Steven Friedman WORM’S EYE VIEW
When will we stop relying on others to do what only we can do ourselves? As the gloom which followed the frustration of our World Cup bid set in last Thursday, an apparently unemployed man who had been listening carefully to our team’s sales pitch exclaimed: “Now we will not get jobs.” The reaction summed up the key flaw in our attitude to the world: that we expect it to shower upon us growth and jobs which only we ourselves can create. We were right to bid for the World Cup, right to insist that we were ready to host it, right to complain that our bid committee did everything it could but was thwarted by that combination of greed and power- broking which is international sporting politics. But we were wrong to place on world soccer bosses our hopes for the resources to put the nation to work, fight poverty and realise our economic potential. Growth and jobs are important. But, as much of our public debate often ignores, so are other things. To want to host the World Cup because we and our continent want to show that we have a place in the world which we have been denied was appropriate. To the degree that we pitched our bid on insisting that we should no longer tolerate a world order, in sport or politics, in which we are always relegated to guests or supplicants of the well-heeled and complacent, we expressed our legitimate desire for recognition and respect.
But sporting events are no passport to permanent prosperity. Making sure that they make money at all is difficult, ensuring that they create growth and jobs which will endure long after the players and fans have returned home even more so. It is more than likely that the economic benefits of the World Cup, and the jobs it would have created, were exaggerated. Yet the insistence on tacking on to the bid inflated economic expectations was not an aberration by a bid committee anxious to use any arguments it could to sell its case. The belief that the world will place us on the path to prosperity is deeply embedded in the national mind: it expresses itself in far more than the way we bid for a place at the sporting table. It moves us across race and other barriers, and shapes the thinking of those who used the bid’s failure to trot out the usual whinges about the post-apartheid order as much as it does that of an elite prepared to jettison many other priorities in an often fruitless search for foreign wealth. And it is a dangerous delusion. As this column has noted before, no poor country has ever become rich because foreigners decided to shower largesse on it. The American Marshall Plan – which went to Europe to save it from communism, not to the rest of us to save us from poverty – may have been a partial exception but, unless Stalin reappears, the days of that sort of bounty are long past. Rather, poor countries begin to grow when they persuade their locals to invest in growth. Only when this starts bearing fruit do foreigners, attracted by growth, begin to come to the party. And so, if we cannot find a way to begin growing through investment at home, we will not solve our economic problems, no matter how many World Cups we host or foreigners we flatter. We can find a way, if we want to. We can stop relying on external miracles and start encouraging the bargains between business and labour which will persuade the former to invest, the latter to work. We can start taking the fight against poverty more seriously and begin placing productive assets in the hands of people whose lack of resources hides their energy and enterprise. We can start fighting the tendency among our elite – of all races and political shades, outside the government and in it – to see wealth as something to flaunt rather than a means of developing our society. We can begin to encourage a national ethos which stresses commitment to common social goals rather than fighting over limited resources.
Had we won the World Cup without these things, it seems likely that many of the benefits would have been squandered as local interests squabbled over their share of the pie – or took it without asking. At the moment, we seem not to want to do that. We prefer to rely on others, only to be frustrated by the Charles Dempseys, whether they appear in the guise of sports administrators, trade negotiators or fund managers: like some of our economic policies, our bid faithfully conformed to the technical expectations of the powerful – only for us to find that there is more to success than meeting those criteria. Why do we prefer this? Perhaps the answer is simple: relying on others is easier than tackling problems ourselves. And the idea that countries like ours can only grow if we find some magic route into the good books of the world’s rich and powerful is hardly peculiar to us – it is the dominant superstition in the world marketplace of ideas. But there may be something peculiarly South African about our desperate desire to persuade the rich countries to give us jobs and wealth. Part of it may have something to do with an apartheid period in which both those who fought the system and those who benefited from it saw relations with the rest of the world purely as a matter of finding allies in the conflict at home: we are used to seeing foreign policy as a question of how others react to our problems, not how we respond to theirs. And part may have something to do with our racial politics. Most whites judge the society by its ability to impress those whose opinions they value – Europeans and North Americans. And much of the black elite, desperate to show whites that they are as good at doing the things they are seen to value as any white government, may fall into the trap by trying as hard to impress the north. But, whatever the reason, our progress will be limited unless we rid ourselves of the defeatism which assumes that only the international affluent can solve problems which we should and can address ourselves. We should have won the right to host the World Cup because it would have given us an opportunity to show the world that we have something important to contribute to the planet. But we may be unable to do that until we end our obsession with what the planet can contribute to us.