That took more than a year for the Walmart/Massmart deal to win approval from the government and one has to wonder as to what signal this sends out to people who wish to do business with South Africa. On the one hand we want international business, but on the other hand it appears that when somebody wants to invest in the country, such as with Walmart, we make them jump through a series of hoops and really make it extremely difficult for them. That is unfortunate, because obviously other companies are watching and will not be impressed by what they have seen. As it is, our labour laws are somewhat ridiculous, encouraging the lazy and the incompetent to approach the CCMA with groundless cases and although apparently the CCMA is becoming a bit tougher on employees, we still need to change those laws to resemble those of more advanced and successful economies.

After a lot of discussion, with many people who have taken their profiles off Facebook, I decided to take mine off. It is not really a statement, and the purpose of putting this on my blog is not to make any statement either. It is simply for those who were listed as a friend of mine on Facebook to be made aware that I have not in fact blocked them from my profile, or set the privacy settings so they cannot see it anymore, I am simply no longer on Facebook!

I must be honest and say that the immediate reaction is one of a little bit of relief, because I don’t have to go and check now whether there is some message waiting for me from somebody else that I met 20 years ago and quite frankly I have no regrets about no longer being on Facebook. If I was single and young, no doubt I would still be there but I must say that I really see very little of substance happening there, and a friend of mine who is at another law firm advises me that the only thing their staff members do is to play farming games on Facebook most of the time. It does not seem, apart from the games, that people use it as much for actual communication or discussion of issues of the day.

Gerald Majola will be spending quite a lot of time at home, following his suspension as the CEO of Cricket SA. He will be preparing for his disciplinary enquiry following the report of Judge Nicolson. One wonders what went on behind the scenes that the Cricket SA Board took so long to act, and basically only did so after the Judge’s report was issued and the Minister of Sport threatened to intervene. One assumes that there is going to be a settlement at the disciplinary enquiry stage, given that the Board did make previous findings, which it has now rescinded and one would imagine that the longer the saga drags on the more embarrassing for cricket in South Africa.

I am glad to see that the national government is going to step into the rate prices issue in Johannesburg. The accounts are a total mess, and I am surprised that it has taken so long for intervention.

I sold a house almost two years ago now, where I still have not been refunded my rates, and for one year they allowed the new owner to essentially use my account to pay the electricity. Now, because I have not calculated what amount I am to be refunded, I have essentially also lost two years of interest and am being forced to institute court action against them, simply to be refunded. Obviously, as an attorney I can do that cost-effectively, although it is some inconvenience, but the average person really cannot afford or be inconvenienced into having to litigate to simply get their deposit back. Of course, when I win my case, the City is going to have to pay my legal costs as well, which means it is going to cost ratepayers more – so we are all paying for this fiasco, and then paying again!

A lot of motorists are going to get a huge shock at the beginning of April when the petrol price is going to be increased again. The Minister of Finance, in his budget speech allocated a further 20c increase in the fuel levy – which is really just general taxes for the government – as well as 8c per litre to the Road Accident Fund.
The Road Accident Fund money at least gives one some cover if something happens to you, but the general levies that they add on each year are just simple ways to increase taxes without touching politically sensitive issues such as VAT. In addition, based on the current exchange rates, at the moment we are looking at an under-recovery of 32c a litre, which means that at the beginning of April the increase could be as much as 64c a litre or an extra R30,00 per tank of petrol in an average sized car.

I think that those who believe that the campaign against the E-toll system is going to succeed are deluding themselves. It is clear that government has taken decisions, made up its mind and whether or not this is the most cost-effective way of getting it ready, and everything suggests it is not, they are going to proceed. The latest suggestion that they will change the law so that they will not renew a licence if you do not get your e-tag, will force the people ultimately to comply, because not having a vehicle licence is one of the most common ways to get the attention of the traffic police and secure yourself a fine, and people do not really want to do that. I think at the end of the day we are going to see that this campaign fizzles out, and that people are going to back down and the E-toll system will go ahead.

There can be very few countries in the world who would give as much attention, during each and every news broadcast, to the gold price and the currency exchange as we do in South Africa. I must say that I think it is really overdone and it should be largely limited to the financial radio stations and business people and not to the youth market. The youth market really could not care what the gold price is each day, and yet even stations who blast out music all day and all night seem to have to, at every single news bulletin, tell us how the currency has fluctuated in the last 60 minutes!

