Frikkie Faces Business Disruption After Planned National Shutdown Affects Supply Routes

Before we get to the frown, some background on our dear Frikkie. He sells industrial fasteners out of a warehouse in Pietermaritzburg. Bolts, washers, the boring metal that holds the Republic of South Africa together. He is a calm man. The kind who refills the same Stanley flask with filter coffee (strong and black) four times a day and jingles his car keys in his pocket when he is thinking. The keys are going now. His wife notices from across the kitchen. She has been married to those keys for a long time and knows their moods better than his.

It was the date that caused the frown. The 30th of June 2026. A planned national shutdown, linked to the March and March movement, billed by its organisers as peaceful. A statement that in this country has roughly the predictive value of a R10 umbrella. You can feel a highveld storm building hours before it breaks. The heat sets in. The birds go quiet. Your hound has a small theological crisis under the bed. Frikkie felt this in 2021 and did what everyone does when a storm is brewing. Carried on. Told himself it would pass. Then went back inside to finish his coffee. And have another wine gum. Or two.

Except, it did not pass over. It came down cats and dogs, like a tsunami of ants, figuratively speaking. Running riot, literally speaking.

His building did not burn. The looting never came that near to him. What came near was an empty road. A road closed forty kilometres away turned a warehouse full of perfectly good washers, into a warehouse full of perfectly good washers that cannot be sold or moved.

So he exercised his only option. He waited. With hope. Not for the authorities, no South African waits for those, especially when one is in the dwang. The soldiers came eventually to guard the ash. By then his neighbours had been minding the roads and buildings themselves for a week. Protecting property that was not theirs. When the rubber hits the road, Saffers help Saffers. No time to be depressed, no time to wait for blue sirens, you just get on with it. That is Mzansi gees.

That was 2021. This is now. Frikkie does something the 2021 Frikkie would never have done. He opens his laptop at the kitchen counter and writes to his staff.

Dag sê, Mense. In 2021, the riots caught us with our pants down. Good and proper. We sat here like a row of meerkats waiting for the system to do something. No one came. We very nearly did not make it. There is a “peaceful” march on the 30th of June and we all know peaceful marches in this country have a way of going pear-shaped. I am not interested in the politics of it and I do not want it discussed on the floor. What I am interested in is that on the 30th we will be prepared for a disaster. So from today we take the position that it will go pear-shaped. Grey rhino, mense. That big grey beast with a sharp horn you can see coming from a mile off, while everyone else has their heads in the clouds, we are preparing for a helse storm. The July 2021 unrest was a grey rhino. We called it a black swan and paid the price. Not this time. Meeting tomorrow, 7am sharp, please bring a pen and your brain. Marie you can bring a red pen. We will leave no stone unturned in our planning. All hands on deck mense. Baie dankie, Frikkie.

He read about the grey rhino in a book his new risk advisor left on his desk and it stuck like a Boney M Christmas tune. The black swan is the thing nobody saw coming. Covid was the classic example. The grey rhino is the thing everybody saw coming, yet no one moved out of the way, no one did anything. The book got the colour right for the symbolic grey rhino. The real life black rhino and the white rhino are both, in the flesh, shades of grey, which tells you something about how confidently people name things they have not looked at properly. Risk is the same. Never black or white. Always a shade of grey.

Frikkie has decided he is done being the man who watched the grey rhino approach, hoping for the best.

So he begins the unglamorous planning work now. Before 30 June 2026.

He starts with “The Sandy Report”, which covered causes of the 2021 riots in KZN. It said the riots had been predicted. That smart people warned the right people. And that the right people did nothing. The country lost an estimated fifty billion Rand, most of it uninsured. Four years later the report is gathering dust and another highly charged march is coming up. Same symptoms. The same system that slept through it then, is the system we have now. A man who blindly trusts that system is either stupid or fast asleep. Frikkie is neither. So Frikkie trusts Frikkie.

