Stop trying to ‘create jobs’, start creating people who add value

As parliament burned because of cheap latches making the expensive fire doors useless, I couldn’t help but laugh at the relatability.

In my early radio days, our studio boasted a R10 000 sound proof door but the contractor didn’t understand why there was no door handle nor keylock so they drilled one in. Our specialized 10k door suddenly became a lot less specialized and worth less than 10k.

But this is the South Africa we’ve cultivated; a lazy, uninspiring, and frankly dangerously fatigued manner of thinking. No context, no collaboration, no value.

The poetry of the fire doors being ineffective due to cheap latches and blazing up parliament kinda writes itself.

Blazing… Ha! Get it? Because Parliament are like over a year late to abide by the Constitutional Court’s weed law amendment order.

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Anyway, there I was, on the balcony of my local pub, trying to comprehend the Zondo Report and the mixed feelings that came with it.

There was joy at the bust, sadness at the thought of nothing coming from it, anger at the thought of a country collectively being taken for a donkey over decades, and, of course, the typical deja moo at having seen all this bullshit before.

Overcome with conflicting emotions, I squared my tab and made for my car which was 5,4 meters from my table (I measured) and in my sights the entire time. That’s when it happened.

That’s when the car guard expected me to pay them.

Now, I’ll pause here in anticipation of the flack I’m going to get about being privileged, blah blah, and the typical “some people don’t have the luxury of even having a car” nonsense. None of that is remotely near the point.

The point is that, despite no agreement, the car guard had an expectation of income despite being further away from the car they were guarding than the person they were guarding it for. In all probability, they likely surveilled the car less than I did in that time.

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Basically, the lack of adding any value wasn’t supposed to be a factor. All that mattered is that this car guard did a job, supposedly, and regardless of the lack of any agreement regarding expectations and costs, expected to get paid for it.

Were it just the unsolicited vehicle custodial service executives who maintained this perspective, I may be able to ignore it, but it’s not limited to the parking lot professionals.

People sit behind important desks across the public and private sectors and have likely never thought about what value they or their colleagues add. If they did, it’s certainly disproportionately less than thinking about weekend plans, their next payday, and whether it’s appropriate to seek a raise 6 months after the last one.

For some reason, we need a whole Zondo Report to half see what’s wrong with this?

Our country spends increasingly more on education and social welfare each year, yet the returns are increasingly concerning. To our politicians, that means we should be spending even more for some reason.

Probably because changing how we spend it to be more effective will cut into golf time (tune in next week to read how forcing golf clubs to report the hours civil servants spend on their courses will be better than making parties reveal their donors).

We still boast about hosting a World Cup 12 years ago despite one of the local sponsors, PRASA, hardly able to keep the trains running.

We pride ourselves in our Omicron-catching scientists, yet struggle to go a full university year without a protest breaking out.

We claim to be creating jobs by giving people flags and telling them to wave them on the side of the road.

Y’know what we’re about to learn? Robots can do that, and if we insist on keeping our people doing jobs for the sake of having a job, we’ll learn how international markets can flood us.

So stop talking to me about “creating jobs” and let’s start talking about equipping people to create value. Let’s start encouraging the rewarding of adding value.

Perhaps then, we won’t find ourselves in a position where we seriously ask ourselves if parliament could have benefitted from having a fire pool.