The funny thing, because people always assume that our currency is in a long-term slide, is that in actual fact it has moved very little over the last 10 years. Ten years ago the Rand/Pound exchange rate was approximately R12,00 to the Dollar and that is where we are now and 10 years ago the Rand/Dollar exchange rate was approximately R6,50 and it is now approximately R7,50, so it has not moved that much in 10 years. Sure, there are lots of fluctuations all the time, but quite frankly I think they should be focusing in the news on the horrific deaths and injuries that happen on our roads every single day, so that we can get more of a culture of safe driving than obsessing about the Rand/Dollar exchange rate.

A number of reports came out recently indicating that the Karoo has substantial shale gas resources and the whole question of fracking is certainly going to be debated heavily in South Africa. Environmentalists are quite against this, but they have been on the losing side in America and when one hears about the money involved, I don’t believe that they are going to win in South Africa either.

Tony Twine, of Econometrix, who recently died, but before he did so, he released a report into the economic impact that the Karoo shale gas could have on our economy. They estimated that there could be an economic impact of somewhere between R80 billion to R200 billion a year to our GDP, and that it would give the government between R35 500 million to R90 000 million a year in extra taxes and generate between 300,000 to 700 000 permanent jobs over the 25 year period of the project. Gas is a very efficient form of heating, and that makes it very valuable. Fracking is all the talk in America and it is no doubt going to be a huge conversation topic here, but with oil prices rising, and unemployment issues, I would imagine that shale gas is going to completely transform the Karoo.

I don’t think there is any chance that the government is going to reverse on the e-toll decision. The roads have to be financed, and this is the way they have chosen to do it. That is perhaps the bigger mistake, because one would prefer them to have simply levied an amount on petrol, and collected the money more effectively that way, as they do with the Road Accident Fund, than having to build toll roads, awards contracts to foreign companies and spend a lot of money, estimated at 30% of whatever we pay, towards actually collecting the money.

A levy directly on petrol would have prevented that. It will also be very interesting to see what happens with the Road Accident Fund levies in years to come. We now contribute 88c per litre of petrol to the Road Accident Fund, and in most cases you get little or no benefits unless you are seriously injured. One can only imagine that in a few years’ time, once the Road Accident Fund has settled all the cases that arose before 1 August 2008 when the law changed, that the Road Accident Fund is going to be generating huge excesses each year and perhaps that money could be diverted towards approving the roads, or at the very least we could see the Road Accident Fund levy being reduced. I don’t believe we will ever see that, but that should be the case given that they have now eliminated probably 80% of claims compared to before 1 August 2008 and have continued to increase the levy.

I follow the American elections keenly, and support the more liberal values of the Democratic Party. Obviously, it means I want Barack Obama to win the election later this year, and I am very interested in which one of the candidates is going to Republican nomination. At the moment Mitt Romney is still winning, and he is a Mormon, who earns $20 million a year, and is often mocked for strapping the family dog to the roof of the car before driving to Canada with him for the holidays. He is up against Rick Santorum who is anti homosexuals, very strongly in favour allegedly of the Church and famous for a number of scary perspectives on the world. Both Republicans really specialise and supporting either that the wealthy should not have paid much tax, under the guise of it promoting business and any other of the conservative issues such as being opposed to homosexual relationships. It never stops amazing me, and I don’t think it is ever going to end, that so many below to average income earners get terrified year after year in voting for a party that represents not their interests but the interests of the rich and now they will do so under the guise of a number of ridiculous allegations against Barack Obama that many Americans still appear to believe including: that he was not actually born in the American State of Hawaii, but was really born in Africa, that deep down he does not believe in God, that if he is in charge of America the country will become a socialistic state, etc, etc. The Republicans have always, to a large extent, drawn their support from conservative people living in small states and probably with a smaller perspective on the world outside whereas the Democrats, for example have always won the major States and cities such as New York in the Californian State.

Apple has released the new iPad, which will go on sale on 16 March 2012 at the same price as the last iPad. The display is going to be the retina display of the iPhone and obviously a far superior quality display to the current iPad. The current iPad will benefit from a price reduction so it will be sold for $100 less than the new iPad. The Apple share price is currently trading at $530 – up almost $90 over the last two or three months and clearly the public is expecting the company to continue to roll out winners for some time. The new iPad will also allow users to dictate e-mail. There was no mention at the release event of the new iPhone, so one would assume that we will hear more about that early in the second part of the year – probably in about August.

