The older you get, the faster the seasons go by as we all know. It still does not stop amazing me, that only a few weeks ago we were being flooded with rain, and yet I can see that a lot of the grass is already beginning dry up, the leaves that the trees are carrying are now a lot more faded and before you know it, it is going to be the end of April and it is going to be freezing again!

The William Nicol interchange has finally been finished and my initial impression of it is extremely good. Having one robot in the middle, that controls all of the traffic, really does lead to the traffic flowing much faster.

I don’t travel at peak rush hour and I understand that at that time, there would still be a problem in actually getting to William Nicol, but once you are there, the traffic literally flows over and I would estimate that for me, my journey to the office is about 5 minutes faster and the journey back home, which used to take a bit longer, is probably about 10 minutes faster. All in all, an extra 15 minutes saved a day, multiplied by tens of thousands of motorists is a huge saving and one can only wonder how much faster it will get, when the N1 highway that runs below it, has the extra lane available – and that does not look too far off now.

If the Main Road off-ramp is also then revamped in a similar way, I think you will see a whole lot more industry and development in Fourways and Lanseria, which in many ways is already the new North.
 

It is once again that time of the year, when a good round of flu vaccinations at your home and your office can prevent everybody falling ill. I must say that we’ve had flu vaccinations at my offices for about 5 or 6 years, and while some staff always confuse a cold with the flu, we have never been hit, like companies that don’t do vaccinations have been, by waves of people all being off sick for days on end at the same time. I think covering the cost of staff flu vaccinations is well worth it and particularly this year when the vaccination will include the swine flu vaccination.

Ernie Els finally triumphed on the US PGA Tour once again this past week. What made the victory even more impressive was that it was a final two ball of two South Africans, namely Ernie and Charl Schwartzel leading the field in the World Golf Championships. There are a few World Golf Championships a year, so the awfully impressive title is not as impressive as it may sounds, but it is a field which basically includes the top 50 in the world, excluding of course Tiger Woods, who will be making his return at the Masters and $1,4 million for first place is great money!

I was so impressed to see Blair Atholl member, Charl Schwartzel, finish second in this field and after his two wins earlier this year in South Africa, which counted as wins on the European Tour he really put in a great show until he got what golfers called “a fried egg” in one of the bunkers and hit it out into another bunker. Charl is going to rocket up the world rankings and we certainly are going to hear a lot more from him.

Transnet has applied for a 23,73 cents per litre increase on the petrol price. this is so that they can build a bigger pipeline from Durban to Johannesburg to carry all the fuel that we need to Gauteng. I would not be surprised if this is granted fairly easily, but I note that when it is something like the Road Accident Fund, and people actually getting coverage for their injuries, there are then howls of protest every year. I have heard barely a word about Transnet’s request for an extra increase on the petrol price.

I am sure there cannot be too many people who write as much about an intersection as I do, but when you get to pass it every day, you take a keen interest in it, and it seems to be that it is going to be open for normal business from Tuesday, 23 March 2010, which is really going to be tremendously exciting. There is construction all along William Nicol and Fourways is rapidly becoming the next Sandton, but if this intersection can be improved, and possibly at a later stage, additional off-ramps to be made off the highway to Main Road, the current traffic problems could largely become a thing of the past.

Perhaps I am being overly optimistic, but I expect at least 5 to 10 minutes to be chopped off the daily journey, and there is no doubt that the majority of traffic jams, excluding those that are caused by robots out of order during the heavy rain season, will be eliminated. If nothing else, the majority of the traffic jams have been precisely because of the construction taking place – and so when it ends, things are certainly going to be looking up! Whether one travels past Sandton or wherever one goes, one sees cranes, buildings being erected, bridges being constructed, roads

I love little gadgets, and luckily for me, they are generally quite cheap. One of the more interesting ones I’ve got recently was a UV monitor from Oregon Scientific and what it essentially does is to tell you how strong the sun is and the various UV-rays and how long it is safe to spend out in the sun. It is quite interesting that in early March, the ratings as early as 8.30 am in the morning are “very high” and we can literally get frazzled by the sun quite quickly!

Camillo Villegas is one of the rising stars of the golfing world and after two, back to back victories in 2008, he finally won another tournament recently, the Honda Classic. In golfing circle he is known as “Spiderman” because of the incredible low crouching pose he gets into, parallel to the ground, so that he can read putts before making them. I think he, and another young golfer like Anthony Kim, represent two of the hottest young talents at the moment.

I heard an advertisement that KFC is raising money to fix all of the potholes in Johannesburg. That is certainly a high risk strategy, to identify your brand with the repairing of holes that are forever opening.

If your campaign is successful enough, people will always remember that you have now taken responsibility for potholes and if there are too many of them, or certain potholes in prominent places don’t get fixed for a long time, they are going to associate your brand with it. Personally, I hope it works and to work, they need to fix all the potholes and keep on doing it!
 

