Don’t dismiss the president, it’s time to dream of smart cities and bullet trains
SA needs a clear focus and a sharing culture for an inclusive economy
● Following his state of the nation address earlier this year, President Cyril Ramaphosa was accused of being a dreamer with no grasp on reality.
“I dream of a South Africa where the first entirely new city built in the democratic era rises, with skyscrapers, schools, universities, hospitals and factories,” Ramaphosa said in his speech.
This came, unsurprisingly, with a clap-back from EFF leader Julius Malema, who stated: “The dream ended in 1994, now it is time to implement, Mr President. Someone must wake the man up.”
I, however, believe the contrary. Dreams are an absolutely essential part of nurturing success.
Let me rewind a little and tell you why.
Having spent a short part of my life living and working in another country — and now hearing many conversations about people wanting to leave SA again — I want to offer a perspective.
Being a dad to three young boys, and having grave concerns about former president Jacob Zuma (all of which played out, and more), the offer to run the best and biggest ad agency in Australia, M&C Saatchi — based in magnificent Sydney — held huge appeal.
And so, as I read the daily papers and watched the news with the prospect of leaving, everything I heard and read validated my decision, as that was the lens through which I was viewing the country.
My obsession was solely what Zuma and Malema would likely do to the country and not on what incredible opportunities lay wide open in front of me, in a place I deeply love — and a place that my family have called home since the late 1800s.
So, looking through a lens to validate the decision to move to Sydney, the daily news corroborating this view was overwhelming.
But my wife, Sara, and I weren’t looking through the far more important lens. A small part of the head was overruling the entire heart. As parents to young boys, our entire obsession was their safety, because they had been exposed to a scary house robbery. The prospect of Zuma (corruption), Malema (extreme racist rhetoric) and crime (the robbery) was our myopic lens.
I hadn’t internalised how important SA is to me. The opportunity to continue to make a profound difference to people’s lives, which has always inspired me. To contribute to job creation and economic growth. To solve exciting problems through concepts and ideas. I hadn’t internalised the importance of the smells, the sounds and the timbre of home. I hadn’t internalised exactly what leaving grandparents, siblings, cousins and dearest friends actually meant. Shabbat suppers without them, planning late night or early morning Skype calls to cope with time zones, wanting to dive through that cold monitor and warmly hug them tight.
So when I was asked to set up the M&C Saatchi Abel Company in SA (but to start it remotely from Australia), we leapt at the opportunity to come home.
I reached out to a number of my closest friends and most trusted colleagues, living in Australia, the UK and Kenya, to also come home and start the company with me, which they did.
And this is where the dreaming comes in.
There were a lot of critics, a lot of naysayers, who said there wasn’t space in the industry for what we were attempting. They were just background noise — we remained focused. We had a dream, a vision of an agency built on meaningful black employee ownership — not just big BEE equity deals — that would fill a meaningful place in SA’s advertising landscape.
With this vision, we plotted a plan, empowering exceptionally talented people. Our growth has been phenomenal. The majority of locally distributable equity of the business is owned by black employees — the biggest segment of local ownership — and is a testament to the power of a transformative dream, followed by a solid plan and capable people.
And the principles of turning a vision into a success story hold true for the president and businesses too. You need to stretch ideas in order to have a marker of where you are headed.
If you are the president and you say, “I want to get education right, get the hospitals working properly and I want to attract foreign investment”, that’s fine, but those are generic comments.
Whether it is Ramaphosa or any other person, those are basic ideas.
You have to have stretch in the idea, you must have a vision of what this thing could be, and that vision leads you towards that reality. Otherwise, it is just more political verbiage. And so I do think you have to dream.
You have to get the basics right because a dream has to have foundations. You have to solve the immediate problems and get the right people into key positions. That much is not negotiable, and the president knows this. However, one does not exclude the other.
Then, if you say, “I want bullet trains and smart cities”, that will start attracting the interest of foreign investment, of the big companies in China or France or the US. Because they will say, “here is a country with a vision”.
South African business should rally behind the president in this instance. We have lost our leadership position as the gateway to Africa for first-world markets. We have a lot of competition on the continent.
The same principles hold true for business. A strong leader with a clear vision is more likely to attract the support of staff and investors. A clear plan to implement the steps, with capable and motivated staff, is how the organisation will reach its goals.
We have to leapfrog the competition. The president must have a big vision and there must be a gap between the dream and ambition, and the reality on the ground — to stretch it there.
The time has come for businesses to stop hoarding cash and invest in innovative and exciting ideas, and be prepared to take risks to grow and develop new markets, new solutions to local problems and to create new economic opportunities for more people. The time is right to invest in the dream of SA with a clear focus of driving for more of a sharing culture towards building an inclusive economy.
After all, as Apple’s great saying goes, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.