The cellular companies don’t compete much in South Africa, certainly not on price per minute of calls, and it seems like their big payday comes when you go overseas. International roaming, for example in the UK is R17,00 per megabyte for data, and R21,50 per minute to make a call back to South Africa. Just to receive a call is R6,00 a minute and making local calls within London, as thousands of South Africans do every month, is R7,00 a minute.

Essentially, the companies’ greed is such that you are forced to get yourself a separate SIM card when you are in that country, and divert all of your calls to that SIM card. A friend of mine told me that the best solution is to get a Skype-to-go number and then set up the numbers that you frequently dial in South Africa with that account and then simply get a SIM card from whichever country you are travelling to, with a cheap data package, and make the calls that way – and you will not be making them at 1/20th of the cost, but you will probably be making them at 1% of the cost that local cellular companies, like Vodacom in my case, charge!
 

It seems that the ANC has shelved the Protection of Information Bill, which is more commonly known by most people as the Secrecy Bill and one can only hope that this is a permanent decision. Anything that compromises media freedom is not desirable in a young democracy, and is really not necessary or a good idea. Potential whistle blowers need to have some protection in the form of a defence based around revealing information in the public interest, and quite frankly no ruling government party needs to protect themselves against what may be rogue elements in their ranks, who break laws and who need to be reported to the media. Media plays an important watchdog role, and as I have stressed before, I don’t think our media is strong enough in the first place, compared to the British media, and that is without bringing in such a law.

It was quite impressed when I tried the DSTV Mobile system recently, with the Drifta wireless decoder. It is the new product from DSTV that allows you to watch TV on your iPhone or your iPad, for example, and while there are a limited number of channels at the moment, it works far better than I would have imagined. The picture does freeze every now and then, although it seldom loses the sound, and would be a great way, for example, to keep up with breaking news on CNN or watching some of the sports channels.

I was a bit disappointed that the horseracing channel (channel 232) is not on yet, and that there were not more news channels, but I am sure that that will follow as the product takes off. It also does not use any data, being a wireless system, and so effectively all it does is cost you your R600,00 that the modem costs, and you then got TV on your phone. The Drifta modem itself is probably a little bit bigger than I thought, being the size of a credit card, but naturally thicker, probably similar to the thickness of a small iPod. I would imagine, for example, that it would become extremely popular at sports grounds. You could be in the audience watching the match live, and when there is a contentious decision you will be able to see the slow motion replays at the same time that an audience does at home and have a little bit more of a perspective on the game.
 

Most of my routes at the moment are plastered with small billboards advertising two big events for most young people, where there is an interesting clash of dates. Sun City is advertising their annual Spring Break and H2O is being advertised as taking place in Boksburg at the same time.
I cannot imagine that H2O would compete with the force and attraction of Sun City, although I am astounded that H2O is still around, having been to the first one which now seems like it was almost a century ago! I have been at Sun City during the Spring Break time before, quite by coincidence, and the one thing I did discover is that if you don’t get a parking spot by 6am in the morning, you are not going to get one! Sun City is literally filled to their seams at that time and if you are not into loud music and the Valley of the Waves with 5 000 people in it, then Sun City probably is not the place for you during that weekend! It will be interesting to see who wins the commercial battle between the two, and my money would certainly be on Sun City’s Spring Break. 

The title of the programme is enough to guarantee that I normally would not watch, but I watched the opening episode of the latest British version of Strictly Come Dancing, and having never watched an episode before, I decided to Google the terms “strictly come dancing affairs” and was not surprised to see multiple articles about various contestants come up.

The supercharged nature of the show and the way they pair off various married celebrities to what appear to be single dancers, almost guarantees that there are going to be a few who stray from the path – and when one watches the excitement of some of the female dancers, for example, when they are told who their partner will be, it is no surprise that things may get out of hand, not to mention that some of the male dancers, who have been on the show for more than one season, have been linked with more than one of their partners over the various shows. In some regards, and perhaps it was just the opening episode, it came across to me as more of a show about match-making, than it was about dancing!
 

