New Thinking

Albert Einstein once made the point.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we did when we created them.

We have numerous problems in South Africa: high unemployment, rampant corruption, wealth inequality, low labour productivity, strikes, dishonest government, low levels of investment, incapability of utilities to meet the demand, abysmal education, increasing racial tension, declining food production, and many, many more.  It is difficult, looking at each problem as a single problem, to find a solution that we can rely on.  Each problem, in itself, does not require rocket science to solve.  Yet we seem to be unable to solve them.  The Government produces plan after plan, promise after promise, excuse after excuse.  Caught up in the excitement of the moment, we go along with them, hoping for an improvement, a different outcome, until, one day, it suddenly strikes us!  There will not be an improvement!  We realize that the old saying is true – a definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome.  That is what the Government has been doing for the past fifteen years.  It has an outlook on the world – it would be difficult to define it as a policy! – and its actions to correct the increasingly rapid slide of the country and its citizens into destitution and chaos are all informed by that outlook.  Each action is premised on the views that the ANC is capable of improving the things it has done wrong.  A slightly more cynical view is that each action is taken only when the people at the top can see how they can best benefit from it, in cash, in promotion of the decision-maker in the eyes of the voters or in enabling them to secure their position by means of patrimonial dispensations. 

It is very hard to find any action taken by the Government in the past fifteen years that would have been unpopular amongst the ANC voters, or which would have deprived the nation’s leaders of the opportunity to cash in, in some way.  However, Government is not an easy task.  On many occasions, the leaders of the nation have to take unpopular decisions, to demonstrate that, like a good father, they are acting in the long term benefit of the people they serve, even though the medicine may be unpleasant at the time.  Generally, when a Government is honest with its people, the people act in a responsible way in return.  In the case of South Africa, the only unpopular decisions are those that hurt the minority of voters and benefit the ANC and its associates.

The result of this course of conduct is that many of those who make up the minority have come to believe that there is no hope for them.  They generally would like to see actions implemented that, at best, benefit them but, at worst, do not prejudice them.  When they see that the deck is always loaded against them, they often decide to walk away from the game.  Many Whites, Coloureds, Asians and Blacks have recognised the situation for what it is.  They have seen that there is no hope for them to be able to achieve their potential in South Africa, and they have taken their skills and talents elsewhere.  They are unwilling to compromise their integrity by joining the ANC to become eligible for the hand-out.  Any South African who does business abroad will know that there are numerous of their compatriots in important positions in foreign countries, in management, in the professions, and in their own businesses.  By definition, the people who emigrate are those who are desired by other countries – most destination countries for emigrants do not issue permanent residence or working visas to the unskilled, the indigent and the uneducated.  By definition, the emigrants are the cream of the working society.  They are the people who have given up on the South African dream.  They are the people we desperately need to retain.  Their exodus must surely be a cause for concern in any thinking Government.

Why do these people leave the country of their birth?

They leave because they know that the leaders of the nation are lying to them.  It is clear to anyone who has owned an industrial business or managed a business at the top, that the labour policies of the country are wrong.  Those policies, designed to kowtow to the Cosatu members of the tri-partite alliance, are not capable of creating the large numbers of jobs that the leaders so frequently promise, and just as frequently fail to deliver.

They leave because the statistics are lying to them.  The rate of unemployment is proudly announced to be below 25%.  25%!  In any advanced economy, which South Africa should be, an unemployment rate of 25% would be an excellent reason for the Government to resign en masse, in recognition of its incapability of providing for the people those policies for which they were elected.  However, the Government points proudly to the great achievement of reducing the rate from 25,5% to 24,8%!  What they don’t tell the people, but what is clearly evident to anyone with open eyes, is that of the 100% of employable people, only about 45% have employment or other means of earning an income!  That implies that about 55% of employable people are effectively unemployed!  The reasons are several, starting with an education system that continues to produce an unimaginably poor result, even with an adjustment of the standards to boost the real results to something that the Government imagines will redound to its credit.  Another reason is the very high cost of doing business, particularly in relation to the costs associated with employment, as well as the cost of transport (including the cost of unreliability of the Spoornet service), the cost of the numerous reports to multiple organs of Government, the numerous levies and fees, the cost of having to provide a substantial share of the business to BEE members who do not have the capability of adding in any way to the business, the cost of dealing with devious and plain crooked organs of Government, the cost of providing security that should be the preserve of the Police, and so on and on.

