With the ever increasing number of potholes on our roads, we get quite a few queries about claims against municipalities. We don’t generally do these, unless they involves substantial amounts, but they are not that hard to do if you are talking about something relatively simple, like a little bit of damage to your car.

There are very strict time limits in which to send a letter of demand to the municipality and at the moment, for example, we are doing one for a burst tyre and damaged tyre rims for one of our company cars. I think the whole claim is for R3 300,00 and that is precisely the kind of claim that is invariably not worthwhile taking to an attorney because there is work involved, and the fees are really going to outweigh the compensation. A claim like that can generally be handled against the municipality itself and of course a claim for damages to your possessions is not in fact a claim against the Road Accident Fund, which compensates you only for injuries that you suffer to your body.
 

After all the rain of January I guess it was quite predictable that we would have a hot February and it certainly has been cooking. I actually had to get a small air conditioner for my bedroom, because the temperature was in excess of 30° at 7 pm at night which does make it somewhat difficult to sleep!

The hottest days I ever remember, so far, were at the Shingwedzi Camp in Kruger Park, after preparing myself for a hot holiday in Zimbabwe, which was not as hot as I thought, when I arrive back in South Africa to 40° plus temperatures during the days and temperatures that remained 25,5° at 5 am in the morning! That was unfortunately in the days when I could not afford an air conditioned unit, and it was almost impossible to actually sleep.
 

Lest we ever forget it, golf is a game where things change dramatically all the time. I was following Louis Oosthuizen in his battle with George Coetzee when the unthinkable happened – he did not birdie the last two par 5’s, as one would have expected him to do and a player, many shots behind, Michiel Bothma, who had won the PGA previously, came through with a final 9-hole score of 30 and a 63 for the day to win the tournament by one shot. 

His dress code was quite incredible, as the photo alongside which I took, will show with long white bellbottom pants, which must have been at least 2 inches above the floor and his black shirt certainly did no favours in the heat! It is rather a large local tournament with more than R400 000,00 for first prize, about R300 000,00 odd for second prize and approximately R250 000,00 for third, so he certainly had a great afternoon!

I recently had the pleasure of going on a cruise. The benefits of a cruise ship are that you can basically go to a lot of different places while essentially staying in the same hotel room. In other words, you unpack your bags once into your room and then the ship heads off to different destinations. It certainly would be a great way to see a number of cities and I found it quite interesting.

I also notice that as with a few years ago many young South Africans were working in London but all of a sudden they are all working on cruise ships or looking for jobs on cruise ships. The Royal Caribbean cruise liners certainly seem to have a number of South African staff, particularly in the spa’s but clearly this is becoming a way that young people get to earn money and see a bit of the world – by working on a cruise ship. By all accounts however, the hours, including all the partying that they get up to, are incredibly long.
 

One of the things that I have certainly always known, that has been reinforced through my experience in law, is that the one thing you cannot afford to be without is car insurance. Those who don’t have car insurance and are involved in an accident, and that is if they are lucky and there is another party as opposed to a theft where you don’t even know who has your vehicle, is that it is a painful and expensive process that seldom reaps any return.

Too often people skim on insurance and say that they will cut that particular expense, so as to make their ends meet and if I had to take a hard line approach, I would say if you cannot afford insurance, you cannot afford a car. The reality is, one simple mistake that you make might leave you in a position where you owe literally hundreds of thousands to somebody else and are financially ruined. Even if you take the robust approach that you will never be to blame for an accident, you may very well be unfortunate enough to have an accident with somebody else, who like you, is not insured and if they have no assets, you are never going to recover any of the money that you spend on fixing or replacing the car.

We have one of the highest accident rates in the entire world, and there are very few adults who will go through life without having at least one accident. You should make sure that when it happens, you have an insurance company to call. Incidentally, because of a combination of factors including the fact that people who cannot afford insurance invariably cannot afford legal fees as well as the fact that you often spend thousands of rands and then discover that the other party has no money to pay the case you have just won. This is the type of legal case my firm does not even take on in the first place.
 

My firm gets asked on a regular basis to take on all sorts of maintenance cases. It is one thing we try to avoid like the plague. The bottom line is that an attorney may get you a better result than the legal official that is provided by the State for free, but the costs are so much higher that neither the attorney nor the client is going to end up being happy.