So what happened in 2021? He had Sasria. What is Sasria you may ask, sounds like a German first name. Sasria was born after the 1976 Soweto uprising, when insurers realised one riot or unrest event could cause thousands of claims at once. Normal insurance is not designed to cover these kinds of losses, as they cannot easily be spread, so South Africa created a state-backed insurer called Sasria to carry these special risks separately.

Trouble for Frikkie was that nothing was physically damaged in the riots. Which was a good thing of course, but it also meant no Sasria claim. What was damaged was his pride, his turnover and his bank balance, which took a big hit to cover security costs. When the looters were in his vicinity he hired guards. Armed ones. Expensive ones. They stood watch over a warehouse of bolts for three weeks like it was the Rugby World Cup Trophy. He paid for that himself. A whopping R1.1m for preventative measures. Who knows what would have happened if they were not there, a story that often replays in Frikkie’s mind.

The assessor mentioned a startling fact when going through the claim file that covered nothing.

"Meneer, I see you paid a small fortune for security guards? Sasria would have paid for those." He said it warmly, the way you deliver good news that was not good news. "The minute the trouble is inside ten kilometres, the cover triggers. During and after the drama. Up to ten million." He turned a page. "Lovely cover. We call it Security Costs incurred for Imminent Danger & Post Loss Minimisation.” Fancy, hey.

Frikkie asked what the lovely cover cost.

"Few hundred rand a year. But I am not a broker, risk advice is below my pay grade,” he chuckled.

Frikkie had not so nice thoughts. Thoughts that did not reflect well on the broker. The thoughts multiplied and produced a few unspoken Afrikaans profanities. You trust someone to know about an insurance extension that covers a R1.1m loss and costs a few hundred Randelas. This oke took his commission for six years and never knew the cover existed. Frikkie made a note to himself, the wrong broker is not an admin problem. The wrong broker is a business threat.

Moving back to the here and now, Frikkie calls in his ops manager, an unflappable woman named Marie who has run the operation for fifteen years and keeps a red pen behind her ear at all times, in case the world needs correcting. They stand at a whiteboard and do a risk identification colonoscopy. Marie calls it derisking. What do we move if an angry mob is on its way.

And how. What gets locked down. Who goes home and how. Marie writes it all down with her red pen, calm as a Sunday, the way only Marie can when she has decided panic is for amateurs. "Put a security company on a proper retainer," she says, "with a backup option, in case the first lot gets cold feet or goes belly up, so we are not standing in a queue behind every other oke who also did nothing until the looting started." Then she asks whether water cannons are legally permitted to defend private property.

Frikkie mutters, "Seriously, Marie." Marie, undeterred, wields the red pen with even more vigour, a red question mark now clearly displayed on the plan. "And what about asking Elon for a few hundred of his Optimus robots to guard the place? The looters will get such a skrik when they see our Robocops, they will do a sharp 180 and go bother someone else." At that point Frikkie said genoeg. But inside, he was smiling. Marie was one of a kind, for sure.

But Marie was not finished. "Split the stock, send half to a second premises in another location. Spread our risk, the way those clever insurance companies spread theirs. And let us try and find other ways to keep the money coming in if push comes to shove." She had learned in 2021 that a business with one income stream is a business with sustainability issues. "And read our own contracts, all the way to the boring end where the force majeure clauses are. The part that decides who carries the loss when Mzansi goes rogue."

And only then, last, deliberately last, the insurance.

Insurance is never the whole plan. It is the parachute we have in case the plan fails. Risk first. Insurance second, is what our new brokerage says. This time he has a proper risk advisor, the one who left the rhino book, the one who thinks about risk first instead of commission.

Frikkie reached for his wine gums. The packet was empty. Let us hope the powers that be have their packets full and do some risk management of their own this time. The 30th of June is just around the corner.

Frikkie is not panicking. Frikkie is prepared.

Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes and does not constitute insurance, financial or legal advice. The scenario is fictional and used to illustrate real insurance principles and common industry practices. It does not refer to any specific insurer or claim.