think about it in the context of my business and the age of some of the people working, I appreciate it.  

You can become a lawyer these days by the age of 22 and when I studied you had to have another degree first before you could qualify for an LLB – it was then a post-graduate degree – in other words, you were only allowed to do it once you already had another degree.  In those days it was hard to become a lawyer before 24 and if you think that most men had to go to the army, although fortunately while I was at University that system was done away with, most male lawyers would have been 27 before they even began their careers.  It is also a reminder that opportunities don’t come your way every day and that the bravado and brashness you have when you are young, when you believe because things are going well and lots of opportunities are coming your way now it will continue that way, is just an illusion.  Don’t be one of the many who regret the things they never did and the opportunities you never took.

I loved the recent cover of Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine, which compared the BlackBerry phone with stone-age artefacts, a skull and weapons and is entitled “How Blackberry became a relic”.  I am not terribly anti BlackBerry, which really was a leading product only five years ago, but the cover is firstly an extremely witty but true cover and it is also a reminder to all businesses and business people how quickly one’s business can change.  If you don’t keep relevant, if you don’t keep up to date and if you don’t supply what the market wants, you will be out of business.  

Business is ultimately about keeping your clients happy and to do that you at the very least have to match your competition, if not beat it.  BlackBerry fell behind the times and ultimately it was left with only two markets in the world where it still did fairly well – South Africa and Saudi Arabia.  There is no getting out of the hole they are in and like the Sony Walkman, the name and the product will soon be forgotten.

I often find the traffic along Jan Smuts Avenue or William Nicol in the afternoon frustrating, but it is nothing compared to Sandton.  If you have the bad luck to have to attend a meeting, or be leaving Sandton anywhere between 4.30 pm to 5.30 pm, the traffic is absolutely gridlocked and a very short drive can take a considerable time.  I managed to travel 7 kilometres from Rosebank to the advocates’ chambers in Sandton in 35 minutes recently and that is pretty much average running speed.  That is undoubtedly far worse than the traffic anywhere close to my offices or on my route home!  The worst part is that the vast majority of that time was spent covering three or four blocks in Sandton at a rate which is far slower than any taxi could drive you around a city with 8 million people living in it, namely New York City.   

The Sunday Times came out with their annual rich list and it was topped by Christo Wiese.  The only person on the rich list that I personally know, did not make the Top 20 this year, coming in at 24th with R1,7 billion and that is Markus Jooste.  I sat on the Board of the Racing Association with him for 4 or 5 years and he was by far the most brilliant man I have ever come across – incredibly intelligent and intimidating in his knowledge of so many fields.  As a result, I always invested in the shares Steinhoff and was sad that shortly after I sold out of my Steinhoff shares, they added on another 40% or so in the last six months!  It was also his horse, Yorker, who edged out Master Sabina by a neck in winning the Summer Cup.  

I did like the comments of the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, that the top 100 taxpayers in England, who pay 20% of the tax of the entire country, should actually be celebrated and perhaps that is a thought for South Africa.  Forget about telling us who are the wealthiest people but tell us who the top 100 contributors to tax are and let us celebrate them and hope for more and more people like them, because it can only be good for our country.  The wealth of successful people like this, and particularly those who pay their fair share in tax, is only to be celebrated and admired.

In my preparation for a trial recently I spent some time reading the report of the clinical psychologist for the Road Accident Fund detailing our client’s head injury.  Our client had to be incubated and at one stage had a GCS of 9/15 with a fracture of the skull base and an occipital fracture as well. She is left with headaches and the expert for the Road Accident Fund describes this as “a moderate concussive brain injury”.  The expert goes on to say that she will finish school, achieving a Grade 12 education and this is exactly what she was likely to achieve in life before the accident.  In other words, really, there is nothing wrong with her at all and she will still on to be whoever she could have been.  

By comparison, our experts say that before the accident she was a child with a bright average ability and now suffers from neuropsychological difficulties.  Her verbal functioning is now in the borderline range and her non-verbal functioning is in the average range.  Her mother says she is hyperactive, she is mentally slow and our clinical psychologist says of the brain injury that our client sustained “a brain injury of such severity that it cannot be ignored …”.  Were it not for the accident, our client would have been able to go on and study at University.  It is again a reminder, and I have dealt with this in my blog before, that it is all good and well to hear advertisements on the radio that the Road Accident Fund will help people with their claims, but if they are going to send the people to experts who basically trivialise a very serious brain injury and make out that there is nothing wrong with the person, then that free assistance is as good as what is being paid for the advice.  In other words, you get what you pay for, and if you pay nothing, you are normally going to get a very poor result.

There is only one topic around the world today.  Nelson Mandela died last night, Thursday 5 December.  Everyone will have their own thoughts own memories.  Mine will be of his release, of shaking his huge hands over a fence at the Wanderers cricket ground and how a country that was meant to go up in flames didn’t, largely because of him.  The world media came to South Africa in 1994 for a blood bath and civil war and neither transpired. He had a wonderfully long life, and an incredible one and one can only think how all of futures would have been different if he was not the leader he was at that crucial time in our history.  If he had been an ordinary politician like the ones we have now instead of an extraordinary great man.

