It is quite incredible, with the power problems that we have in South Africa, that a South African has come up with a fantastic solution, but is unfortunately doing so for an American company.  Everybody knows about Elon Musk, the Pretoria boy who has made it big with Tesla Motors in America, but Tesla’s latest product is called the Powerwall.  It is a lithium ion battery which captures and stores energy saved from solar cell panels for later use when, for example, the power is down or when power is too expensive.  The batteries cost $3 500,00 each and based on my research seem to be far smaller, and cost-effective than the solutions we have available in South Africa at the moment.  They go on sale in America in 3 to 4 months and we will have to hope that they start coming to South Africa soon thereafter.  The bottom line is we have one of the sunniest countries in the world and we should all have solar cell panels on our roofs with powerful batteries which last longer and are more simple and effective than the current ones that then store that energy for later use.  As they do in other countries, people could be encouraged to sell their excess power back to the national grid, and quite frankly 500,000 batteries later we will not have any more electrical problems in South Africa.  Instead, we are going to give billions to Russia to build us nuclear power stations when the answer is so much more simple – the sun.

People are living much longer these days, and it is a good reminder that one really has to provide for one’s retirement.  I think far too many people retire too early – 60 is a ridiculous age to retire – and then they also retire with too little money.  A recent article in The Economist magazine confirmed that life expectancy in richer countries has been growing at a rate of about 2½ years for every decade or, as they put it, every hour that you live, it appears that life expectancy is growing another 15 minutes!  

In short, people are living far longer now and the figure is going up every day, than they ever lived before and every prediction as to at what age people are going to die is proven wrong with the current generation.  While that is good news for those who want a nice long life, it is very bad news for governments and taxpayers, because ultimately taxes will have to be raised to fund what will be dramatic shortfalls and pensions around the world and it is bad news if you don’t start early on getting those retirement savings going.  I have always suggested a retirement annuity, because it has tax benefits and it also has the benefit that it does not fall into your estate if you should for example be sequestrated.  I don’t believe people, in any country, relying on government pensions can expect a comfortable or decent retirement and it is up to one to save or accept whatever you are given when you are 70.

The American edition of Golf Digest is a little bit more racy and different to the South African version.  It for example always features adverts for blood thinners as well as for erectile disorders and medication like Cialis as well as Viagra – adverts which you don’t find in the South African version.  The magazine’s cover recently featured a professional golfer, Lexi Thompson, topless with a towel over her and a very lengthy letter from the editor trying to explain the cover – as if he knew beforehand that there was going to be a bit of trouble.  They went out of their way for example to say that the room was cleared while the “delicate moments” were photographed.  They even mentioned that they checked with her mother that she liked the shoot.  What is your opinion as to whether or not a photograph of a topless lady golfer has a place in a golf magazine and is it appropriate or not?  Or, considering the photo is it much ado about nothing? I must just mention, before anyone raises the issue of males, the month before edition had what I thought was a ridiculous picture of Rory McIlroy also topless – although bronzed.

I read an interesting article in The Economist recently about the comparison between America’s teenage pregnancy rate and that of Switzerland saying the American rate is 7 times higher.  The article compared the effectiveness of various contraceptive devices noting that the failure rate of the Pill is 9%, and 18% for condoms whereas an IUD, which is used in much higher numbers in Europe and China, has only a 0,2% failure rate.  The article pointed out that if more women used IUD’s there would be less unplanned pregnancies and that a large part of the problem is that young pregnancies are more and more common especially amongst poor families. Medical practitioners are actually trained that they are meant to recommend an IUD first, but a number of medical practitioners did not even know the guidelines.  