Of course, there are many excellent prosecutors and maintenance officers in the employ of the State and their system is not going to cost you anything. If you go to an attorney and the attorneys spends 20 hours on your matter, and it is quite easy to spend a lot more time than that, including a lot of time spent waiting at Courts, then you are going to pay R20 000,00 or R30 000,00 or more in fees. If, for example, you increase your maintenance from R2 000,00 a month to R3 000,00 and your fees are R30 000,00, it is going to take you 30 months of paying off the attorney before you are actually in a better position. It simply does not make sense, as far as I am concerned, except in the most extreme cases, to actually use attorneys in such cases and it is an example of another field of law where attorneys have largely lost out on the work – joining estates, debt collections and various other fields.

From an attorney’s point of view, there is little joy to be had in spending hours at Court, hours going through the client’s file and preparing and running a case and ultimately having to cut and reduce fees and then on top of that, wait forever to be paid.
 

The Super 14 is upon us once again and it is back to all the well known franchise – the Bulls, the Sharks and Supersport is showing many of the games in HD. I visited Japan some two years ago and I was amazed to discover in Tokyo how big Super 14 was, and that strangers in a restaurant could talk to me about Bulls players, etc. There is a much greater rugby following in Japan than most South Africans appreciate and hence it really did make sense to give them the 2019 World Cup.

I always enjoy the reality programmes and the local version of Survivor is interesting, apart from calling it a “celebrity version”. I only knew about four of the celebrities before the show began, including Okkert Brits who seems to single handed win every event week after week, and while they will certainly be celebrities by the end of the show, it is highly doubtful the tag fitted.

The countdown has really begun in earnest now, and it is sad to see how many negative people there are out there. Ticket sales is one thing, and I wrote on www.lawblog.co.za quite some time ago about how impossible the FIFA website was, and as somebody who really has considerable Internet experience as well as experience of purchasing things online.

A lot of people who would be able to go, and can afford tickets, such as a lot of my staff, still would not have credit cards because either they have not been approved for them, or they are aware of the risks involved with overspending on credit cards and choose to avoid them now. Without one, you could not book a ticket online, and so I really don’t think that is much of a problem – we will see a lot more tickets sold closer to the time when they distribute them over the counter as it were.

What is more concerning are all these overseas coaches and people who know nothing at all about South Africa who go on and on. I have been a victim of crime, but I can still say that there are certain parts of New York or London that I would be very nervous to go to by myself and I don’t think that the average tourist to South Africa, living in an hotel and going in buses to stadiums or tourist locations, is really in any risk of serious crime. If I had to warn them about something, I would say watch out for our roads – there are a lot of deaths and the compensation under the new Road Accident Fund Act is somewhat pathetic.
 

The Cabinet has announced the new proposals for the Road Accident Fund, a problem which will include no fault of having money for pain and suffering and reduced benefits and of course, about all schemes there will be almost no benefits at all, the name will include that work!

The Road Accident Benefits Scheme or RABS is going to increase the number of claims against the Road Accident Fund and here the only possible way of doing that is by reducing the already limited compensation.
 

Toyota has done immeasurable damage to its brand name with its recent recall and the fact that it appears from articles I have read in American newspapers, that they really tried to avoid the recall until the last second. In fact, it took the recordings of an experienced highway patrolman, calling in an emergency call, explaining that he could not stop the car and it was accelerating before he died together with all the occupants of his car, before they started attending to the recall.

In the US alone, at least 30 class action cases have been begun by personal injury attorneys and one imagines there are going to be some huge payouts. Whether the issue is a defective gas pedal or a floor mat, people have been injured and in some cases killed, and there is no doubt going to be some substantial compensation that is going to have to be paid by Toyota. Anybody driving any of the affected models really needs to get their car in very urgently to have the problem attended to.

I followed this story with interest about the couple who had won the R90 million Powerball, South Africa Lotto. The real winner must be very happy – they wanted privacy and upjumped a couple, who bought a ticket with the winning numbers the day after the draw and fooled all of the media!

There are continually robots out of order, particularly along William Nicol, and that is something that I have written about quite extensively, but it amazes me that more pointsmen are not put out on a regular basis either by the provincial government or by local residents. Everybody could save a fortune by contributing R10,00 a month, for example, to an organisation which sends staff round to affected robots, much like the Outsurance project. In particular, given that the problems often relate to construction work, it surely cannot be very difficult to make constructors include in their tender, when they tender for these construction jobs, for pointsmen and/or temporary robots for every time they cut off the lights – which appears to be almost all the time. These are not major issues to tackle or to resolve.