Kony 2012 is a short 30 minute movie on You Tube, which has already been watched more than 43 million times and it is a campaign by Invisible Children. The whole purpose of this campaign is to make Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda famous, or rather infamous. He is the one who kidnaps children, gives them guns, makes them kill their parents and mutilate and kill people in Uganda.

Over the last 20 or so years, he had more than 30,000 children join his army which actually does not really fight for anything other than to keep him in power. The premise of Kony 2012 is that people have, through the Internet, a lot more power now to influence their governments and make sure, for example in America, that enough attention is focused on Joseph Kony by American experts, who have the technology to track him in the jungles of Uganda. If the Americans help, the Ugandan army may find him and bring him to justice. It is going to be very interesting to see if this campaign works and can focus enough attention on Joseph Kony to make politicians in western democracies act and assist the Ugandans in bringing him to justice. Part of the campaign for example, in America culminates on 20 April 2012 when activists and cities around America are asked to plaster posters all over the cities calling for the arrest of Joseph Kony. They have also targeted celebrities and got support from Ryan Seacrest, Oprah and a variety of other celebrities whose attention they believe will bring more focus to the campaign which hopes to work simply by making Joseph Kony famous, in a bad way, and thus focus the attention of world governments on him.

It is great to see the widening of the lanes at the intersection of William Nicol and Main, and in particular the continued widening of William Nicol Drive. The road carries a tremendous amount of traffic to what is the north of Johannesburg, and there needs to be continued progress in terms of widening these roads, creating additional lanes and helping put in the transport infrastructure to allow the economy to grow. Most of the wealth of the country is generated within the Gauteng region that has the largest workforce and the roads obviously need to be able to transport people more efficiently to and from work as well as goods and service providers.

I love the Property magazine and it is certainly wonderful to look through all the beautiful glossy pictures of the latest developments, wonderful houses as well as read about trends in the property market. The latest Gauteng edition, which I just received, has some unfortunate timing and that is for this issue they chose as a guest editor, Rael Levitt, the CEO of Auction Alliance, according to the cover of the magazine. Obviously, by the time we received this, he is no longer the CEO of Auction Alliance and was subject to a variety of allegations of having paid bribes and similar allegations. In the editorial Rael Levitt writes about an auction, “In his purest form, it is a transparent transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller at a specific moment in time.” Obviously, all of the allegations essentially say that these transactions were not that transparent, and that there were fake buyers, etc driving up prices.

I was very excited to see plans, in America, that all US cars will have to have rearview cameras by 2014. These cameras allow drivers to see what is behind them and it is an invaluable help, for example when reversing. Apparently, the extra costs per motor vehicle will be $160 to $200 dollars per vehicle but this will certainly be off-set by eliminating the blind spots that lead to so many accidents. Let’s hope that South Africa does not lag too far behind in adopting a change like this, because we don’t need to have old model motor vehicles sold in South Africa that are not, for example, allowed to be sold in the US!

The advert goes on to say that some Internet service providers throttle their uncapped ADSL which means you get a slow and frustrating Internet experience and that MWeb does not do that. I must say that as an MWeb customer, I have been somewhat frustrated that when I took one of their uncapped products, they did start throttling various aspects of the service and their sales representatives were very quick to tell me that I needed a fancier package and that if I did not want the Internet slowed down, I needed to upgrade to a package at double the cost – which I was eventually forced to do. So, I am not quite sure why they are knocking their competitors, because I am sure I am not the only client who had that experience and it was only last week that we sent them an indication as to how slow our Internet was running at the office and asked them to get back to us!

It is amazing that Telkom, instead of addressing the problem straightaway tried a story about the account not being paid, then told us that there were issues in the Rosebank area, then gave us some other version and eventually sent somebody out who discovered that some contractor in the area had recently just chopped the cables by mistake, and that they would repair them shortly. A picture of the damaged cable is alongside this blog.
One then has to get a number for the cable division of Telkom and follow up the cable division and quite frankly this is the type of action that could really put many businesses out of business and naturally we have sustained huge losses as a result thereof, and while once you get through to senior management, something does seem to happen, but it is tragic that it takes almost a week of stories before you get the truth, and you then still have to phone up each department to get follow-up action.  