We obviously don’t have statistics on most of these things in South Africa, but it is interesting to note that in the State of Colorado for example, that one they started assisting with IUD’s and implants, in only two years teenage births fell by 26% and abortions by 34%.  That had direct savings on the benefits that the State would have had to pay out for unplanned pregnancies, so they worked out for every $1 dollar they spent on IUD devices, and they are relatively expensive, the State saved $6 dollars even for mothers who already had one child, giving them an IUD afterwards showed dramatic results – and those without an IUD fall pregnant again within a year at 20% of the time and within two years 47% of the time.  The bottom line, as the article ultimately said, is that coils and implants work.

One of the first principles of doing business in South Africa is to learn to put up with a lot.  I do my very best to run a first-class operation, by the best standards, but it amazes me sometimes that clients don’t seem to realise some of the things one is up against.  If our telephone lines are down for a few hours, after 20 years in business, we will get e-mails from people asking whether our firm has closed down!  They don’t seem to realise that the same problems they read about in the news, or hear on the radio, affect our business also.  

We have a UPS back-up system, although we have back-up telephone lines, telephone lines with both companies, spare Internet facilities and solar power for hot water but it does not seem to be enough!  We lost our Telkom lines for about three months last year before we moved to Neotel and Telkom really, to put it simply, could not care about fixing them.  Like all businesses we have to put up with the Eskom power cuts on a regular basis and two weeks ago we had the City of Johannesburg apparently lose a piece of equipment that led to a 400 volt surge being put through out offices.  That took our offices offline for the entire day on a Thursday.  When you factor in about 70 plus staff members at 8 hours a day that is 560 man hours minimum that was lost in just one day.  

Unfortunately, in South Africa you have to learn to put up with things like this, and accept that you are going to pay your staff for thousands of hours’ work, over any given year, where they will not actually be working.  There are certainly certain things that they can do when the power goes off, but there are others that they can’t and to a large extent the time is lost.  Sadly however, it is not just the time that is lost.  It is the money that is spent on calling electricians, it will be the time and money that is spent on repairing equipment damaged during the surge (approximately R200 000) and of course it will be profits lost in terms of clients who would have called in as a result of our adverts during that time, who will now assume that we don’t answer the phones, and try their luck elsewhere.  Doing business in South Africa really requires patience and back-up plans and accepting that the best back-up plans are not going to work for every situation.  It is a reminder that we live in a third-world country and those of us in the legal business should only be too grateful that we do not have to compete with others internationally because those in manufacturing do have to, and it must border on impossible with our infrastructure.  

I was pleasantly surprised to see, in a report put out by Henley & Partners who do the Visa Restrictions Index, that South Africa ranks higher than I suspected it would.  It is a ranking according to how many countries of the world you can visit without needing a Visa and while we are not that high on the list, and the list is dominated by the countries like the UK and the USA, whose residents can all visit 174 countries without a Visa, we did not do as badly as I might have thought we would have.  

In some ways it is a measure of the power of a country and it is not far off, if one really thinks about it, an international overall waiting of one’s country because countries negotiate amongst each other to determine whether or not Visas will be required by the citizens of that country.  In terms of our cricket and rugby opponents, New Zealand and Australia were way above us with 170 and 168 countries respectively that they can visit Visa free, with South African passport holders being able to visit 97 countries.  On the plus side, we have beaten most of the African countries and we are certainly ahead of Iraq and Afghanistan which are the bottom countries on the list where residents of those countries can only visit 31 and 28 countries respectively without Visas.  Some of the countries that rated higher than us include Macedonia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Israel, Iceland, etc.  Where the survey is a little bit flattering to us is when they say we have position 41, they don’t count all the positions that are tied, so for example there are five countries that are tied for first place and then they have a further two countries tied for second place which in theory should of course be tied for sixth place.  That means that there are not just 41 countries ahead of us on the list, there are probably about 60.  That does not affect everybody and many people, including some of my employees, have citizenship of more than one country and then of course they can travel internationally on a passport that does not require a Visa entrance to countries.