I saw a newspaper article advising people to stay away from the William Nicol bridge over the N1 highway. It is apparently going to be closed frequently on weekends and at night and for the whole of the last weekend in March. That undoubtedly will cause traffic chaos in the area, but I am looking forward to when the bridge is finished, because it is undoubtedly going to improve traffic in the area.

I am told that Supersport will have a special 24 hour HD channel during the World Cup, which will be showing all the games in HD. They are also going to have a very expensive and fancy HD studio to be built especially for the World Cup too. Hopefully we will see a few more HD channels later in the year from Multi Choice.

The World Cup is fast approaching and we have already passed t5he 100 day deadline. I must be honest, but I really want the next big dream, the next big event to look forward to because I fear that the World Cup will be a distant memory in the blur of time quite soon. I certainly hope that we are planning to bid on the Olympics and possibly land it for South Africa, whether it is in 2024 or 2028.

A dream is very motivating for the people, and no doubt it is wonderful for the infrastructure of the country and the economy in terms of the construction that is done. We are having some awful luck in terms of the timing of this World Cup, with a worldwide recession and we need big events to continue to promote our country as a tourist destination.
 

I received an e-mail recently where the person enquired as to why I write so little about law on this blog. It is not intended in fact to be a legal blog, and I do have a legal blog, which I maintain in writing mainly for attorneys, updated somewhat infrequently which can be found at www.lawblog.co.za

The March 2010 additional FastCompany has declared Facebook, which now has in excess 300 million users, as its most innovative company of the year. Facebook is not generating any profits at the moment, so I would probably have chosen one of the three companies that is tied for second, namely: Apple, Amazon and Google.

A friend of mine said that he had a chat with a client who was involved with temporary nursing staff and after he read my article about the problems I had with nurses at a Clinic, he was reminded of his conversation that a large percentage of nurses at many institutions are brought in as temporary workers according to the capacity of the ward.

This has led to a situation where in some cases, apparently, nurses over-commit themselves and agree to go to more than one hospital on a night and send along untrained relatives or friends! The mind boggles, and I can certainly hope and pray that all reputable hospitals all have ways and means of checking that the temporary staff that are coming in for the day actually are nurses! On the other hand, I can tell you plenty of tales of admin staff and indeed other nurses, in various institutions, who are staggering around drunk. It is not so long ago after all, that our own Minister of Health wanted to treat Aids victims with beetroot and garlic, so if that was what we had at the very top of our health system, I guess one can believe almost anything. I have no doubt that there are hundreds and thousands of hard-working doctors and nurses who are underpaid (as I have made clear in my previous article) and overworked and are doing their best in very trying circumstances.

In a case against the Law Society of South Africa, the Department of Health and the Road Accident Fund alleged that comments about the capacity of State Hospitals to give proper and adequate treatment to accident victims were not fair and that they have adequate capacity. The doctor making the affidavit in the matter on behalf of the Department of Health then went on to refer to an annexure, which actually contradicted his affidavit, and to concede that in many respects, while they have the capacity to give certain types of treatment, they never have the staff to actually give it! I don’t think we must fool ourselves that we have a run-down health system in South Africa and it is not improving! We have also lost far too many talented doctors, nurses and specialists to various overseas countries which have head-hunted many of our top talents.
 

Lanseria is certainly an area that I believe will be a huge growth area over the next 10 to 20 years. It has an under-utilised airport and an increasingly convenient location to use to travel to Cape Town and Durban.

It has probably the premier golf residential estate in South Africa, certainly of the future, namely Blair Atholl and it also has what is heralded to be Africa’s largest development – 10 million square metres of the Cradle City complex. At the moment, there is extensive work being done on the roads, one of which goes into Mabalingwe Drive and the infrastructure in the area is being seriously upgraded. The roads don’t have that much traffic now and the upgrade can only be for the future growth and demand in the area. I would not be surprised to see it being the “new” Fourways in 10 years’ time. Hopefully it won’t be beset with the traffic problems that some parts of Fourways are.
 

Natural disasters seem to abound at the moment, and the latest one is the Chile earthquake. Of course, it is not going to be the last and it was followed only a few days later by mudslides killing large numbers of people. There is a difference between natural disasters, which we really cannot do anything about other than in terms of how we react and how one builds in earthquake zones, and human-caused environmental disasters and damage which is invariably the case in things like mudslide when natural vegetation and trees are removed and the land damaged.

I see our President has been visiting London and is seeing the Queen. He is really having a bit of a tough time with the British tabloid press, who is currently now claiming he has 35 children. Their media is particularly vicious, although it comes in at all sorts of levels – there is a whole range of newspapers that seem to be focused on who slept with which football player on which day and we must not think they are singling him out for attention – recently it was the Chelsea captain, John Terry, who after winning the award of “Father of the year”, was revealed to have a mistress and allegedly paid off another few. Certainly, I think that in these types of cases the first thing we do is to consult with a PR specialist and make sure that you handle the media correctly.

I don’t try consciously not to write about politics in my blog, but it is just that so much of our opinions are guided by the media, and one year they are attacking somebody and for the next year the person is absolutely incredible. So whether that is Julius Malema today or Jacob Zuma last year, the only thing you can be assured of is that if they don’t “get their man” and he does rise up, the coverage will become more positive later.