I think very few South Africans are aware as to how radical some elements of the Republican Party in America have become. During a recent holiday, I found myself glued to Fox News and watching Glenn Beck in particular go on and on warning all of the viewers about the threats of socialism and the Socialist Republic that Barack Obama is trying to create in America.

The virulent paranoid criticism of the government is quite incredible and he is one of their current heroes of the Tea Party movement which is driving to get Republican candidates it approves of and remove the democratic power. To quote a New York Times article about how busy the Tea Party members are at the moment, “Their task seems endless, almost overwhelming … there were rallies against illegal immigration to attend. There was a coming lecture about the fraud of global warming. There were shooting classes to schedule, and tips to share about the right survival food.” At that point, I realised just how tame our press is, and our politicians should never complain, and what a bunch of nutters America is filled with!
 

I am never quite sure if the SA Tennis Open is so well covered in the media, in recent years, because it is held at a casino complex, namely MonteCasino, or whether there is some delusion that tennis is still some major spectator sport.

I think there was a time in South Africa, because Wimbledon was about the only sports event that was allowed to be broadcast in terms of some of the anti-apartheid boycotts, that tennis really was big – but that’s way back in the past now. Quite frankly it is really a bunch of no names that come to the South African Tournament. Every year we get the media complaining that the Sun City Nedbank Challenge Golf Tournament does not have the big names that it used to have, but the names that it does have are far bigger and earn far more money than the tennis players who are brought to South Africa and yet they seem to get much more press coverage.

In short, my question is have the media got an incorrect sense of the pulling power of the two tournaments or is there just better marketing by the tennis tournament? One thing is for sure, whether you are at the complex, or you saw it on TV, half of the stands were empty and so people cannot really allege that tennis is more popular when they cannot fill a 3 000 seat arena and you will probably get in excess of 20 000 people at the final day of the Nedbank Golf Challenge alone.
 

Google Buzz is Google’s new social product tying in with G-Mail. It is a bit early for me to say whether or not it is going to be any fun, because I really have not tried it much, but have just noticed once again Google has put its foot in it slightly, raising various privacy concerns, etc. When Google Buzz came out, it basically immediately revealed your circle of friends and contacts to other friends and that is not really what you want from an e-mail programme! These have seemed to be rectified and it will be interesting to see how Google Buzz grows in popularity and how it competes with Facebook and Twitter.

I get quite a few e-mails from people whose claims have been handled by other attorneys and who tell me that their attorney has not managed to extract the money from the Road Accident Fund in three months after the case was settled and that they are very worried about that. I actually reassure them that this is quite a common problem at the moment, and whether you use the Sheriff of the Court to try and squeeze the money out of the Road Accident Fund, or you don’t, you still, either way, have tremendous problems in getting paid by the Road Accident Fund. 

The public version that the Road Accident Fund had been telling us lawyers, up until now, is that there are all sorts of computer issues or software changes and things like that, but one wonders whether or not it is actually a shortage of funds, and we are not going to see much slower payments in future. In other words, people that put in RAF claims against the Road Accident Fund are going to have to accept and understand that payment will not take place as quickly as it has in the past or that they may have heard from their friends.
 

The Telkom PGA will be taking place at my own Golf Club from 18 to 22 February 2010. It is always great to see your home course, in this case being the Woodmead course, because Country Club has two courses and the other one is known as Rocklands, on TV. It is also especially nice to walk around and watch professional players take on your course.

The player who wins the tournament normally does go on to achieve good things internationally and for example, two years ago it was won by Louis Oosthuizen, who has finished as the runner up in Dubai and is a regular high finisher on the European PGA Tour. Last year one of the pictures I took of the winner chipping out from the rose garden on the 18th hole, was published in the Times newspaper. That picture is alongside this article.

Divorce rates in America reveal some very interesting statistics. These basically indicate that when a woman is financially independent, and works, that divorce is less likely. In American States where less women work, the divorce rate is higher than in States where more women work. Basically what the statistics are showing is that the more economic independence and education women has, the more likely she is to stay married.

