As many of us suspected it has now turned out that we, the taxpayers, were funding the Gupta family media empire – this is the media channels that obviously supported Jacob Zuma at the time.  How this happened is that our taxpayers’ money was spent on advertising on this newspaper and TV channel, even though they did not have many readers/viewers.  We pay taxes and the Government carefully chose where to spend those taxes – in this case on the Gupta’s media empire advertising.  

The Free State government for example spent R80 million on advertising across that media and the Government Information and Communication Systems (GCIS) spent R55 million with New Age Media receiving 95% of all the payments it received just from various government departments!  The bulk of the payments came after Themba Maseko, the former head of GCIS, was tossed out of his job because he refused to entertain the Gupta’s!  One wonders what else we are going to learn from the current state capture investigations!

I am a big Tiger Woods fan and it has been fantastic to see the massive surge he has had up the world ratings this year.  Let’s not forget that he is 42 years old, he is turning 43 on 30 December and he has had a spinal fusion.  Many of the clients of my personal injury firm are not able to do work after a spinal fusion, but Tiger Woods can still swing a club at 129 miles an hour and compete at the top of the sporting world despite being close to 43 years old and having had the spinal fusion.  Let’s not forget that at the beginning of the year he was ranked 1199^th in the world, and with the season almost coming to a close he is now 21^st in the world – ahead of every single South African, for example.  

His results so far have included a 2^nd in the PGA Championships and a tie 6th in the British Open, which is normally known simply as The Open.  If his injuries hold off for now it will only be a question of how soon he will win and not if.  He has been written off many times and the Tiger haters were all very vocal about 6 or 7 months ago that he would never ever win another tournament in his life.  A recent survey in Golf magazine found that 98% of PGA tour players, and they would know better, believe that Tiger will win another tour event and 90% of them believe that he will win another major.  To quote one of the tour players who gave the quote anonymously, on the prospects of Tiger winning again “A year ago:  No way.  Now:  No doubt.” 

We were recently approached by a client who had an accident who told us that somebody else skipped through a red robot and collided with him.  His version was that he was driving a Nissan bakkie along Nelson Mandela Drive and a Toyota Corolla, going along Francis Baard Street, went through a red robot.  

Our prospective new client was very emphatic about it, but what he probably did not know that many of these intersections now have video cameras and when we went to the Traffic Department to see what they had, we discovered that our potential new client’s version was in fact a complete lie.  He had driven straight through a red robot into the Toyota Corolla for whom the traffic light was green.  More and more situations like this do arise, and it is surprising that people are still so happy to try and tell a blatant lie and see if they can get away with it when they are driving through intersections which do have video cameras on them!