Home, sweet home - South Africa always looks better from outside but we could be so much better
As we were driven from OR Tambo Airport to our home in Johannesburg the other day, my wife and I both burst out laughing: the thought struck us both at the same time - South Africa looked so good, so clean, so First World.
We had just returned home from a sixteen day sea cruise, sailing from Singapore and visiting Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Phuket, Rangoon, Cochin, Mangalore and Mumbai. Many are charming and worth visiting but only Singapore could claim to be First World. It's clean, it works and it looks good.
The contrast between our ship and the places we saw was in some cases stark. Seabourn describes itself as the best small ship cruise line in the world. And it lives up to its claim. We had an ocean view suite; wonderful food and entertainment; very good shore excursions and four hundred fellow passengers, many of whom we met, who were kind and very friendly.
Before readers conclude that I must have died and gone to heaven or else that crime pays, I need to explain that I have been singing for my supper. As a world affairs lecturer, I had "conversations" with a hundred or more - sometimes many more - of the passengers on each sea day. I delivered seven forty-five minute lectures on different subjects and what interested me was the reaction of the diverse audience to South Africa as it is today.
The passengers come from 22 different countries, with about a third being Americans; more than a third being Australian and British and the final third from Canada, Germany and the whole of the rest of the world. These people were decidedly mature; mostly wealthy and well educated. Many have visited South Africa and are surprisingly up to date with developments here. Many expressed concern and said their impression was that things were "going wrong." These people want to see the country succeed.
I do not slag off my country outside and I continually stressed the important positives while conceding the problems and the negatives. An important positive is that we are a constitutional democracy. As Justice Edwin Cameron said recently, that constitution is holding. Our courts uphold the constitution and regularly rule that government actions, regulations and laws must comply with it. No one should think this is not important.
I always point that in democracies governments are routinely thrown out of office and replaced with fresh faces and policies. The misfortune of South Africa and the ANC itself is that the same party has been in power for twenty one years. If we are to become a proper working democracy, with governments changing from time to time, it is necessary for the ANC to become weaker and less attractive while electoral alternatives become more acceptable to the electorate.
This is what is happening now. In a sense the ANC government is rotting and while it is very uncomfortable for South Africans now, in the longer term it will be of inestimable benefit to normalise and become a mature democracy where power passes through the ballot box. Believe it or not, the current negativity is not all bad - it is a necessary precursor of better things to come.
There are so many positives and these must not be overlooked. Investec told us recently that South African investors invested in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) (that means millions of black and white South Africans, especially through their pension funds) over the last fifteen years would have done extremely well for themselves. US$100 invested in 1999 would now be worth US$497. The same amount invested in the S&P index would be worth US$187. Who would ever have guessed that under an ANC government that seems not to like or help business, this would have been the case?
The World Economic Forum Report for 2015 shows our country is a world leader in financial market development; law relating to settling disputes and challenging regulations; auditing and reporting standards; efficacy of corporate boards; protection of shareholders and investors; soundness of banks and regulation of Exchanges; availability and affordability of financial services; and even in secondary school enrolment, where we rank 24th out of 144 countries in the world.
But we could be so much better. The same WEF Report shows us lagging in many areas where we should not be among the worst in the world. We rank 132 on health and primary education; 113 on labour market efficiency; 133 on business costs of crime and violence; 140 on quality of educational system; 144 on quality of science and mathematics; 126 on bandwidth; 144 on employer/employee relations; and so on.
None of these problems is insoluble. We are not on the brink of being a failed state. On the contrary, when one looks at South Africa from outside, and returns after an absence - even a short one - there is no place like home. But why don't we go ahead and attend to these problems on a practical level? Not everything can be fixed in a day or a year, but why do we not start?
If we have poor public hospitals generally, why do those responsible not decide to fix ten or twelve this year? And next year the same. Where the hospital is filthy, clean it. If the lifts don't work, repair them. If the staff employed to do the job won't work then get rid of them. Repair and replace equipment that is defective. Where the medical and nursing staff are overstretched, then go and recruit additional people. Make us proud of our hospitals.
The same goes for police stations and schools and roads and pavements and potholes and every other public facility.
Within a couple of years we could make a real difference by aiming for the First World instead of the Third.
Douglas Gibson is a former Opposition Chief Whip and a former ambassador to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.
This article first appeared in The Star.
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