The absolute harassment of Tiger Woods and his family is a case in point, and if you were unfortunate enough to have a child in the same school as his children, then you also had photographers and who knows who gathering outside. That kind of reporting is unnecessary, sensationalistic and quite honestly I don’t see why he has to spend his entire life apologising to a bunch of people who only know him as a golfer. The reality is that sometimes, if you are well known enough, you get your name in the media at just the wrong time – when there is no natural disaster or something else to wipe you off the front pages.
 

A surprising thing, when clients complain about their attorneys, is so often they actually increase the fees and reduce the result by really not co-operating fully with their attorneys. Human beings are very busy, they always have other things to do, and as a result, even when they are paying other people to do a job, you will be amazed at how often they don’t supply necessary paperwork and documentation.

We had a case this past week involving a claim against the Road Accident Fund for a young widow whose husband had been killed in a motor accident and she really supplied us with every bit of documentation. Of course, the fact that he had been very upwardly mobile in his career as an IT specialist also made a huge difference to the result, but judgment in the case was given in the amount of R3,7 million. I don’t say every case will do that well, but certainly a lot more cases would go better if clients actually supplied any documentation at all – or at least did so on time!
 

Now there is a business idea I like. Take a piece of land, cover it with nicely mowed grass and then charge people a monthly subscription to come and hit balls on it! I can only imagine that they are highly profitable and nothing about golf is cheap, so it certainly must be a very good business formula to have approximately 13 000 members at about R300,00 a month.

The World of Golf in Woodmead is right next door to what was hailed, at the time, as the largest residential development in South Africa, namely Waterfall City, which was going to have two golf courses, an equestrian estate and all sorts of other aspects to it. I see that the equestrian estate has continued, but I really have not heard much more about the other two golf courses or the 20 000 residential units that were going to be coming on line in the area. No doubt it will happen in time and that will become a major residential area, not to mention that alongside the World of Golf there is already quite a lot of office space including major companies like Oracle.
 

I see that NERSA has announced that the power increases for the next three years are going to be 24,8%, 25,1% and then 25,9%. That is going to be a huge cost on business and individuals and is certainly going to lead to a much more inflationary environment. The bottom line is, everybody is going to have to price in much more expensive electricity into their business models. The adverts always go on about investing and the wonders of compound interest. Well, imagine the nett effect of those increases by the third year.

Most golf courses in South Africa have their club championships over the first weekend in March. They choose this time because the grass that is the very longest, and if you stray from the fairway, you are really going to have a tough time – so it is a much more challenging time of the year to play golf. Invariably, it is played over two days – this year being 5 and 6 March and so it is the wrong time of the year to try and arrange a social game with a friend if you are not a member of a club!

I get quite a few queries about potential medical negligence cases. One of the things that I have tried to do, given that there are vast expenses involved in most medical negligent cases, is to basically turn away smaller cases. That sometimes causes irritation with people, because they feel that they do have a case and they are not sure why an attorney does not want to sue the doctor or the hospital that is involved in their medical negligence that has led to them suffering. It is very hard to explain to people that sometimes one does have to make an economic decision when it comes to these medical malpractice cases and quite simply, if there is not a lot of future treatment involved, or loss of income or either combined with fairly serious injuries, that it may not be economically worthwhile doing a claim.

This year’s July Handicap, run at Greyville Racecourse in Durban, has always been run on the first Saturday in July. For the first time in history, it is going to be moving, because of the World Cup, to the end of July. The end of July also coincides with the end of the racing season in South Africa and that three week delay may very well be to a different winner than one may have expected it if it had been three weeks earlier. Horses recovering from other races will have longer to do so and others may not be at their very best at the end of July.

An interesting fact that very few people know is that horse races are often run according to the age of a horse, and the age of the horse is determined, not by the day on which it was born, although that obviously is a factor, but in the racing season in which it was born, each racing season running from 1 August to 31 July. Essentially, all horses in the country turn a year older on 1 August.
 

A recent three-day stay in hospital has illustrated to me precisely why there are so many medical negligence cases. I don’t have 101 complaints, but I can say, for example, that the nurse who had to operate my IV tube on the one particular night came in and told me, “Please bear with me, I don’t work in this Ward and I don’t know how to use the equipment.” She then promptly switched off the machine, after punching all of the buttons as if it were a casino slot machine, and reversed some of my blood up the tube!

Pipes were not sealed at other times, a pill which I know has to be chewed was given to me and I was told to swallow it and basically a multitude of minor mistakes took place all of the time. The reality is that doctors want to go home at 5 or 6 o’clock and leave a hospital or a clinic unmanned by professionals until the next morning and those left in charge, namely the nurses, are expected for R7 000,00 a month to work a 12 hour shift and keep people alive. If there is one lesson I learned it is that in future I will only go to larger hospitals that have doctors at the hospital 24 hours a day – most probably those with ICU trauma sections.