The budget will be out on 17 February 2010 and I am certainly hoping that the Road Accident Fund gets some more money. How they are going to balance the promises of extra social welfare, together with declining tax revenues, are naturally concerning for most to pay taxes, because there is a good possibility you may see some tax hikes. Already we have a situation where 24% of taxpayers carry 64% of the personal income tax burden and 50% of the taxpayers altogether only contribute 3,1% of the personal income tax. In other words, SARS needs to try and avoid squeezing the small minority of individuals in South Africa who pay the vast majority of taxes.
 

The Winter Olympics start Friday. I am looking forward to it, probably having watched more of the last Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics. They have so many interesting sports and the crowds all seem to be having a bit of a drink and a jovial time, certainly when the cameras pan across them.

There are so many interesting events like the bob sled, speed skating, downhill skiing and a host of other events that just happen to look very good on TV. I cannot say I played or experienced any of them, other than attending an ice hockey game in St Petersburg, Russia, where Russia played against France and Vladimir Putin opened the game on the ice about 80 metres away from me which was awfully exciting as you can imagine. I certainly hope some of it will be shown on the HD channel.
 

If only my mother had understood the lucrative and guaranteed side of banking, I might be in a better profession today. Maybe not a better profession, but certainly a wealthier one.

Banking, as the 2008 crisis has revealed to us, is certainly the way to go. You get to loan out people’s money at huge multiples, to people who would never qualify to get it and if things go well, or at least while your books show they are going well, you pay yourself huge bonuses – not R100 000,00, R200 000,00 or R1 million but R20 million or in America $15 million. Then, when later it becomes apparent that the profits you were entering in your books on the basis of lending money to people who could never ever actually repay it, were somewhat fake, you then get to have the Government step in and give you millions to hold up your business because if your business crumbles, so does half of society, so they are forced to save you. When they have lent you enough interest-free money and you make some profits on that just by putting it back in Government bonds, you can then once again pay yourself huge bonuses.

I am sure that the catch to this whole system is that one has to be very well connected to actually get a banking licence and one needs a little bit of luck to get going in some real boom years so that you can grow quickly, because the whole principle is too big to fail, so you cannot afford to be a small bank and you do need to take high risks. A lovely job if you can get it and the fiscally responsible or prudent need not apply.
 

SuperSport HD goes live 24 hours a day from 12 February 2010.
I am certainly looking forward to it, and watching golf in HD has been a true pleasure. People always ask me what the fuss is about HD and quite frankly, it is similar to comparing the old VHS video tapes to the quality of DVD’s. 
The important thing with HD is, the larger your TV set, the more you notice the improvement. In other words, the difference between standard definition and high definition is less noticeable on a smaller TV set, than on a large TV set.

I don’t like to moan about everything when it comes to customer service, but I recently had one of my best examples of poor service! We ran out of bandwidth at the office, a subject that really deserves a whole blog or two in itself, with the ridiculous limits that we are given in South Africa of approximately 5G a month, but the problems began when I tried to buy more bandwidth.

I firstly went onto Telkom’s top-up site and discovered that it was not working. The website indicated that one had to phone their 0800 number which I did, and once they have processed the whole purchase and told me that it had gone through, the lady on the telephone indicated to me that there was a problem with the system and that later during the day I would be sent an SMS with a new username and password.

When you purchase over the phone, and presumably to stop their staff abusing the system, they send you a new username and log in each time. Obviously, especially when your are running a network, you now need your computer experts to reset a few settings, but you will only get to that problem once your SMS arrives with the top-up bandwidth you have just bought. One day later, the SMS had still not arrived and I had to make a plan with my IT guy to run off his account for the rest of the day. It is quite appalling that we have such caps, and even worse when you cannot top-up on the Internet and when you do it on the phone, your order which is going to cost you R350,00, does not even arrive!
 

Once again, the American Supreme Court has voted along party lines. By that I mean the Judges voted precisely along the lines of the ruling party’s, namely the Republicans or the Democrats, who initially appointed them.

There are 5 Judges sitting on the bench who were appointed during the Republican administrations and once again they outvoted the others 5 to 4. That was of course the case in the Al Gore case when the five ruled that it was in the interest of American democracy that recounting should stop in Florida with the recount seemingly favouring Al Gore. This time what they’ve said is that limits on contributions by big companies to political parties are unconstitutional and they shall now be allowed. It is not really going to please most Democrats, because Republican policies largely favour the wealthy and big corporations and they are no doubt going to put or give the Republicans bigger contributions than they will give the Democrats all astute business decisions, they will no doubt give it to both sides! The guaranteed loser will be the public and heaven help any candidate who stands up against a rich corporation in his or her area, for example, on a subject of their polluting the rivers, who will be met with threats, one would imagine, of huge campaign finance to their opponent.