The annual FedEx Cup draws to a close this weekend, and depending on where they finish, it is not just the usual $1 million on offer for the winner this weekend. This year-long challenge on the American PGA Tour rewards golfers for consistency, although the final 4year-end events are worth more points and the person with the most points, at the end of Sunday evening, who may or may not be the winner of this weekend’s event, will walk away with $10 million. That is a huge amount, and a limited field of 30 players will be doing their very best to get their hands on the loot!

Tiger Woods was eliminated early and will not be in the final 30, as is sadly true of the South Africans – not one single South African has made the top 30 play-off, although Charl Schwartzel undoubtedly could have, if he had not given one of the play-off events a miss and missed out on crucial points as a result.
 

With a year to go until the Para Olympics in London 2012, I was very impressed with the marketing of the games. It must be very difficult to compete with the glitz and glamour of the full bodied sports, and yet they came out with a number of amazing adverts that illustrate, for example, the difficulty of playing basket ball in a wheelchair or the fact that, using the power from their arms, wheelchair athletes cover 400 metres in 46 seconds. Obviously, in a modern, vibrant metropolis like London it is easier to promote what could be much more difficult to promote in a smaller city, but their advertising is nevertheless superb and will no doubt achieve its goal of getting many more spectators to the Para Olympics.

Over the years we have been given the impression by the media the Jacob Zuma is the last person in the world who wants an arms probe to proceed, so it was quite surprising for most people to see that President Zuma announced a commission of enquiry into the arms deal corruption this past week.

Both German and Swedish companies have commissioned internal audits which have confirmed that bribes were paid to secure the South African contracts and one can only hope that a proper commission, with an independent chairperson, is set up so that once and for all this story which now goes back for 15 or 16 years can be properly investigated and resolved. The terms of reference will also be crucial, because the commission needs to be able to investigate everything, and not just a narrow set of issues that makes it impossible to get to the bottom of the entire story.
 

I was very happy to see that Nedbank, with whom I bank, recently introduced a new system whereby every single time you log into your Internet banking account they will send you an SMS confirming that you have logged in, and that is obviously over and above the normal SMS’s you would get, for example, when a transaction goes off your credit card.
Obviously fraud with Internet banking is rife, and every extra step they take will advance security and reduce the risks of people losing a lot of money due to a fraudulent transaction.

The Rugby World Cup is under way, with a very tight beginning for South Africa. Personally I don’t see us winning, but I am naturally, like everyone, very hopeful. It is so hard to look past New Zealand and while they do have a tendency to choke when they start playing a more defensive game, they are brilliant and they are at home and its probably why the bookies have priced them at 6/10 favourites for the tournament with the Springboks available at 8/1.

In other words, the bookies are saying the New Zealand have literally 7 times more chance of winning the tournament than the Springboks do and while I think that is a little bit exaggerated, it certainly does give you the sense of what overwhelming favourites they are. If there is anything that can upset their applecart, it will be an unpredictable team like France, but this time it is us who are scheduled to meet New Zealand in the semi-finals and my first hope, when it comes to New Zealand, is that somebody else eliminates them before they get to us! Australia are second favourites, and of course they won the Tri-Nations this year.
 

We live in an instant new world, where everything has to be done faster and quicker than previously, but in some sports they are taking things too far, too quickly. In rugby, for example, they are already now closing the voting on the Man of the Match after 70 minutes, and announcing the Man of the Match 75 minutes into the game – in other words, 5 minutes before full time is up, excluding 1 or 2 minutes of injury time! It is absolutely ridiculous, because anything can happen in those final 5 minutes that can dramatically change the result of a game, and it frequently does in a sport like rugby, and you cannot possibly have proper decisions being made if you are announcing the Man of the Match before the game has ended. Sooner or later it is going to lead to an embarrassing announcement where a certain player can be named Man of the Match and a minute or two later he is going to miss a tackle and allow somebody else through to score a sensational try against his team which changes the result. I really cannot see why in this Rugby World Cup, for example, they cannot announce the Man of the Match a minute or two after the game has ended, as opposed to 5 minutes before full time.

It is fantastic to see that the crime statistics are going down. The murder rate in South Africa is still absolutely unacceptable but now it is actually surpassed by the number of people that die on our roads meaning that that is still your biggest danger. In 1994/1995 27 000 people in the country were murdered and 16 years later that is down to 15 940 murders a year and a drop of 6,5% compared to the previous year.