Every time I drive past Webber Wentzel’s new building in Sandton, I am impressed by how big a law firm can grow!  The building, right opposite Sandton City, continues to climb and I can only imagine not only what it will cost to build, but what the piece of land it is on must have cost!  It is an absolutely prime, prime position and when they say that the three golden rules of property are location, location and location – well, then this property has all three of them!  It has some time to go before it is finished, but I would not be surprised if it is not finished later this year or early next year, because I don’t think offices need the same finishes that a house does, but one thing is for sure, if I was a client of theirs, I would not imagine that they are working at R2 500,00 an hour!

This is an old topic by now, but the issues are timeless.  I personally don’t have a major problem with names changing.  There are some name changes that I don’t think are necessary and there are others that surprise me, from time to time.  I guess it depends on one’s perspective, but I don’t understand why any street or any place is named after any apartheid era Prime Minister, President or leader.  They all led a morally corrupt system and they should not be recognised in any way at all, whether they were a Prime Minister or a President.  Nobody who believes in democracy in any event would ever believe that any of them would have ever been Prime Ministers or President if there was true democracy in South Africa at the time, so with the exception of F W de Klerk, who at least had some sense and saw that changes had to be made, I cannot believe that any of them deserve any credit at all.  

I have not spent as much time thinking about people from 100 or 150 years ago either, but if history shows that they made their money illegally, or they made it by injuring others (I think of the makers of cigarette and alcohol products) then I don’t have any problem either with anything named after them being changed.  It is very nice that they were charitable, but one must also recognise that there are a lot of people who do a lot of wrong in their lives, who towards the end of their lives try to make up for it with charitable donations and I am not saying that that is the reason that they set up the various foundations and charities that they have, but it may well be one of the factors.  The bottom line is that there are people amongst us right now who we acknowledge, that we praise and who one day will be looked at in a new way because that is how history works, it is rewritten by the winners and it is also rewritten as we achieve a greater understanding of things.  I don’t have a problem with all the statues of the past going into a wonderful old museum, where they can sit together with statues of people who were once acclaimed for their scientific knowledge of proclaiming that the world was flat and I have no doubt that one day they will be joined by, amongst others, highly revered businessmen that make all of their money by selling nicotine-delivery products that cause cancer. There are far too many fake idols, false stars and people who are given credit for things they either never did or have everything brushed over, and I don’t really see any problem with correcting history in time.  That does not mean I think they are particularly serious issues, and there is no doubt that the students of today have much less to protest about than they might have some 25 years ago when I was at University, and that they may soon, once they have resolved these issues, have to move on to the quality of food in the canteen, but that is the nature of the young – to complain about what they think is not acceptable and to express their opinion.  Invariably as they get older, they often have a new view on many things and that too is a part of life.

I have written positively about my experiences with the Randburg branch of the Department of Home Affairs previously.  Unfortunately, the situation is no longer as it was and I think to a large extent that relates to the problems that have now developed with the requirements in terms of full unabridged birth certificates.  Parents now need these to travel with their children and it has led to a surge of people at all of the various branches.  The queues are ridiculously long and I’ve had staff members standing in queues for up to 5 hours before being “assisted”.  One has very little success with the Director-General, Mkuseli Apleni, who proudly advertises his contact details on posters throughout the branches, but if you call him you will get a different story.  When one of my staff called him he told them that while it was his department, the particular thing she was phoning him about, which was citizenship, was not something that he oversaw – which is a rather peculiar answer if it is his department!

I have written approximately four or five letters to him over a span of a few months and I have yet to receive the courtesy of even a reply from him.  His department is in a shambles, and when the rock starts it normally starts at the top and when you have somebody who does not reply to their correspondence and cannot even delegate somebody to actually reply to it, if he is amazingly busy, one can hardly expect that your staff members are going to keep a proper work ethos.  It brings to mind the tragic story of a young man who committed suicide outside one of the branches some years ago, because they would not give him an identity document, and the reality is that in any Western democracy if such a terrible incident had occurred, heads would have rolled and I would not be surprised if the Director-General would have been fired.  It is a pity in South Africa that similar action is so seldom taken.