The final episode of the latest season of Game of Thrones set a new series record when it was shown in America.  The previous record for a season finale for the show was 7,1 million viewers and this episode was seen by 8,1 million viewers in America.  That was particularly good because it was up against the NBA Finals and of course many people now watch programmes on DVR and other systems later.  By way of comparison, the opening show of the season, two weeks after it has premiered, had already been watched by 18 million people – showing that in fact the majority of people now watch a programme after its first broadcast and the numbers go up considerably after that. Game of Thrones is already the most viewed show in the history of HBO.  The final episode killed off lots of characters and had some fairly shocking moments and I would love to hear from those of you who watched it.  

Every single day we get older, and we all know that, but it is only when parts of your body start failing you, that you really realise how quickly it is happening!  About a year ago I got reading glasses, just to help me read certain things.  

I was told that approximately every year after that you would need stronger glasses and while I have not needed new glasses yet, that time is coming.  What I have found, while I generally have not worn glasses while doing my work, is that I am now in a situation where most of what appears on paper before my eyes is partially blurred, for most of the day and certainly at night!  One gets to a situation where, and it is nothing to do with ego, but just the practicality of running around with different pairs of glasses, that one needs to start wearing them!  That of course is the least of one’s concerns, because if I listen to most people older than me, the dramas they are having with their teeth, not to mention the expense, is something that I am certainly not looking forward to!  It is amazing that we have to spend our whole lives working so that in our retirement when our bodies are failing, we can spend all that money on medical assistance!  It is a pity that life does not work the other way around – that you could retire to have your youth again having spent all that time when your body is failing you, and you are old and wrinkly, sitting in an office doing work!

I am glad to see that people are finally begun working on widening Cedar Road, particularly outside the Dainfern and Steyn City entrances.  It has been needed for a long time and especially as Steyn City develops, it will become more critical.  What worries me though is the tremendous amount of cyclists who use this strip of road for weekend rides before returning typically to the Broadacres area for breakfast.  I honestly believe that the cyclists need to find a new route, because if they continue to ride on it, while it is undergoing upgrading and widening as it is now, I don’t think it takes too much to predict that there will be a number of deaths on this stretch. As my photo illustrates, side barricades have been put up on the road, in some way narrowing the space for the cyclists to ride and basically forcing them across into cars, and I just hope that as soon as cyclists see what development is taking place, that they find another place to ride for the next six months until the road is sorted out.

It seems that we continue to pay a lot of money for the adventures of President Zuma.  This time it is the National Director of Public Prosecutions who got paid out his entire contract of 10 years which led to him receiving R17 million.  One assumes then that the government had no real basis to call the enquiry, which they were doing, into his fitness to hold office.  

One can only assume that Mxolisi Nxasana was obviously investigating something that people did not want him to investigate.  His attorney, who I know well, Busani Mabunda, said that his client received a top security clearance for the job and that his client has fully disclosed the issue that the government raised now, when he applied for the job.  So we’ve had the head of the Hawks leave, also taking a golden handshake and now we have what appears to be yet another golden handshake.  The temporary head of the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr Ramaite, was arrested for drunken driving after he crashed his Jaguar into another vehicle in Limpopo in June 2011, but those charges appear to have been withdrawn recently.  Things are really looking very troublesome in the prosecuting and investigating areas with all these institutions being weakened.

What our country really has to sell to the rest of the world, apart from the platinum, gold and diamonds in the earth, is tourism.  It is astounding then to see, with effect from 1 June, the ridiculous rules we’ve implemented for full unabridged birth certificates.  As attorneys we have always been familiar with full unabridged birth certificates because we’ve had to go through the hassle of getting them for some cases against the RAF involving minors, but to hear now of groups from India of 49 people who had one child in the group cancelling their trip to South Africa and choosing another destination instead, is heartbreaking for our economy.  

Apparently in India they don’t have full unabridged birth certificates and so this uncertainty led to this group choosing another country for their holiday.  Less foreign currency coming into our country will of course affect us in other ways – by weakening our currency and letting the petrol price go up further and so one must hope that after a month or two of what is going to be an absolute fiasco of people being turned away by airlines or travel agencies that our government will relent.  Apparently not another country in the whole world requires a full unabridged birth certificate for children that are travelling, and let’s be honest, it is not going to stop people who are trying to smuggle or illegally take children into another country – they will always find a way to get a fake document. All it is going to do is to hamper normal people with decent amounts of money who want to spend it in our country.  Apart from anything else, it has absolutely flooded the offices of the Department of Home Affairs for the last few months with hundreds of people standing in queues to get full unabridged birth certificates for their own children and the whole thing is an absolute farce.  Once again, unfortunately, we are a third world country that thrives in over-regulation when most first world countries, with far more developed economies than ours don’t implement half the laws and regulations we do.

