As the new year dawns and many reflecting on their lives and making new resolutions for the new year, take the time to look at your surroundings and people you encounter this festive season with an additional different lens. You may be richly endowed to tackle your new challenges with confidence and zeal. South Africa truly has talent. By Nimroth Gwetsa, 30 December 2017.
One of the privileges of being able to travel around different locations in South Africa is the opportunity to discover hidden gems produced by communities in some obscure locations in the country.
There you will find pockets of concentrated talent and creativity not easily discovered if one only visits popular touristy places. By this, I am not referring to mass-production of culturally misappropriated creativity masked as traditional and local production of goods we see in popular tourist areas. Here we are talking about real creativity and ingenuity in arts and crafts where reapplication of things and knowledge is creatively applied in a different context to bring about wonderful creations.
I wish I could post pictures of some rare finds I’ve seen. I could but would not, for out of interest of protecting the intellectual property of artists concerned, I wouldn’t want images of their designs displayed on this forum and risk having them replicated en masse by wise-men and women from the East. With this kind of creative leverage, I wondered what else could be achieved if such creativity was let loose to solve some problems afflicting our communities?
Moving along to other places, I met friendly and real-people-centric communities. You’d bet these people were too good to be true. Not easily provoked, they patiently listened and with a beaming smile on their faces, occasionally burst into laughter at almost everything one said. Could this be real or a ploy to get us to buy from them? I wondered. If this was a performance, then they deserve all the goodness they could get from such interactions. But in this dog-eat-dog rat race of our city lives, we can do with these kinds of people in all areas of our lives.
In other places, some locals there are on a publicity-shy mission to co-opt like-minded people and SMMEs to form a formidable productive force to effect change in “morality” and socio-economic outlook of some “neglected” rural communities. They aim to achieve this by harnessing their divergent skillsets and offerings to produce solutions to problems afflicting those communities. They plan to encourage higher consumption of current offerings by their advanced customers by offering them incentives and in turn, leverage the gains to offer conditional “freebie” solutions to “indigent” communities, which when taken up, would ultimately result in behavioural change.
Such ingenuity! To think that one can achieve sustainable commercial success without making it primarily about “making money”, but higher causes in life! Such initiatives need our undivided support. Imagine what would become of our nation if this kind of thinking was common among Corporate South Africa and public institutions?
One would never know about these hidden gems if one only focused on one’s world, did the normal things done daily, lived in isolation disregarding the diverse contribution of others and wallowed in one’s prejudice and self-sufficiency.
This kind of goodness is not confined to obscure places, but surrounds us. Social media is awash with such goodness. #CountryDuty, is but one example of how ordinary South Africans can rally behind a common cause to overcome difficulties. We have seen good results emerging from such initiatives.
One notable outcome from such initiatives is seeing how problems are solved, not by people wanting to make money from doing so, but out of the goodness of wanting to see others living well. This shows that not every problem should cost a fortune to be resolved.
The Auditor General annually laments the excessive use of consultants, and therefore higher operational costs incurred by government departments. The Auditor General may as well save on blood pressure medication and perhaps accept that using consultants in government departments will be a permanent fixture, at least for now. Then, it may be best thinking of creative ways their extensive use may be obviated.
Perhaps if departments can capitalise on the prevailing volunteerism spirit as shown by initiatives like #CountryDuty, many problems could be solved through encouragement of citizen pro bono participation. If the legal, education and health professionals can volunteer their services in advancement of the public good, why can’t we have similar involvement from other technical areas? Crowd funding model works in encouraging entrepreneurship, so is open-source development in encouraging widespread distribution and availability of technological solutions among communities.
Humanities activists have championed many causes. Some in South Africa are fighting against prohibitive costs owing to patents and related royalty payments for intellectual-property rights. I see no reason why government departments cannot encourage the public to volunteer ideas and solutions to solve some common problems afflicting communities for which cost savings may be needed.
South Africa does not necessarily lack skills. We mainly lack the will to look deeper, try new and unfamiliar avenues and we are obsessed about wanting to own everything, hence our generally low sharing and leverage levels.
As we enjoy our festivities, let us also take the time to keep our eyes open to see a little differently, listen to unfamiliar voices to be enriched with “new” insights, and be open-minded and willing to be persuaded to try new things. We once were all inexperienced, yet someone gave us a chance and in appreciation of such opportunities given to us, we too can afford to extend our hand to others by adding a little adventure to our lives.
Seasons Greetings.