Later today, Apple is going to be holding an event, and the invitation sent to the media hints at a new iPad. The invitation reads, “We have something you really have to see, and touch.” One would assume that later today, from America, we are going to be getting the third generation iPad. The next iPad is expected to be similar in size to the current one, but to have a better display and possibly running a faster chip. Then again, it is more than likely that we are going to see an upgrade similar to that of the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S – much better, but not dramatic.

I was chatting to somebody who is involved in the launch of the new Edgars’ loyalty programme, where you get points for money spent like most loyalty programmes, which are ultimately redeemable on purchases and the numbers are huge. They apparently have over 4.6 million cardholders and on the first day after they announced the activation of the new cards, more than 62,000 cards were processed. That was a Monday – and I can only imagine what this weekend will be like, for example. I thought their card certainly had a good design, with a bit of a hi-tech look on the back and some see-through plastic for the U in “Thank U” and hopefully for Edgars and the Edcon Group, because you can use the cards at CNA and Jet for example, it will be a huge hit.

One can imagine the many months of work involved in putting together a new loyalty scheme like this and all the work that must be involved in printing, manufacturing and getting those cards out in the hands of all of their members, not to mention reprogramming software for the points system. I wonder how much Mr Price has eaten into Edgars and I would love to hear your comments as to the new loyalty scheme from Edgars, and whether you shop at Edgars or Mr Price – or both.

I really don’t try to have much to say when companies are in tremendous problems, because one never really knows what all the facts are until they are revealed in Court and both sides are heard. I can only say that I had one property that was sold on auction, and it is something that I will never do again.

My piece of land that I had was sold at a tremendous loss, by Auction Alliance, who had enquired from me as to what the minimum amount would be that I would accept – which happened to be all that it was auctioned for. I was told later that the person who bought it at the auction, immediately applied with the conveyancer to transfer it to another person and sold it for double the price they had bought it from me for!
That leaves a very sour taste in the mouth and it certainly soured me to the auction process. To now read allegations that there had been fake bidders at some auctions, that all sorts of back room deals were going on and that various kickbacks were being paid by Auction Alliance under the leadership of Rael Levitt who has subsequently resigned, hardly leaves one feeling any better. One certainly hopes that various banks named in the probe, namely Absa and Investec are going to get to the bottom of allegations that their staff pushed business in the way of Auction Alliance in return for kickbacks.

There has been a lot of negative publicity about Velvet Sky recently, allegations of accounts not being paid with BP and various other problems. They have suspended flights and announced that they will be flying again on 5 March, and I certainly hope for the sake of those who bought tickets, that they will be.

It is never nice to see a company fail and I am the type who always gets sensitive when I see an empty restaurant, for example, because it so often represents not just the big corporate entities, but the savings of a family going down the drain. I must say however that I very much doubt in the airline business that you can survive all this negative publicity about your failure to pay your accounts and still stay in business because I don’t see who would continue to book tickets. The directors and spokespeople have been extremely confident on radio that the company will definitely start resuming all its flights again and will be back to business as usual on 5 March but one would imagine, if the company has any chance of success, they would have to say that. I don’t think however just saying it will make it happen and I would imagine the end is near for this company.

I recently filmed my new TV advert which will shortly start appearing on television. We have a shorter version of it, but my preferred version is loaded up with this blog article so that you can see it and comment on it. What I certainly find so encouraging is that although the advertising certainly does produce some results, the vast majority of our business still comes from word of mouth, and past clients referring new clients to us. It reminds one that the longer one is in the business and conditional to you producing top results and being absolutely honest and fair with your clients in your fee charging process, that you will be rewarded with a continuous flow of referrals.

The Super 15 Rugby is upon us and I see that they already now trying to turn it into a Super 16 from 2013! This time however the beneficiary will be South Africa who will have a 6th team in the Super Rugby next year if it is agreed to expand the franchise from 15 to 16. Apparently, the major weapon in South Africa’s favour is that of the total TV audience in 2011, 62% of it came from South Africa, leaving 38% between Australia and New Zealand.

SARU has already committed to a new team in South Africa next year, namely the Southern Kings, taking part and if the franchise is not expanded to 16 teams, it will mean that one of the Bulls, Cheetahs, Sharks, Stormers or Lions will have to drop out next year. Interestingly enough as well, SuperSport pays the most for broadcast rights and so basically the biggest audience, as well as most of the advertising money and most of the profits are coming from South Africa.