Bric + s = Brics. Do we belong?
South Africa enters 2011 with a BRIC invitation from China and doubtless considers this a coup. Is it all about wanting to belong or do we also have the wit to understand that we now cannot afford the humiliation of failing to thrive?
Our economy is insignificant by comparison to those of the other BRIC countries. On the face of it, we have little to offer the grouping. Ours lags behind Russia’s economy, the next in line, by over 75%.
It is possible that we will do little more than serve as a middleman to other African countries. But other African countries appear to be doing just fine – gleaning infrastructure funding, developing mines and oilfields, even selling off parcels of land to the highest bidders – without our help.
Once was when land was lost in war. Then colonialists raped it...now we simply sell what others want.
We must get our economy growing faster and that demands a total change of strategy. The BRIC invitation offers us access to the best mindsets in modern economic growth. Taking and implementing the right advice will be the coup!
In the 80s, Rio de Janeiro had shocking unemployment, poverty and plenty of shanty towns, all of which had transport, water and electricity supplies. At that time, South African shack dwellers had no more than the plastic over their heads. We’ve still got a long way to go.
Russia’s economy has grown significantly since the wall came down, which endorses the fact that no system works in isolation. Communism was theoretically good, but combined with human greed in practise, still enriched none but the minority. (Where have we heard this before?)
Fraud and bribery corrupt the best laid plans.
The growth and infrastructure that made SA sub-Sahara’s biggest economy came out of colonialism.
A brilliant education system in India has seen that country surge ahead economically, but the country still counts amongst its citizens millions who cannot access learning due to the hardships that poverty presents.
We need to look for overall improvement while fast-tracking natural talent.
China has contended with communism, a far too-fast growing population and poverty, but its disciplines extend from a work ethic that pays little for unskilled labour to regulated population growth.
Our own lack of general discipline, arrogant mishandling of fraud and corruption, general disdain for regulations and refusal to follow the good advice of others who have seen it all before are the things that hold South Africa back.
It really has less to do with the disparities in earning power than our cultural values.
A recent TV ad announced that a particular stokvel had won R25 000 to spend on its New Year party and I was agape. I wouldn’t spend that kind of money on a wedding, a funeral or a party, but I’d have happily transferred the same amount into my once terrifying mortgage bond.
Although presently still the largest sub-Saharan African economy, we could be overtaken by one of Africa’s oil-producing states in the near future. Nigeria is sniffing our heels; Angolan oil production falls not far behind, but both countries have limiting personal issues.
One of our greatest limiting issues could be that we don’t plan to lay a pipeline from Angola directly to Gauteng!
Ghana pumped its first barrel of oil December 15 and expects its economic growth to double during 2011 to 12.3%, which will probably make it by then the sub-Saharan country most deserving of BRIC membership.
Our economic growth prospects are nowhere near as rosy.
We were invited to join BRIC due to political expediency rather than in our own right and should the other BRIC partners decide to invite their buddies along, we will need to have something tangible to offer. To earn a seat on merit, South Africa really needs to integrate the 15 SADC countries, which appear to some of us, to have only one thing in common: allegiance to Mugabe. There is also an unsavoury suspicion that SADC is held together more by South African subsidies than good management.
The BRIC announcement further strengthened the rand, making many South African businesses wary.
Those businesses would be stronger if they did more than pray for a weaker rand. Our labour law is also not conducive to economic growth. In fact, it’s time that business stops paying lip-service to government and makes a few hard-hitting demands of its own.
The state had no qualms about suggesting that that the private sector caps its salaries for the benefit of those people it might still have no plans to employ. But public-sector salary increases largely define those demanded in the private sector, which at least works hard for its money.
We need to move from political infighting to getting our national priorities right.
Two other totally unrelated news items caught my attention over the holiday period. Research claims the existence of two separate African elephant species: the smaller forest version and larger savannah elephant. They can and have, apparently, happily inter-mingled their gene pools for the benefit of elephant-kind.
It’s such a pleasure the way animals just get on with doing what is best for them without all the hype and delaying tactics humans bring to bear. Belonging is not such an issue in the wild, or even on the average suburban pavement.
On the other hand, South Africans took the silly season to the silliest heights yet, with a discourse about who owns the right to call himself an African.
If people want to claim the description by whatever virtue, but disallow it to others of foreign ancestry, they must at least treat black Africans from elsewhere on the continent with respect, common decency and our so-called ubuntu. They must, in short, walk their talk.
They should also realise that they are entrenching the spirit of apartheid again, which has a certain irony. It is also retrogressive and suggests that equality was not what they were really after; superiority was.
Pre-1994, the government spent years searching for a collective description which black citizens would cheerfully embrace and ‘Africans’ was one of those rejected out of hand. If black South Africans have at last decided that the word does give them the warm-fuzzies, I am all for it, even if it isn’t exactly a flash of inventive genius.
I can do without it. I have not visited any other African countries and can live contentedly with the ‘South African’ stamp in my ID book. I am regularly called ‘blonde’ and that doesn’t faze me either, despite the connotations. I really don’t have the energy to argue over something I consider trivial. In my life, even elephant-sized debates score more.
But then, I don’t like being labelled and I don’t feel the need to belong to any club to prove myself.
Those South Africans who feel the need to segregate themselves from the rest of their countrymen on this issue are welcome to the experience. Equality, for me, doesn’t hang on a word.
But most interesting here, is the need that people who obviously do belong, have to re-emphasise the point.
If we live here, pay our taxes here and suffer what we like least in the country, we belong, no matter what we are called. We also acknowledge the benefits we have. Citizenship determines whether we are South African and is fact rather than a nice-to-have.
Studio M’s bottom line: Whether you choose to join a soccer club, Round Table, the school debating forum, call yourself an African or a BRIC member, I acknowledge your right to belong, as long as you acknowledge the responsibilities that belonging brings. And that includes using the dustbins provided for your litter, please.
Mo 
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