It's a very cold, rainy day and I decide to take a drive to talk to my client, he has been calling me for some time but for some reason, I had not had a chance to visit.

On my way to her, let's call her Z for now; so on my way to see Z I cannot help but realise that most of the office spaces in her park have got big To Let signs. It's as if there is some "to let" contest I know nothing about; at the back of my mind, I am thinking about the sad reality the business world is facing.

Z welcomes me in and introduces me to her team, and she tells me they are shutting down the business as things have not gone well, they have not made revenue for the past 6 months.

We talk about the pandemic a bit, as we all know in 2020 we woke up to a new world; a world our governments had not anticipated, a world our business leaders had not anticipated. This new world seems worse than anything we have ever seen before. In 2020 most businesses had to shut down due to covid regulations and when the time came for everyone to go back to work a vast majority of companies did not really open.

This forced a lot of people to lose jobs and sources of income, and a lot did lose income, and they turned to UIF for help and yes some did get some relief by having their insurance fund paid out to them.

We all know a dollar is just good enough if you are going to make another dollar tomorrow, but the saddest thing happened to us in South Africa, we did not make another dollar as we experienced waves of covid that had businesses closing down again and again.

The On/OFF/ON situation created a lot of problems that led to a lot of hospitality businesses closing down. Well, we survived that to fight a bigger battle, restrictions were relaxed, businesses went back to operation, and then BOOM; the consumers had no money for luxuries and very little money for necessities. This created a lot of issues for businesses as they rely on consumers spending money to keep operations going; gaming Shops, Cinemas, Restaurants, bars, decor, boutiques and cake shops are some of the businesses that were affected by a change in consumer spending patterns.

The situation got worse when the war broke off in Europe, this is a story for another day, but we all know what happened after that.

I find myself sitting across the table from Z asking myself, what could we have done differently?

Let us have a scenario where for some strange reason we had free trade with other African countries and we were taxing imports from China and Europe heavily... Imagine the innovation we would be having, imagine the inventions and product lines we would be having in our continent, like a few years ago we were manufacturing our own Television, Fridges, Sofas, Toothpicks, earbuds, and now we import all these things, and yet we have a government that is more concerned about foreign policy and attracting foreign investments when we have enough resources and manpower to build Africa the next generation would be proud of.

We created a recession way before covid-19 hit us, and now we are going to make more mistakes trying to escape this situation, unfortunately, small businesses are affected so much that it is depressing.

Check Out!