Free in the Wild West

A while back I attended a dinner with a senior international executive and he commented that he’s never before seen people who run their business while firefighting – on a grand scale – like he’s seen in South Africa.

I was slightly offended at the time but, on closer reflection, realised he was right. Doing business here is complicated. It is exhausting. Every week introduces another WTF moment.

But having spent a decade abroad – studying, working and living in Europe – there is still no place on earth I’ve felt more free and, dare I say, hopeful than I do living and working here.

A few months ago I saw a tweet from Paul Theron, CEO of asset manager Vestact, which stuck with me and which I now whisper to myself repeatedly on an almost daily basis.

He posted a picture of his running group in Johannesburg’s inner city, simply captioned: “Here in Joburg, we are f****d but we are free.”

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This resonates, with one important distinction: I do not, in fact, believe us to be ruined. But I do believe us to be free. And the latter is our saving grace.

I am not talking about economic freedom, which most of our citizens do not have. Nor about freedom from fear. Violence and crime are a part of our daily reality. To an outsider – and to many South Africans – that is not freedom.

The freedom I feel living here is freedom from restrictions, from petty rules and old-school structures and norms. The freedom to make a plan to move forward.

We’re living in our version of the Wild West and while that can be infinitely frustrating because some days, nothing seems to work, it can also be infinitely energising.

South Africa is complicated. It is complicated to live here and even more complicated to do business here. Public displays of incompetence are frequent and result in billions of lost revenue every year.

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Away from the public eye, out of the news cycle, there are battles fought daily at every level of every organisation that are unique to South Africa.

In my experience of working with other Third World countries, there is little that comes close to the complexity we deal with here. And in business, “complexity” is a bad word.

Superimposing a capitalist structure entirely geared to profit, performance and growth on to a country racked with infrastructure challenges and corruption is difficult as it is – but that’s the cost of doing business in most developing countries.

What sets South Africa apart is the layers underneath: we have tried to recover from decades, if not centuries, of vast and purposeful inequalities in education, from oppression that led the majority of people to believe that they’re “less than”, from hierarchical and male-dominated cultures and from very deep-seated and justified anger.

And we’ve tried to do all of this in 30 years, without descending into civil war.

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Looking at our history, it’s a wonder our economy and our people are still standing. And not only standing, but (modestly) growing.

I spent my early 20s in Germany, and my late 20s in the UK, and I was always confounded by the narrative on the news.

I remember hours of discussions on things that wouldn’t even enter a water-cooler conversation in SA, along with a complete reliance on government to sort out the “mess”.

A part of me was jealous – what an incredible privilege to worry about First World problems.

But a far bigger part of me was incredibly bored. There was a feeling of apathy among most of the public, armchair warriors who could sit back and rely on the public sector for a solution. Imagine if we did that in SA? Nothing would work.

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South Africans are not apathetic. We fight – not always for the right things and sometimes with each other – but we rarely rely on anyone else to do things for us.

People are smiling, the sky is blue, Sandton is a perpetual building site with businesses expanding and pockets of the inner city are being gentrified.

Most importantly, through it all, we find joy in each other and we laugh (often through tears) at the chaos and beauty that surrounds us.

Are we ruined? Maybe a little bit. But are we free? In my definition of the word: entirely.

We have the freedom to get things done, to innovate, to discard old rules that don’t serve our future, to walk across the street even though the red man is blinking, to leapfrog the First World and create something better – grounded in real need, rather than want.

Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

– Smith is in customer services