One so often sees the situation where one candidate has basically no idea, no vision and perhaps poor ideas and goes on to defeat the candidate with a workable and grand new way of doing things, simply because of alleged infidelities or something else that the other sides managed to dig up or, in the case of John Kerry, with the U-boats, just allege without any proof. One could only imagine this type of behaviour is going to increase substantially in America with corporations hiring private detectives and making huge donations to the other side.
 

The art of politics and of law both appear to be dealing with manipulation of the facts at time, but politics certainly take it to extremes. One cannot help but feel sorry for President Barack Obama who is now under attack for the job situation in America.

It never ceases to amaze me that the average member of the public just does not seem to realise that the loss of jobs now is as a direct consequence of things that happened some time ago and for which neither Barack Obama, nor his party were responsible. They now take the blame for a situation that they did not make as well as the blame for the excesses of the rescue plan which were in fact put in place by President Bush.

The Republicans seem to have it down to a fine art to invariably get power back from the Democrats, who never seem to hold on to it for too long, and who somehow managed to convince the poor that they should vote for the party of the wealthy, the party of the big corporations and low taxes for the wealthy based on fears of socialism, communism and whatever other fear they can put into people’s heads about medical benefits laws that were actually bring treatment and coverage to 43 million Americans who don’t have it! One really does get the impression that Democrats, apart from the 8 years of Bill Clinton, are just not capable of actually holding onto power for very long.
 

It is interesting to see that the number of movies eligible for the Best Picture Award has now been increased to 10 movies and they include an animated movie, “Up” as well as the filmed in Soweto, “District 9”. “Avatar” naturally received a nomination but even as a science fiction fan, I cannot say that I would think it would win the Best Picture Award. Certainly, the best special effects and the best use of 3-D in any movie I have ever seen, but the story did drag on a little bit and was perhaps too clichéd.
I loved the animation “Up” and I really enjoyed “Up in the Air” as well with George Clooney but the movie that probably caught me the most by surprise, for the whole year, and which I very much doubt has a winning chance would definitely be “District 9”. Meryl Streep, who has been nominated for the Oscars 16 times already, has been nominated again, and it will be very hard for her to be beaten and it would be very interesting to see if any of the acting nominations for “Invictus” result in Oscars. Strangely enough, with its rugby theme, it is one of the few major movies I have not seen this year, although on the other hand, its ticket sales reflect exactly that – it has not been very popular.

There has been a lot of golf rained out recently and some courses, like Dainfern, have basically not been open for at least two weeks.  The heavens really have opened and continue to pour down, for what must be almost three weeks now, and every day that I feel that it is about to come to an end, it rains again that night!  I certainly hope that the rain stops in time for Friday’s golf day at the Pretoria Country Club.  It is the annual charity day of the Law Society of the Northern Provinces and something I enjoy taking part in.  I understand that I am playing with quite a few Judges this year, and so hopefully I will not put up an embarrassing performance. 

Apple has, at its customary late January announcement, finally brought out the rumour of iPad’s looks, from the videos and photos that I’ve seen, like a very large iPhone. Apple shares soared as a result and most probably they will have yet another winner, because Steve Jobs, does not seem to have many losers. This is the man that founded Apple, then got the boot and went off and founded Pixar, which had such stunning success with animated movies, and went back to Apple when it was a complete flop and has brought the company back from the dead to a roaring success.

One would have to be foolhardy to bet against the iPad although I do notice that already they have said that announcements about international features and sales will only be made in June, so one wonders firstly whether South Africa will be getting it at all, in terms of being supplied on a 3G network, for Internet features and if so, whether it will be before the end of this year. That is not to say that you could not go ahead and buy one now, and use only the Wi-Fi features but with Wi-Fi being somewhat poor in South Africa, it really would not be impressive to show off Internet surfing only in your own house or office on your own Wi-Fi network. To have the real social desirability factor that one searches for in these devices, you need to be able to show it off in areas where there is no Wi-Fi as well.
 

Here is another relatively young man who has died of brain cancer at an early age leaving his wife and children. He was really one of the giants of Springbok and Blue Bulls rugby and played with such passion and ferocity that one could have sworn he knew that life is fleeting, and one does not have much time. It is especially tragic when one loses people when they are still relatively young.