The Nedbank Challenge takes place at the Gary Player course at Sun City this weekend.  By Sunday afternoon, at the end of four days of play, the winner is looking at in excess of $1.2 million and the prize money for second and third also makes the prize money for horseracing look quite miserable!  Even the last placed player in the field gets $100 000 which is R1 million for those of you without a ready placed calculator.

There is big money to be won, world ranking points and while we don’t have the best American players in the world at Sun City, we do have some Americans and most of the top Europeans and all of the top South Africans.  To me, and I would have tipped him even if he did not have the most incredible year that he has already, it is hard to look past Henrik Stenson.  Sun City is a course that he has always done well at, and has won on previously and so he is certainly my tip for the weekend.  If anything, the full schedule that he has had, in winning both the European Order of Merit as well as the FedEx Cup may make him a little bit tired, and just coming off a break now, he may not be in the form that he was a few weeks ago.  I always thought that his very controlled manner of play and his constant use of his 3 wood will mean that he will never be far away from the front.  It is certainly a very exciting weekend, attended by just about every golfer and half of Sandton, and there is an incredible energy at Sun City during the event.

I am very relieved that November is over.  It has to be the craziest month of the year.  Not only is it a particularly busy month for lawyers, in the last month of trials for the year, but it is a ridiculously busy month for companies and organisations.  It features the AGM of the Law Society, it has Council meetings for me and for anybody with children, there is also one function after another to attend – whether it be prize giving, carols by candlelight, talent show competitions and basically invariably an evening or an afternoon for every extra-mural activity your children have taken part in during the year.  It really would make a lot of sense if companies and organisations could actually move their annual general meetings a little bit earlier, to perhaps September or October, for example, because anybody with children has so many commitments in November that you often barely have a day without an activity to attend.

This is a never-ending saga, with government Ministers going to court against the Public Protector.  There have now been allegations that photographs of the compound cannot be published, which were then retracted and corrected with a statement that security features cannot be identified.  City Press however went out of their way to list all of those security features and some of them to me are quite understandable, such as bullet-resistant glass in the house, and I guess every house needs a high security fence, although at R9,2 million that is quite expensive.  It also probably makes sense to have helipads for helicopters to land, but I am not quite sure why President Zuma’s bodyguards need to have Astroturf soccer pitches for them to play on.  

One must not forget the R582 million which was spent tarring the P15 road linking Nkandla with Kranskop.  The roads had to be upgraded as the 200 km stretch of road to the King Chaka International Airport apparently poses a huge transportation challenge to the President apparently.  One must say that this is turning out to be a very expensive endeavour and you will have to hope that our next President lives quite close to major roads, so that they do not all have to be upgraded, which of course the people in the town will always no doubt appreciate also.   On the other hand, the outgoing Auditor-General apparently says we lose R30 billion a year as a result of bad spending and the Treasury says corruption is estimated at about R30 a year, so that is R60 billion of taxes a year that is currently being wasted.  I think City Press’s editorial was quite important and they said, “The thing is, we are getting used to it.  Flip through the newspapers, surf websites or watch television and you will see that levels of impunity are growing … We are growing immune to the corruption.  We complain and hate it, but don’t really do anything about it.”   R60 billion as they point out could build 670 000 RDP houses a year or let the government give out 5 million free laptops to the next generation of young people.

I was quite shocked to hear how much money is involved in illegal cigarette trade.  Apparently, it only costs about R2,00 to manufacture a box of cigarettes with the result that, if you can get it into the country without paying tax, there are huge profits to be made.  The Sunday Times in fact said that the profit on illicit cigarettes can exceed that on guns, cocaine and everything else!  This all came about due to the crackdown that SARS apparently plans on the tobacco industry because many in the tobacco industry are dodging tax and excise duty.  Amongst the companies they apparently are going to look at is a company called Amalgamated Tobacco Manufacturing or ATM which is apparently linked to Edward Zuma, the eldest son of President Zuma.  The company and Edward Zuma have denied that he is a director anymore but it will be interesting to see what comes out as ATM apparently sells their cigarettes at R7,00 a pack and each box of cigarettes needs to attract at least R13,00 of tax, so it sounds like there is something certainly strange in that price! 

E-tolls go live on 3 December 2013.  I know a lot of people are going to say that one should not register, not buy one’s e-tolls, pay for one’s e-toll registration or take part in the process.  People seem to believe that if they don’t take part, the whole system will crumble.  I don’t like the whole e-toll process, but I don’t believe that e-tolls are worthy of a civil disobedience campaign.  That applied to apartheid, but it certainly does not apply, to my mind, to e-tolls.  

Court challenges have been brought and lost and essentially at the end of the day the government voted in by the majority of the people have decided that this is what will be implemented and nothing is going to stop it. Civil disobedience or ignoring the process is only going to lead to people being arrested, getting fines and ultimately to a huge late stampede for registration.  There are many things in life that we don’t like, but we have to follow some of them and this is going to be one of those.