Tag: lockdown

According to government reports Britain’s new prime minister Liz Truss is planning to freeze household energy bills at broadly the current level this winter, using government-backed loans to energy suppliers.

South Africa’s headline unemployment rate hit a record high of 34.4% in the second quarter of 2021, up from 32.6% in the first three months of the year as businesses shed staff resulting from the devastating economic impact of the COVID-19 lockdown.

A recent Cape High court judgment contains some useful guidance for insurers in adjusting COVID-19 business interruption claims involving recovery or remission of rental.

South Africa cannot afford to lose its mall and medium enterprises (SMEs), says financing expert. As local business relief initiatives such as the COVID-19 Loan Guarantee Scheme come to a close, many SMEs continue to struggle, with an unfortunate number of businesses’ liquidity eroded by the pandemic and various lockdowns - especially those that operate in the hospitality and tourism industry.

COVID-19 has changed the way we work, not only through global hard lockdowns, but also with a hard reset in the world of work. The traditional sense of the workplace has met its demise and it’s time to think of the post-pandemic office in creative, new ways.

The pandemic and the lockdown have reduced our mobility, but our connectedness - via IoT, the Cloud and AI - has helped us overcome this. As society gets moving again, connectedness will redefine the way we do it.

By the time you read this, South Africa would have been in a state of lockdown for more than 300 days, and there is no end in sight; here or globally. We know that the economic consequences of this have been devastating for our country. Don’t be fooled by the GDP growth numbers for the third quarter of last year; 13,5% off the back of a 16,6% slump the previous quarter is not growth.

Much has been written about the uniqueness of 2020 and all the changes and uncertainties that have come with it. What started as a localised and isolated health scare, very soon spread to a global pandemic. Despite fatality numbers being relatively modest as pandemics go, the uncertainty about the disease, and its transmission and propagation, caused an extreme leadership response.

The DTI has failed business in exchange for being BBBEE politically correct! The Department of Trade and Industry have shown an astonishing naivete at best and total disregard at worst for business sustainability, in not extending current BBBEE certificates for at least a year, because of COVID-19.

As South Africa prepares to hear Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s medium-term budget speech this week, it is becoming increasingly clear that the country needs a new post-COVID-19 approach to the tobacco industry and the growing illicit tobacco sector.