Written October 4, 2007:
You see the issue here is that although the black people of South Africa
have won their political freedom, we are still miles from achieving
economic emancipation. One might argue that there are plenty of Black
millionaires in the country, but as the statistics above show, this is
still far from an equitable distribution of this country’s wealth. Until
the proportions of wealth and resource distribution are reversed, we
cannot claim to have achieved true freedom.
What needs to happen
is this; young, Black, educated South Africans need to rise up and take
their rightful place in South African society. They must play the role
that only they can, thanks partly to their unique historical legacy, in
the transformative movement already building up steam. They must prove,
once and for all, that one should not depend on others to for help in
changing the adverse socio-economic circumstance one might find
themselves in (regardless of the causes), but should devise means of
lifting themselves and their community out of poverty and indignity.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating the kind of forced seizure of
resources that has left our neighbours in Zimbabwe with the highest rate
of inflation in the world. No. I’m talking about educated Black men and
women using the tools they’ve gained through Universities and Technical
colleges to re-order the power balance in this country.
In
addition to this, workshops need to be established in our communities on
a massive scale, promoting the spirit of entrepreneurial ambition and
establishing a culture of saving; it gains our country nothing learning
to make money without knowing how to spend it wisely. The government
needs to make it’s presence felt through the media, actively playing a
role in the kind of programming being fed to us on a daily basis; if the
right kind of messages are being broadcast over the media and
reinforced in the home environment, the media can play a pivotal role in
ensuring that the perception of wealth is changed in the minds of our
people. The images and messages need to encourage education (by
extension knowledge production) firstly, initiative and ambition
secondly, and thirdly contextualise them in the spirit of Ubuntu. These
values are to create the foundation for an ideology that will transform
the perception surrounding Empowerment, not to be thought of as means
with which to grow individual/personal wealth, but to benefit the
families, communities and ultimately the country of those who will
pioneer this new generation of (mentally) Empowered Blacks.
These
are necessary measures, and I am unapologetic about advocating the
fundamental principles underpinning them. If you think about it you’ll
see that the results of a process of this kind will in time benefit not
just the Black grouping of our population, but the whole; it will
increase the number of economically active citizens, raise the level of
competition in the market (not for jobs, but for contracts), allow this
level of competition to produce world class specialists in a variety of
fields, attract foreign capital, strengthen the economy, give the
government more lateral space for social spending (focusing primarily on
education, centrally engraining the concept of, what I will for want of
a better phrase, call socio-capitalism) on schools, health care
(including nigh aggressive HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns, I will outline
some plans I have drawn for this in a later document) housing, venture
capital (Umsobomvu etc.), strategically designed disability grants and
pension funds, basic amenities and motivational seminars on community
development (the latter will play a critical role in fundamentally
changing the perception that the majority of the country has of them
selves). If all this is geared towards enabling a shift in focus from
base survival to betterment (through education), it will begin the cycle
all over again; sustainable development, perpetuating itself so long as
there are men and women willing to give of themselves to see this ideal
achieved.
[I’ve put the words educated and education in italics
to denote a different concept of knowledge giving, not necessarily
bound to institutional learning, but encompassing a broader array of
gained wisdom; what remains when the facts have been forgotten]
A
phenomenon that has disturbed me, not because of its’ advent, but it’s
general acceptance and even promotion by most of society, is the Debt
Trap so many newly empowered Blacks find themselves inextricably caught
in. However it may have come about in individual cases, it exhibits a
fundamental flaw in the thought processes propagated by a capitalist
society; that money and the material possessions it can afford you will
make you happy. It doesn’t help that pop culture, through various forms
of media, especially music and television, have made this an almost
primary assumption of the frightening majority of the youth in the world
today.
This perception needs to change if we are ever to free
ourselves (South African society as a whole) from debt, as impossible as
this might seem. How, you might be asking, will we ever achieve this
lofty goal? It’s simpler than you might think. The truth is that Black
South Africans have never known what it is like to have excessive
amounts of money, and quite frankly we’re handling it badly. How many of
the Black Fat-Cats you see rolling around in S-class Merc’s paid for
them in cash? How many of them are ‘in the black’ on their credit
ratings? The plague of newly empowered Blacks is the desire to show the
rest of the world how much money they have, by buying flashy cars and
mansions in exclusive neighbourhoods, Armani and Gucci suits, Breitling
and Rolex watches, whether or not they really can afford them. We live
in a society of debt, just another form of slavery that so many of our
young Black professionals have fallen into. We’ve learnt to love the
wealth of the White man without learning how to use it effectively; we
have new money, not real wealth.
So how does one go about
curbing this trend? The answer is simple; education. Teach money
management from the earliest stages of cognitive development, this way
our children will grow up with an understanding of how money works,
learn to manage theirs properly when they enter the working world and
avoid the debt trap. Feed this into the model of social spending I
outlined above, and maybe, just maybe, we might be able to turn this
country around and realise the Dream our Fathers and Mother bled and
died for, in our life time. If not, we can always rest easy in the
knowledge that we have helped to sketch the plans for a better society
for all South Africans, one in which our children will be the architects
and engineers of a kind of Social Change that will lead the rest of the
world along the path that will spark the next step on mankind’s
evolution. I believe quite firmly that in the same that fire, the wheel,
the telephone, electricity, the internet all helped shape and give
direction to Man in his collective evolutionary trek along the vastness
of time, global social change (beginning with individual, cognitive
change) will be the determining factor in our survival or ultimate
extinction
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