They leave because they see no end to the decline.  Remember, the rats that leave the sinking ship are the smart rats!  They hear the calls from the Deputy President to all South Africans to fight corruption at all levels, and they ask themselves where he was at the time that Thabo Mbeki was working to destroy Democracy by manipulating the Parliament to prevent an enquiry into the Arms Deal corruption.  They see the new Plan presented by Trevor Manuel to grow the economy at a rate of more than 5% per annum in order to reduce unemployment to 6% by 2030, but they don’t see the plans to implement the Plan.  They do the calculations and realise that the planned growth rate, even if the unrealistic bases and the unplanned implementation are ignored, cannot hope to achieve the effect it is aimed at.  They see the approval for the importation of 2 000 Chinese workers to ‘train the local labour force’ in construction (!), knowing how difficult and time-consuming it is to obtain a work permit for a highly-skilled German engineer to fill a gap that the uneducated South Africans cannot, that the Chinese workers will not receive the same wage conditions as the locals, and that they will almost certainly not be repatriated at the end of the two-year contract.  They see the sale of thousands of pieces of rolling stock to China as scrap metal, the ripping up of hundreds of kilometers of railway track and its sale to China as scrap metal, to be followed by an announcement that Spoornet is planning to import billions of Rands of new rolling stock to replace the poor quality Chinese wagons that were bought to replace those sold.  They see Eskom making undertaking after undertaking to increase its capacity, each undertaking having a later completion date and a higher cost, while the cost of manufacture soars with the massive increases in the cost of electricity, the cost of downtime due to the failure of electricity supply escalates and the production for export declines.  They see the President jetting around the world, attending conference after conference, and wonder whether he is doing it to advance the interests of South Africa or of the President.  And all the while, South Africa is slipping from its once pre-eminent position as the Leader of Africa.

They leave because the level of security in the country remains in the ‘hazardous’ area.  Once one has lived in the United States, in Britain or in Europe, one realises just how stressful it is to live in a war zone.  One looks at the evening news and sees a war going on between two Trade Unions for over a week, while the President jets off to attend to the problems of Zimbabwe, the Minister of Mineral Affairs sits in Cape Town, and the newly-appointed Commissioner of Police does a tour of the country while making reassuring statements about the future quality of policing in South Africa, statements that have been made by previous Commissioners of Police who achieved nothing better than to be tried for corruption.  They look at the burglar bars and security doors, and remember the statement by a Minister of State Security that ‘the Whites must be compelled to tear down their security walls because they have forced criminals to the poor areas!’

They leave because their belief in the country has been destroyed.  They leave because their home country has become a laughing stock in the world.  They leave because they no longer trust the politicians who have brought this once-hopeful nation to the point of collapse.

Just as it has taken many East Bloc nations decades to recover from the calamity of Communism, it will take South Africa many decades to recover from the depredations of the ANC and its associates.  The once-proud Party of Nelson Mandela, the leader of the aspirations of so many in the early years of the Rainbow Nation, has degraded to the standard that almost every other African nation achieved.  It has confirmed the belief that the Dark Continent will remain a blighted area.

All of these problems and situations have been created by the policies, and the actions or lack of actions of Government.  It is no longer possible to blame the ‘evils of Apartheid’ for the compounding disasters that threaten the country.  All should know that the vast majority of the Whites want South Africa to be a place that they and their children can live in.  They want the Government to succeed, whether it is an ANC Government, a DA Government, or one made up of a number of parties.  They want an honest, efficient and effective Government, as do the vast majority of every racial group.  Whites and Blacks are all South Africans, regardless of what President Mbeki and his version of the ANC propagated.  It is time to look carefully and brutally honestly at what has been done incorrectly, what the real reasons are for those mistakes and, often, intentional mismanagement, and then to work out what is to be done now. 

As Einstein said,

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we did when we created them.