South Africa is a noisy and dramatic country. Something happens every day that shifts our attention from what took place the previous day. That is why we forget quickly.
The problem is that we do not pause to consider where we are going. Does anyone have an image of what, given the way things are going, our country will look like in the medium to long term?
You need not be a soothsayer to foretell a society’s future. While nobody could have foreseen Covid-19, it is not impossible to tell that the future of an unschooled child who is a drug addict is doomed.
And so we need no bones to foretell SA’s future.
Two weeks ago, Eskom announced that there will be a shortfall of 4,000 megawatts on our national electricity grid over the next five years.
In simple terms, Eskom is preparing us to expect power cuts to continue for five years and beyond. If you have money, buy a generator now. That is how they do it in Nigeria.
In a normal country, one would expect government to launch a massive generation capacity infrastructure rollout to avert an impending disaster. Alas, ours is a government of incompetent thieves who have stolen all the money needed to build power stations.
So, it is not impossible to foretell: No serious foreign investor will come and build a new factory in SA, where the government cannot provide a simple thing called electricity. This means that, if you are unemployed, you will remain jobless for as long as thieves continue to run your government.
A second indicator is more sophisticatedly prescient. The future belongs to countries that will master science and technology – countries that will produce hi-tech products in a new world economy driven by artificial intelligence.
Donald Trump is an idiot, but he had a good hunch about the endgame China is involved in: investing in research and development to conquer the knowledge economy of the future.
In his book, Has China Won?, the Singaporean strategic thinker Kishore Mahbubani suggests that China is in many ways already ahead of the US. That is precisely what drove Trump mad.
China has discovered the secret of the future: ownership of ideas (intellectual property) and domestication of the instruments of production (the factory).
Such, in a nutshell, is what will constitute the infrastructure of power in the future. Substantively, it is the same strategic insight that eluded the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Instead of encouraging knowledge diffusion in society and allowing ordinary people to reap the fruits of their own knowledge, Soviet strategists allowed the US to lure them into the symptomatically deceiving game of demonstrative gimmicks – of atomic bombs and space experimentation.
When such foreign policy power games are not based on what the American strategic thinker George Kennan called “national vitality,” social stagnation, nay, degeneration, is bound to happen.
Intriguingly, Russian president Vladimir Putin is still busy playing the old game of projecting power through bombs detonated on foreign soil.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is far smarter than that. He grabs Putin’s hand for a dance in space to celebrate the Chinese people’s victory over poverty, while the US cries foul that China has invaded the Western laboratory.
Given the magnitude of the global stage on which the future is currently being contested, it makes sense to wonder: Is there space for small players like SA?
The answer is unbelievably a big Yes. But only if SA is no longer governed by an unthinking mob of looters who cannot see beyond their bellies.
Where, then, is the evidence of success by small players in the gigantic game of global big brothers? Look at what Scandinavian societies have achieved. Or, to cast a gaze on the road ahead, look at what a small country like South Korea has done to secure its place in the future.
Here we are, again, confronted by the same question: Does anyone have an image of what SA will look like in the medium to long term?
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