One no longer needs to be an Albert Einstein to see that South Africa is in a rut and needs a major reset. The rot is there for all to see.
We are a country lying to itself that it is going somewhere while stuck in fifth gear on a steep hill. We have stalled. Unemployment is horrendous. Economic growth has been stuck at 1% for more than a decade. The cost of living is high. Our politics are deeply fragmented. We unite for brief periods to support our national sports teams, and turn on each other viciously immediately afterwards.
We need a creative revolution, an implementable idea, that can take this country by the scruff of the neck and set it on the road to fast economic growth and political unity. It’s not an idea that will come from a politician, but it is one that will need a visionary and focused leader to champion it.
We are doing the same old things hoping for a different outcome. “Solutions” that failed 15 years ago, with politicians who failed 15 years ago, are still being held up as solutions today. This is madness.
Inaction is pushing us towards an explosion. It could be anti-immigrant riots (there is another deadline looming from the xenophobic March and March dingbats). It could be former president Jacob Zuma’s supporters resurrecting their 2021 shenanigans. It could be failures by the current administration relating to water provision, electricity or some other societal need. Without a positive intervention, South Africa has too many grievances, too many tinderboxes.
Yes, the ANC achieved much between 1994 and 2008. Since then, it has failed to govern. In 1994 it was the party of liberation. The country wanted a party of liberation in office and in power. Does it now deserve to stay in power given its numerous leadership and governance failures of the past 18 years?
In 1962 Deng Xiaoping, at the time vice-premier of China, looked around him and saw the devastation of the four-year industrialisation campaign (known as “The Great Leap Forward”) implemented by the Chinese Communist Party. The country was at the tail end of the failed policy, which led to the starvation and deaths of more than 30-million people.
Deng wrote an article, titled “How to Recover Agricultural Production”, in which he quoted military strategist Liu “One-eyed Dragon” Bocheng saying: “Yellow cat or black cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat.”
Deng’s “cat theory” became the pillar of China’s “reform and opening up” policies. It adopted measures that some may have regarded as capitalist, but which suited the country’s needs at the time. These policies produced jobs and development. It is largely that reform plan that has led to China challenging — and perhaps soon surpassing — the US’s global economic dominance today.
A country must be brave to decide on the kind of “creative revolution” that Deng’s cat theory envisaged. Chinese leaders needed to discard their ideologies and rewire their brains and outlook. Can we do the same? We are way past the stage where we have a choice. We are at a crossroads. We must either change or perish. It can happen slowly, or it can happen quickly, but doing nothing leads towards destruction.
It’s not just political leaders who now face a choice. Ward by ward, town by town, those South Africans who still bother to vote face their own “black cat, white cat” moment, as it’s better known nowadays. Does the cat they choose on November 4 catch the mouse? If South Africans cannot make the leap towards pragmatism, towards choosing what’s best for their communities, poor policies and bad leadership will continue.
Courage brings results in the smallest and biggest ways possible. I lived in New York City in 2001 and 2002. The place was infested with rats. The whole world knew about New York’s rats. I left. I moved back there in 2023. It was still infested with rats. In April 2023, New York City appointed a young, energetic official called Kathleen Corradi to fight the rats.
Corradi’s rodent mitigation department was one of only four city agencies that shared a mere $3.5m of the billions allocated for overall sanitation. It didn’t deter her. She did one courageous thing: she went against the city’s militant and noisy restaurateurs and banned loose rubbish bags on pavements and replaced them with rodent-resistant trash containers. Rodent complaints and sightings declined over 15%.
We need cats that can catch mice.
