It’s hard — that is the reason to stay in SA
As I sit down to write this column, it has been 13and-a-half hours since I last had electricity (a combination of load-shedding and that new household term, “an unplanned outage”). How polite — how inconvenient.
The outlook is bleak. And the next crisis — water — is going to have far more devastating and personal consequences. Our problems will keep stacking up, unless you believe the selected statistics, ignored truths and barrages of unkept promises proffered in the president’s state of the nation address.
I don’t.
It should therefore come as no surprise to you that emigration (if not semigration) is a hot topic, particularly among the middle-class-plus parents who gather on the sidelines of their private school sports fields to cheer on their respective precious progeny while comparing the costs of alternative investment visa destinations (options that are gradually being closed down as it becomes clear to those previously eager countries that having a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good person, let alone a contributing citizen).
I’m not going anywhere, but then my age group’s choices are increasingly limited. That’ sa refrain I hear a lot from my peers. “But we should encourage our kids to leave!”I hear just as often. Maybe. Most South Africans can’t emigrate, even if they want to but, for those who can, why would we?
I actually want to stay.
Let’s start with that refrain from the theme song of Cheers, the 1980s US sitcom, which goes: “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.”
SA is home for me.
As our social groupings, economic strata, associations and intersections keep changing, mixing it up and rearranging in our not-so-new SA, it is sometimes difficult to know where you really fit in. Who are your people in this fragile rainbow mix we so desperately wish would become one nation?
If you resolutely stick to where you’ve come from, your world will keep getting smaller. If you’ve opened your mind to where we could go together, the possibilities are endless. I do, however, see less evidence of understanding, mutual interest and tolerance these days, as differences become entrenched. Make the right choice. It’s good to belong and entrench the rights that attach to being an inalienable, original South African.
We all belong here, and we should stay — not because it’s easy but because it will be hard. What is life, after all, if not the sum of difficulties overcome? If we give up, failure will become a refuge, a place to gather, to whinge, to envy some and decry others still on the field having a go. You can’t expect to be part of the prize-giving if you didn’t stay and play.
Experiences, needs and expectations vary so vastly across the spectrum of the disparate living spaces we find ourselves in that it’s hard to come up with one formulation that will satisfy everyone. But we won’t even get close unless we all stay.
RISING TIDE
An enduring solution will be found only in a plan that is a rising tide that lifts all boats. That isn’t impossible to figure out, but it will require deferred gratification for the harvest to be sufficient to feed everyone. I’m staying for the possibility of that.
I’m staying in the hope that an existential crisis (the alternative route that will force a desperate survival strategy on us) will be avoided as new, young leaders emerge to plot a course out of this mess we’re in, into the future and towards the promised land we all voted for.
I also subscribe to the notion that Africa, as a whole (as much as the sum of its parts), could present just the right risk-return equations to become the investment destination of choice for economic growth over at least the next decade.
I’m staying for that too.