A well-known South African electrical cable manufacturer will not hold it against me when I say that, at one time, about 25 years ago, the manufacturer ran the most unsafe cable making operation that I had seen.

To the accompaniment of whistles and shouts, a group of men dragged wires, PVC sleeves, conductors and insulating paper at high speed across the floor all the time while the whole mix was being fed into a machine out the other end of which emerged a completed electrical cable. It looked chaotic. It looked confused. Most of all, it looked incredibly dangerous.

I asked the man I was visiting how many people were injured in the manufacturing process and how many died. He told me that they had not had an accident in years. How so, I asked? His answer (as you can see) has remained with me for all these years. He said the owners made sure that the workers were sober (they were checked three times a day); that the workers all wore loose-fitting leather gloves so that, if caught up in the wires, off went the glove, rather than the hand; that the workers wore high-traction safety boots on a rough surface; and that a person had a hand on the emergency stop all the time. But he said, most of all, “they want to be safe”.

I recently received an email from Fred Greyling, who pointed out in a fact sheet that he attached to the email that the fatalities due to unnatural causes as worker fatalities in industry and on the mines were 0.7% of the total number of fatalities due to unnatural causes, which include road accidents, the drowning of toddlers, homicide and suicide. His sheet states that road accident fatalities are about 14 000 a year, and homicide about 18 000 a year. Suicide is about 8 500. Toddler death by drowning and worker fatalities are 300 a year.

A great deal of money is spent on safety to reduce worker fatalities in industry and on the mines. The question Greyling asks is whether industry now places too much emphasis on safety and too little on production. If so, he suggests, if the safety costs of industry and mines were reduced, would it not be possible to spend the money thus saved on reducing the deaths from road accidents, homicide and suicide?

This is a hard question, but there are some things to be considered. It is a fact that organisations in industry still have accidents, despite extremely comprehensive safety programmes and massive investments in personal protective clothing. An argument may be that any group of people will, statistically, have a certain number of fatal accidents, regardless of the measures taken to prevent them, and that, if one spends less on safety programmes and personal protective clothing, the fatal accident rate will absolutely increase.

But how do you test this? I offer you the following true story for your consideration. In 1991, the Sapref refinery had a contract to build a crude distillation unit. The engineering, procurement and construction, or EPC, contractor was Badger, of The Hague.

Sapref told Badger that it wanted the work to be top quality, the project to be completed on schedule and the safety record to be great. In the electrical project (I was the lead engineer), all the bidders were given this proposal: in addition to their contract price, they could name a sum of money. If they got the contract, then, if they delivered top quality, completed the project on schedule and achieved great safety, they would be paid this extra sum. If not, it would be deducted from the contract value.

The contractor that got the job, JC Groenewald, part of LTA, delivered handsomely. So, this proves that safety can be bought, yes? No. What JC Groenewald did was to promise each worker a bonus for safe work and had a huge picture of the cow that would be slaughtered for the after-contract party. Each week, a piece of the cow would be inked in to represent progress. So, perhaps, there is a middle path. Instead of punishing unsafe acts, reward safe acts. Can this apply generally? Linking safe acts, quality and production all as one? A thought. Many thanks, Mr Greyling.