Steven Friedman
worm’s eye view
Why do we not try to be world class at being ourselves? As so often happens in this country, a sporting controversy may be holding a candle to an important trend in our society. This time, it is the argument over the choice of venue for the 2003 cricket World Cup.
The details of claim and counter-claim need not concern us here. For our purposes, the important facts are that the organising committee has no plans to stage any of the games at township venues because, it says, the costs of raising their facilities to the required standard is prohibitive. Their critics reply that the amount contemplated for the opening ceremony exceeds that required to fix the township stadiums.
If this is so, the organisers would no doubt respond that the ceremony will be watched around the world and that we need to put on a show, winning the same sort of admiration as, for example, the Australians attracted for their Olympic opening ceremony. That we should show the world that we can put on a spectacle is, in this view, self-evident.
The line of thinking is familiar in government and business and so it would be no great surprise if the cricket organisers embraced it too. But the fact that it is almost taken for granted by many who take decisions in this society does not mean that it is right.
What if, instead of splashing out on an opening ceremony, the organisers were to follow the advice of one of their critics, Ashwin Desai, who proposes that money be spent on upgrading some township grounds and staging games at them? The opening ceremony would then become, partly, a celebration of our ability to bring impoverished areas and people into our sporting mainstream.
We would lose little, for it is hard to believe that many foreigners decide whether to visit or do business with a country on the strength of a lavish opening ceremony at a sporting event.
And we might gain much. Bringing the township stadiums into the mainstream in this way might do something important to enhance relations between our people. Second, it could, with a little effort, be presented at home and abroad as a sign that we are a society concerned about equity and inclusion that, whether or not we are good at smoke-and-mirrors displays, we are excellent at undoing wrongs and creating harmony and growth.
The tournament organisers’ claimed stress on emulating the technical excellence of other opening ceremonies wants us to concentrate on showing that we are good at doing what others do. Their critics’ stress on equity and building bridges invites us to focus instead on showing that we remain good at doing what we have done in the recent past finding a just way to live with each other.
Cricket is hardly the only area of our national life in which the dominant approach urges us to emulate others rather than stress our own strengths. Indeed, much of the talk we hear constantly about the requirements of becoming “globally competitive” follow the same track.
National government devotes more time to appointing panels to advise it on how to communicate on the information superhighway than it does encouraging us to debate where our society should be going. City managers enthuse about becoming “world class” even if that means alienating city workers and many residents. Company managers shed thousands of workers in an attempt to follow the latest “downsizing” fads even if that means losing valuable skills and embittering former workers.
In each example it is assumed that there is only one benchmark open to us if we want to win world respect: those technical standards which we associate with “First World” status. Unless, it is implied, we can show the rich countries that we are as good as they are at doing what they do, we will stagnate or regress.
In none is it assumed that we could make an impact by showing off those talents which enabled us to end a system of race domination without tearing each other and our country apart pragmatism, tolerance, conflict-solving ability and, in some cases, surprising openness to the demands of equity.
The problem with all this is that the attempt to show the First World that we are just like them usually fails. Our history and much of our current politics make it very difficult for us to keep our streets safe and clean, let alone to implement fancy public management methods. Often the groups affected by these attempts to achieve “world class” status stubbornly rebel against them, impervious to theories which explain them as necessary passports to success.
Instead of a seamless march towards progress and respect, these approaches therefore face repeated disappointments. Yet so strong is the desire to show off our capacity for aping others’ strengths that none of them bring home the obvious message that, if our chances depend solely on how well we can imitate the rich countries, we are likely to go sideways or backwards forever.
Luckily, the evidence suggests that they do not. Research and analysis on the economic performance of Third World countries, including those in Africa, suggest that ability to survive and grow in today’s world economy does not depend on getting right fancy techniques or policy recipes but on finding ways of sorting out conflicts so that threats to productive activity are reduced and prospects of people working together across barriers are maximised.
That would make us far likelier candidates for success if we stressed that which we know we can do well settling conflicts and looking beyond our own immediate interests rather than seeking to beat others at their own game.
Indeed, a hard look might tell us that the current fixation on imitating the rich countries may have far less to do with a careful analysis of our options than with an assumption by the white elite that only First World accomplishments matter and a matching desire by their black counterparts to refute racism by showing that a black-run South Africa is good at that which whites value.
None of this means, of course, that we should give up on trying to make the country run better. But it does suggest that it is unlikely to do so until we learn to be proud of, and work at, our own talent for avoiding conflict rather than endlessly chasing after the aptitudes of others.
And, to return to the cricket World Cup, that does mean that the real fireworks are not the way in which we organise gala events but our ability to turn an international sporting event into a catalyst for cooperation.