While we in South Africa have still not got Teslas, despite the fact that it is now the biggest company in the world by market capitalisation, the electric revolution continues.   Recently in America a company, Magnix, entered the history books with the first electric flight of a modified Cessna airplane.  I am always thinking about buying a boat and it is very frustrating that all of them at the moment are diesel run – you can rest assured in 10 or 15 years’ time there are going to be lots of electric options and we need to start making those types of choices for our environment.  It is obviously a long way before there will be lots of aeroplanes that are flying with electric engines, but it is certainly the way of the future and I very much doubt, apart from Africa, and other developing economies, that there will be that many gasoline cars around by 2030.

I am shocked that the taxi bosses were even offered R1,1 billion in Covid-19 relief by the Government, let alone that they rejected it.  They are apparently demanding R20,000 per taxi per month of the lockdown - and with 200,000 taxis in SA this will total approximately R4 billion.

My problem is not that industries should not get help, but my problem is that I don’t think that the taxi business is very regulated or paying very much tax in the first place. Strangely enough, none of the write-ups on the taxi industry even refer to that at all. The taxi industry has always been the one industry in South Africa that people are terrified to challenge because we know exactly how they have sorted out disputes over routes in the past – with guns and just killing people.  The taxi industry has also announced increases on taxi fares between 10% and 25% nationwide, but already many of us have seen taxi drivers flouting the rules on fewer passengers and just totally disregarding them. 

The Transport Department has asked for additional funding for a number of the entities that it is in charge of.  Those include the Road Accident Fund – for whom they have asked for R17,2 billion.  I am not sure if that full amount will be given, but the Road Accident Fund is not being well-run now, and the cash flow situation there is obviously, as we all know, not going well – to put it mildly. 

Apparently, the head of the department, Alec Moemi, said they were negotiating with the National Treasury not just for the Road Accident Fund but also for ACSA, SACCA and SANRAL.  The Road Accident Fund suffered a massive loss in fuel levy during the lockdown and had a financial shortage before that in any event.  Moemi also said that the Road Accident Fund posed a threat to the national fiscus.

I have always said that until a vaccine is found, its going to get down to a choice between saving lives and jobs.  South Africa is one of those countries where no jobs could mean more people dying than from a coronavirus.  I am not surprised that people are getting tired of some of the strictest quarantine conditions in the world.
I think most people know that until a vaccine is found there is very little we can do to guarantee we won’t get the disease other than stay at home and not allow anyone we live with in or out.  Most people do not want to live that way and many cannot afford to live that way.  Our economy and resources are not big enough to carry on like we have been, or for another shut down at a later stage.
Many have lost their jobs, many more are not being paid or will continue to not earn anything and that is going to stop them being able to feed their families or get appropriate healthcare when they need it.  We cannot bring our economy and our country to its knees, for months on end, in order to save those that may die otherwise.  It’s a terrible choice to have to make but by re-opening that is the decision that is effectively being made.  People who are most at risk can’t rely on everyone else to stay inside to keep them safe – they themselves need to stay indoors and not venture out and take risks.
We need to be careful, we need to try and live more healthily and to take steps ourselves to protect our families but a shutdown hasn’t achieved much and I don’t think we can afford it again.

I have friends who are professional hosts on Airbnb.  Managing a number of properties and renting them out – and you can just imagine how that business is doing now.  Cancellations and refunds and nobody travelling.  The people they employ have been laid off and they are sustaining massive losses.  Many people rent properties and then put them on Airbnb at a mark up for a few days at a time and all of them are stuck paying their leases.  If they don’t pay their rent the landlords who own the properties won’t be able to pay their mortgages and one cant imagine what that will do to the banks.

For businesses like that, a “return to work” doesn’t change things for them at all.  Until people start traveling again – and decide they want to live in other people’s houses in some cases or share accommodation the Airbnb model is going to be a disaster.  Airbnb was meant to list on the stock exchange later this year – that’s unlikely now and the company itself has had to borrow money.

I give this just as an example of just one business – and the many people around the world who make money out of it – that has been severely damaged by the shutdown.  There are going to be many companies around the world that are not going to make it through this. 

I don’t think cheques are going to last much longer in South Africa. Strangely enough, in many countries around the world, they are not associated with fraud and are a perfectly acceptable means of payment.  However, when the banks announced, as they did at the beginning of May, that they will no longer accept a cheque for more than R50,000, they made it quite impossible to use a cheque to pay 

for any substantial purchase or even a deposit on a house.  Cheques certainly have their good points and it is really easy to prove a payment by getting a copy of a cheque.  For some reason a proof of payment printed out from a bank account never really looks the same, but there has been so much fraud involving cheques in South Africa that it is not a surprise that the banks really want to minimise their involvement with them.