We Are Builders
This article originally appeared in the Daily Maverick SME Toolkit. Sign Up to receive the newsletter in your inbox every week.
I have written and rewritten this column multiple times in the past 48 hours. Then I read the column and feel despondent and confused so I delete all the words and start again.
It’s a tough time to be South African.
It’s even more difficult to be a business owner in South Africa right now. The country is literally on fire and small businesses across our nation are burning to the ground.
It’s also a tough time to be Cuban, Ethiopian, Guatemalan, Iraqi, Venezuelan or Indian as these countries also battle inequality, protests, looting, corruption, businesses struggling, starvation and death en masse. South Africa is one of the many nations battling with a shifting world and desperate times. As a nation, one of our favourite past times is lamenting that the things we experience “only happen in South Africa”. They don’t. It can be brutal to be alive just about anywhere in the world. We suffer with the world, not apart from it.
As a business owner, you know that what you do every day is difficult.
Building anything of meaning is difficult.
Building a business is difficult. Now more than ever.
Building a new future and building a country are both difficult.
Building a culture of hope is incredibly complex.
Building a community of support and upliftment is challenging at best.
Right now it feels like building anything is futile. But it isn’t.
I oscillate between determination to work harder, and complete and utter despair for a country at war with itself. I am sad, confused, frustrated and lost as a business owner, entrepreneur and South African.
The pandemic has gutted our businesses, restricted our basic freedom of movement, and killed our colleagues, friends, and family. The systemic corruption at all levels in our country has made it difficult to remain positive and is responsible for our torment as much as the pandemic. From fat cat corporate executives robbing the poor to government officials robbing the citizens (and the poor) to ex-Presidents inciting violence and giving our legal system the middle finger.
It’s a tough time to be South African.
This week I offer no advice. I offer no tips and tricks. I offer no positive pressure that you could or should be doing more to improve your small business.
This week I offer up support. I offer support even if it is only through this newsletter. I offer my never-ending admiration to all of you for building something of meaning and value. I offer you my inbox too, hit reply and tell me how you’re doing. Maybe venting will make you feel better.
I offer up my condolences if you have lost someone. I offer up my condolences if your business has been destroyed by the violence, looting and protests spurred on by the desperate, corrupt and greedy Jacob Zuma and his ilk.
But here’s the thing, the looting, the violence and the protests are not going to disappear. The rapidly growing gap between the wealthy and the poor is tearing ours and many other nations apart. This is not a simple case of blaming one man for inciting violence and burning a nation. This is social unrest. This is deep and dark, sinister and complex and there is no single solution to drag us out of the hellfire we find ourselves in. Zuma and his cronies lit the fire but inequality is what fuels it.
From what we can see on the news and social media, there has been no political chanting, no signboards, no movement towards anything other than violence, theft, looting and destruction.
This is no longer about one man in prison, but it’s hard to tell exactly what this is about.
The extent of our inequality is reflected by the Gini coefficient, which paints a picture of one possible answer to the destruction we are seeing in our country. It’s a single number that demonstrates the degree of inequality in the distribution of income shows how far a country's wealth or income distribution deviates from a totally equal distribution. South Africa has the highest Gini coefficient in the world.
After nearly 18 months of lockdown and record unemployment figures, it’s fair to assume that people are desperate. Sadly the looting taking place in South Africa has made the leap from desperation to purely criminal.
The future of your business and our country lies in the hands of the builders, not the politicians. The way out of the darkness is to build the light, not wait for it to shine. To rebuild our broken economy we need entrepreneurship and determination. The road out is not paved with violence, blame, othering, bigotry or racism. The road out is paved with entrepreneurs building businesses and by imaginative and inspired people doing the work they have been doing for decades already. People like you.
The only destruction that we should support is that of a corrupt and failed government. The only destruction we should strive for is that of the organisations trying to separate us all from one another. Do not support the destruction of other human beings. Do not support the destruction of businesses, nor of our hope or our intense desire to build. Do not be tricked into turning on your fellow South Africans. The enemy is a corrupt government, not one another.
We must be angry and filled with rage, but we must direct that anger and rage in the right direction. We must channel our energy, frustration, losses, and hopes into building something of value even if it’s hard – because it’s always been hard. We must not destroy the progress we have made, no matter how small we believe that progress is right now.
We must build because that’s what we do. On that note, the SME newsletter will not go out for the next two weeks as I attend to some personal matters.
