SA like many others in its exceptionalism
What do you miss most about living in the UK? That’s a question often asked in the past couple of weeks. The most obvious answer is not the weather.
Only slightly tongue in cheek, I then mention the ease of communication and rarely needing to enter a shopping mall. I left SA still suspicious of the internet but by the time I got back I was buying everything online, from groceries to clothes.
Judging by cricketer Dale Steyn’s tweet this month about the cost of mobile data in SA compared with Bali, this seems hardly a special observation. In the past few years I’ve hardly given thought to the cost of mobile data, having had access to phone packages that offered more than I could ever use at low prices. Not anymore.
I could also rant about my own farcical attempt at trying to get an internet connection in SA, including logging on to my account with the prospective provider only to be confronted with a message telling me my query is low priority. Did nobody think that having clients see this was not a good idea?
It sounds like a trivial issue, but it’s the kind of thing that’s important to get right if we are going to have any chance of being a major player in the global economy and of taking advantage of the potential for technology to transform lives by easing access to everything from finance to education. As important as the subject is, and as welcome as the attention regulators are giving to it may be (though it seems unlikely they’ll be delivering Bali-type of prices to us anytime soon), this wasn’t on the top of my mind.
I had planned to talk a bit about UK politics this week, mainly about how much debates around politics were strangely similar to SA’s, though one wouldn’t think that based on the tone.
I had forgotten how we, like most other nations perhaps, often overplay our exceptionalism, good or bad. That’s struck me the most in discussions over the economy, inclusive growth (or lack thereof) and of course that P word — populism.
It’s not that controversial to assert that historical imbalances and the devastating levels of unemployment and poverty are a long-term risk to our democracy. But is this a uniquely South African phenomenon, as some have suggested or at least implied?
I spent the past two years watching one of the richest countries in the world shoot itself in the foot by holding a referendum and then deciding to leave the world’s largest and richest trading bloc.
The UK government’s own assessments show that almost every sector of the economy will suffer, and the evidence is already piling up, almost a year before Brexit is scheduled to take effect. So they’ve voted to make themselves poorer and reduce their clout in the world.
Just last week the Bank of England cut its growth forecasts, so Britain will go from being among the fastest growing in the developed world just a couple of years ago, to struggling to notch up a growth rate of little more than 1%.
UK politics are a mess, and the rest of the EU has been left aghast, having to negotiate with partners who can’t even agree on their own position. So they can’t come up with workable solutions on any of the big issues the vote unleashed, such as the possibility of an Irish hard border that may threaten a twodecade old agreement that’s kept the peace in Northern Ireland — a deal President Cyril Ramaphosa helped secure when it looked like it might fall apart in its early days.
As I stumbled out of the office bleary-eyed that morning in June 2016, having spent the previous night reporting on the pound’s crash in the wake of the referendum result, I thought of seminars I attended during my earlier stint in the UK.
It was early in my development studies degree and we were given the simple task of stating our thoughts on what differentiated the advanced and the developing countries.
The response that has always stuck with me was a statement by a classmate, who said what made them different was that people in poorer countries made illogical economic decisions. That morning I wondered what she would have made of Brexit.
It’s fascinating to be back and simply observe the South African debates, and see that the country is as often the rule as it is the exception.
DEVASTATING LEVELS OF UNEMPLOYMENT AND POVERTY ARE A LONG-TERM RISK TO OUR DEMOCRACY. BUT IS IT A UNIQUELY SOUTH AFRICAN PHENOMENON?