Thomas Johnson - The Blog

I sent the email below to Standard Bank's Fraud Department regarding the fraud to my credit card account on June 29 this year. Sub-Standard Bank has lost another client as I finally lose patience. The matter has still not been resolved. I reported the fraud immediately and simultaneously received from them a text message and phone call about the "Etechpro" fraudulent transaction of over R6 000.  The operator said they would contact me "within 48 hours".  Three days later I got a text message the Etechpro transaction had not been processed which means there was still time to cancel or reverse it. But a week after the fraud, when Standard Bank had not contacted me, I emailed them. To cut a long story, without listening to my report (they said I "refused" to speak to them which was untrue because I had told the fraud department operator what happened), they said the Etechpro transaction was done on the Internet and I must've given my one-time pas...

Following the release of South Africa’s 2018 crime statistics, which police minister Bheki Cele described as a “ war zone ”, there was a side discussion by some opinion writers that “inequality” is a cause of crime. Many people – politicians, business, journalists and worst of all academics who should know better – confuse and conflate inequality with poverty. They are linked but not the same.   Poverty is the shortage or absence of livelihood resources and assets particularly income/money, and inequality the disparity of wealth (income) in a society. Poverty affects the individual at micro level whereas inequality is a macro, notional indicator of social or income equilibrium – the social democratic ideal. Inequality is a catch-all red herring to describe SA's ills. People use it, often loosely, to sound knowledgeable, as a sound bite, to simplify what they're talking about or out of intellectual laziness, in this case, the cause of crime. Inequality does not driv...