I was quite amused to hear the radio adverts, paid for by the government, about the new e-toll rates.  It is all about how government has listened to the people and has now slashed the rates people must pay.  I don’t think they listened properly to what people were saying, because nobody asked to pay less but they asked for no e-tolls at all.  

The advert is pure propaganda but like most propaganda it may work together with the corny ending about how everyone has now made South Africa a better place.  At the end of the day, all they need to do is to break the back of the majority, get the majority to pay and then prosecute the minority and they will have their system back in place.  After that, they can slowly increase the tariffs each year back to where they were.  It will be interesting to see if it works and judging by the lack of screaming and shouting, I suspect that it may well work now.  Of course, the real devilishness is their no renewing of your licence without paying your e-tolls up to date – and I think that is going to force compliance more than anything else, because otherwise, although you will not get pulled over for your unpaid e-tolls on a regular basis, you are going to get fined all the time for your licence – something that traffic police always check for.

I must say I was astounded to read in the media recently that the Gauteng branch of the ANC is accusing Eskom of sabotaging them!  Eskom claims that Soweto residents owe them over R8 billion towards electricity and apparently only 16% of Soweto residents even pay their electricity bill. They have not cut them off as a result of that – which of course they would in many other areas – all they did was giving them load shedding but apparently the residents are up in arms saying this is the area where Nelson Mandela grew up and where Bishop Tutu hails from and it is outrageous to have load shedding for such lengthy times in Soweto.  I must say I don’t see the relevance who lived there before and nor do I believe, even if you have a Cabinet Minister living next door, that your suburb should then suddenly be immune to load shedding – if we are all equal, it does not matter who lives where now, or who used to live there.  

The part that amazes me is when 84% of people have not paid their bill, they even have the audacity to go and protest about load shedding!  They should simply be cut off entirely until they pay and it is this kind of lack of respect for rules and debts in South Africa that creates so many problems for our society and our economy.  It is well time that Eskom acted and harshly against those who do not pay their bills and Municipalities who do not recover the funds.  The ANC went on to allege that when people’s electricity is cut off, they may not wish to vote for the ANC on the next occasion and that could cost the ANC in Gauteng.  It is particularly rich coming from a party who has been in charge of South Africa for the last 21 years and could surely, at some time during that time, actually have done something about the power situation we face?  They absolutely should be punished at the polls for what has happened to the electricity supply in South Africa  and it is disgraceful and disingenuous to lay the blame at the door of Eskom, however incompetent they are, if the government took so long to wake up to the current problem and arrange financing and upgrades decades ago.

As somebody who has written quite a lot in the past about healthy eating, it is interesting to read about the problems that the McDonalds brand is experiencing, not only around the world, but largely in America where it is listed on their Stock Exchange.  Of the 29 analysts who cover McDonalds’ share, only 7 recommend buying it, which is the bleakest outlook the share has ever had.  MacDonalds has lost a lot of business to what they call “fast casual food” which is fast-food with good prices but with slightly better quality than plain fast-food giants.  One of the bigger winners in that regard would be Chipotle Mexican Grill.  The bottom is that sales and earnings are falling at McDonalds and I think we are going to see more of this with the fast-food giants as people move more towards healthier living, which, even if it is not a big issue now, would certainly become a bigger on in the decades ahead.  I would no sooner invest in a McDonalds’ share than I would in a cigarette company – although I think a cigarette company will actually have more potential for future profit!

I have written quite often about the problems of doing business in South Africa and really they are only escalating.  The first thing you need is certainly patience because if you allow yourself to get completely worked up, you will simply go mad.  It is really becoming a struggle, day to day, to keep a business running and the expenses never stop mounting.  We have suffered with Telkom in recent times, we’ve had Internet issues and of course like everyone we have power issues.  Our fax lines seem to go off all the time and during the last month they probably have not worked for 7 or 8 days.  Our brand new UPS system does not appear to be working after the surge of electricity from the City Council and on the weekend we find it very hard to do work, or to connect to our bookkeeping system because the office server seems to go down every weekend.  One returns home to load shedding almost every day now and essentially we all had to reduce to having no electricity for 3 or 4 hours a day, reporting telephones that are out of order every second or third week and simply trying to deal with the problems as they arise, one after another, and stay calm.  I can genuinely say that they don’t stress me, but they are expensive and whether it is an extra 30 minutes in traffic, because the robots are not working, or two hours lost at the office, they are costing our economy terribly.