PETER BRUCE | Why we can’t be defined by our entire past

What do South Africans look like from the outside? Born and raised here, I left for 20 years before coming back. Friends still ask me why, but it’s hard to have more than one home.

We’re a beautiful country and, for the most part, God-fearing, conservative people. Unexceptional, I’m afraid. We love and laugh, and mostly we work hard. A social media chart said we wake up remarkably early. We are always in demand overseas — we pitch up and do jobs others would often rather not.

That said, we are also dreamers — probably not surprising in what is still really a frontier society. That we have our heads in the clouds was brought home to me the other day while reading Business Day, a newspaper to which I am hopelessly attached.

Two articles stood out. The first was by Ayabonga Cawe, chief commissioner of the International Trade Administration Commission (Itac). It is a critical agency, setting the rules of trade and import and export taxes, it influences the behaviour of businesses and actors throughout our economy.

It is driven now by the deeply left-wing ideology dominant in the department of trade, industry & competition to which Itac reports. That’s also no surprise. Things are what they are until they’re not, but for now Cawe is a rising star — thoughtful, well-read and perhaps one day a finance minister.

He wrote well about the value, in a constricting world, of holding on to what you produce in case — given the Strait of Hormuz and the galloping price of oil — you need it in an emergency, or require your trading partners to invest in processing at source instead of taking your minerals and foods and processing them for further export back in their own markets.

The crime and negligence around us afflict us but don’t define us. Rotten government is our burden, but it didn’t start in 1994

“In Indonesia,” he wrote, “nickel export curbs have been reinforced by a requirement that coal, palm oil and ferroalloys be controlled through a state firm linked to a sovereign wealth fund.”

The other article was a report on a speech by Tracy-Lynn Field, director of the Mandela Institute at Wits University and a member of the presidential climate commission. Field told how a “just transition” — the notion whereby we move from polluting coal-fired electricity to cleaner renewable energy — should not exclude people dependent on coal for a living.

“The climate crisis is inseparable from the concentration of wealth,” she said. “Just 10% of people in the world accounted for 70% of polluting emissions.”

Like Cawe, she is right. But asking the right questions doesn’t mean we get to the right answers. Karl Marx was right about capitalism but hopelessly wrong in his remedy. And the Right has its own whimsies. We fall into argument instead of action because we can’t all agree on the things that are good for all of us all the time. And that’s partly because we don’t know who we really are.

Phuthuma Nhleko, former CEO and chair of MTN, recalls in his new book, The Invisible People, a board meeting of a company with a problem in West Africa. One of the members said they should be mindful that for centuries West Africans were traders, alive to opportunities to negotiate virtually everything. But South Africans were cattle herders, so bartering and negotiating did not come naturally. These were both sweeping generalisations, but generally accurate.

In a way we’re plodders. We toil, we’re honest and reliable, from Left to Right, black or white. The crime and negligence around us afflict us but don’t define us. Rotten government is our burden, but it didn’t start in 1994.

I don’t pretend to have answers, but to find our path, as Cawe and Field were trying to do, we must surely understand what it is we do really well and do more of it. Off the top of my head, mining and farming. Why is there no investment in mining? My answer would feature BEE rules requiring huge sacrifices of investment capital to people you do not know. But others would have other explanations.

And farming? The state holds 2.5Mha of previously farmed land, almost the size of Lesotho. Why not put a million new owners between the ages of 30 and 45 on viable parcels of land they can farm or sell or lease or solar-panel? As for the beauty of this country, its tourist potential is unquantifiable.

The things that enabled the industries Cawe might want to “save” today were viable in this country, far from big markets, only because of cheap black labour. The coal industry Field needs to be respected as we “transition” was viable here only because of cheap black labour. And as coal vanishes as an energy source and once powerful industries seem to wither, it’s OK to ask if they were ever really a part of us.