Idols South Africa is beginning to draw to a close, although there is some way to go, and I see that this year certainly on the betting sites, it appears to be a closer run event than in previous years. Bookmakers seldom make a mistake when they price somebody up as the favourite when it comes to these types of competitions and this year the two favourites are very close in the betting with Dave at 2/1 and Mark at 22/10, a very close second favourite. Freddie, who was popular, has drifted in the betting now to 4/1, so it looks like they are really saying that this is a two horse race between Dave and Mark!

We currently have a population of 49,9 million and of that population we have 5,5 million registered taxpayers. Of those 5,5 million only 4,8 million earn enough money to actually pay tax which means that before we start collecting tax, we already have less than 10% of the population actually paying tax and 1,2 million people are responsible for 75% of all taxes raised – in other words, less than 3% of people in the country are responsible for 75% of direct tax income from either company or personal taxes. Obviously, the solution for all of this is to create more jobs, and get more people working to increase the taxpayer base. Of course, employment is the answer to more than just that – it is also the answer to reducing crime.

We are going to be having another census in South Africa in a few months’ time, and it is always interesting to see what statistics come out of those surveys. It is the only real way that a government gets to see exactly how many people there are in a country, what age and gender they are, and allows them to plan, for example, what schools need to be built in which areas, due to births and population movement of young families. I certainly hope that they take some time to look at areas which have become vastly more developed, such as Fourways, and build more roads there, because this is an area that is constantly developing, with more and more complexes and the roads simply cannot properly handle the numbers of people living in these areas. The current population is approximately 51 million and no doubt after the next census we will discover that it is higher than even that!

The Justice Department has finally decided that, instead of people having to join queues at the Magistrates’ Court each month to get their maintenance, they will be implementing a project whereby those same people are paid by EFT. It is amazing that for so long in fact such a staff intensive method of paying people has been utilised and that payments by EFT’s have not been the norm all this time.

It must be stressed that these are typically matters involving smaller maintenance amounts – in fact the Minister gave an example of a lady who has been waiting for her R300,00 monthly maintenance, but most private matters, where the people are represented by private attorneys, obviously result in direct payments between the parties as opposed to needing the intervention of the Court. Certainly, it will give some staff at the Maintenance Court a chance to get on to other work, rather than having to each month pay the same R300,00 to the same person after that poor person has had to stand in a queue half of the day. 

I have been really impressed by the coverage in the Sunday City Press recently of a number of political issues, and it is newspaper that I am buying from now on, because I think that in some ways it is more in touch with what is going on in politics and what affects the average ANC voter than perhaps other media that I read. City Press have had a number of recent exposes as well as scoops, and they seem to be able to accurately predict, more than other media, as to what particular developments are about to take place next in local politics – and that accuracy and those predictions make it all the more worth reading.

Judge Mogoeng is going to be questioned by the Judicial Services Commission to determine his eligibility to be appointed the Chief Justice this Saturday. The Chief Justice has a huge role to play in the Constitutional Court, and many do not appreciate that once appointed, that he or she will influence the direction of the Court over the next 10 to 15 years – so it is a very important decision, and it is very important that everybody has their say, and the best person for the job is chosen.

It appears, from the reactions of parties like NADEL as well as the various Bar Councils that there are many who do not believe that Judge Mogoeng is the correct choice and particularly in light of some of his judgments, or lack thereof, in cases involving homosexuality as well as violence against women and it will be very interesting to see what developments take place in this regard and how his interviews on Saturday proceed.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” That is one of my favourite quotes by Steve Jobs who just stepped down as the Chief Executive at Apple.

He has been a huge leader in the technology industry and as Jim Cramer of CNBC wrote, “He is America’s greatest industrialist. Perhaps the greatest ever.” He took Apple high, he left and went to Pixar and sold that off for a fortune and he returned to Apple when the company was basically down and out and in the last 10 years it has released so many successful products that I don’t think many people in their early 20’s would realise how far down, and how close to collapse Apple was only about 10 years ago. It is the end of an era, and Apple will struggle without him, although they have amazing products that will keep their profits high for at least the next 2 or 3 years, and one can only hope that he continues to fight cancer successfully.