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From the editor's desk: What’s a trillion between friends?

Andrew Seldon, Editor

Back in the bad old days of 2015, some (who didn’t want to take the blame for coming up with that number) estimated the amount of money lost to corruption by the South African government to be around R700 billion¹. No wonder the ANC can afford such expensive suits.

Of course, ‘State Capture’ under Zuma and the Guptas is said to have wiped out one-third of SA’s GDP² (around R4.9 trillion). No wonder the UAE has no intention of ever sending the Guptas back to face trial. Is that how Zuma affords 20 children (or is it more now)? And I would suppose that’s why his daughter refers to the Zuma State Capture years as “Those 9 amazing years”³. I’m pretty sure I could manage to get by for a while with a mere trillion, especially if I didn’t have to work for any of it.

Then, in 2021, at the behest of Tokyo Sexwale, the Hawks were apparently investigating the theft or scam of “forty-one quadrillion three hundred and thirteen billion one hundred and four million rands”⁴ (R41 380 513 104 000 000), including the theft of gold worth sixty-three trillion rands. That’s just over two quadrillion US dollars, which is definitely a lottery worth stealing. However, since the global GDP in 2023 was around $167 trillion, I suspect someone made a mistake in their spreadsheet formulae.

In the old days, clowns were poor; they worked in the circus because they had a passion for clowning around. These days, it seems buffoonery pays very, very well, while hard work gets you no electricity, no water, no law and order, no road repairs, no working traffic lights, etc.

Despite all that, plus the innumerable skilled people that have left the country, South Africa still has some very smart people (who happen to read SMART Security Solutions). You will be able to read about some of them in this issue’s Local Innovation feature. While hardware is still manufactured in SA, the ‘killer app’, to misuse a phrase, is software, and there are some good developers at work in the country.

In this year’s feature, we tried not to focus on the ‘usual suspects’ but on the varied innovative minds in our midst. Many established companies are doing the clever stuff in SA and selling their products globally despite economic travails and the challenge of a government that works against business at every turn (unless they have shares, of course, they’re not stupid).

One of the topics we did not spend too much time on is AI. It’s all over the news, and South Africa’s security industry (and beyond) has more than its fair share of experts developing AI software that can compete with anyone. Instead of throwing too much AI at our readers, we decided to ease off a little (only for now) and look at the broader software landscape in the security industry. Of course, anyone developing software these days is looking at AI as a standard rather than something they may want to consider in the future.

I hope you enjoy the issue. Look out for more online at www.securitysa.com. For those in KZN, don’t miss the SMART Estate Security Conference on 8 May – more information is at www.resc.co.za.

[1] https://tinyurl.com/3ahbhd4u

[2] https://tinyurl.com/bd2y72k

[3] https://tinyurl.com/3nc5vawf

[4] https://tinyurl.com/4nt2av77

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