Should I stay or should I go, now?

I have a colleague who was accused of being a traitor when she announced she was leaving the country. And a friend who gets quite viciously persuasive e-mails from a lawyer in Australia, prophesying death and economic destruction, and offering free meals if she should want to come over and check things out in the land of the Vegemite sandwich (sorry, I prefer Marmite).

It’s a bit like that song, this great privileged South African dilemma of ours:

Should I stay or should I go, now?

If I go it could be double.

I’ve found myself humming this a lot lately.

But I’ve been wondering. What’s the hardest part of deciding to bed down in this achingly lovely land of ours? Is it really the nightmare crime and currency scenarios coming true?

I don’t think so.

I think it’s opening ourselves to uncertainty and the possibility that we will be pitied by others smart enough to get out before we did.

We are so concerned with getting things right, aren’t we? For ourselves, our children, our careers. And, indeed, the repercussions of being wrong could be dire ? growing old in a derelict state home for the aged, having no money to retire properly, children unable to get jobs because their education was sub-standard.

I have no idea if it would be wrong to stay here. I fluctuate between the two options depending on what the rand is doing, how many children I see begging on the corner or how many bureaucrats I have had contact with.

The balance can easily swing the other way. It can if I have a wonderful conversation with someone who has just returned from London or New York, is newly enamoured of this country and has decided to stay. The same applies if Johannesburg is incandescent with pre-thunderstorm light. There is a gritty taste-touch-smell-scratch quality to living here that, on a good day, makes me lift my face to the blue, blue sky with glee.

Don’t allow yourself to be bullied by people who have left and smugly tell you to come on over. Some people who leave drag South Africa down because they must: because they don’t want to think they have needlessly turned their lives upside down at enormous expense to emigrate. There is no good reason why the rest of us should be influenced by someone else’s panic or success in another country.

You, however, sitting in your lovely home in a green, leafy suburb might find you don’t particularly care about the rand’s instability. You probably have the confidence or sense of adventure to take whatever knocks may come.

Or, perhaps you are deeply unhappy and wracked with guilt at your growing desire to leave. Or, hey, perhaps you love it here but you just want to try something different.

It could be that what feels like the right decision now will turn out to have been the wrong one in the long run. Sure you’ll probably curse yourself for being a stubborn old trout and wanting to do things your way. But what would be worse would be to realise that you acted on someone else’s choice, not your own. That would be a tragedy.

It’s not surprising that we find it hard to know our own minds these days. We live in an age of information overload, where the world’s concerns are ours. You could argue that this makes us more responsible citizens. Perhaps. I think it makes us more neurotic.

When I was little, people emigrated and flitted about quite a lot. They did it because it made sense to them at the time, I suspect. It just seems that today this stay/go decision is more an issue of public debate than of private reflection. It carries with it everyone else’s experience, opinion and prejudice.

The fact that our country is not one of the G8 or at the top of the economic hit parade doesn’t mean it is falling, even less has fallen, off the map. People are living here ? and over there ? and thriving. Make your own choice. I’ll make mine, and live out my uncertainties in the sunshine.

Sally Burdett, SABC radio and television news and current affairs anchor, is writing in her personal capacity