Just a thought #4: This is Africa!..oh wait or is it Britain?

The British streets are being rocked by riots, but what is the motive and what will the outcome be? How long has this been brewing for and what are the solutions?

Well, in a similar fashion the South African government is also under pressure to create jobs and the promise to voters in our most recent elections has been to do just that. Maybe both nations can learn from each other’s mistakes, successes and failures.

The formal British colony of South Africa is young in terms of colonialisation, even younger in terms of independence and yet younger still in terms of democracy. Can countries ever really learn from each other or do they need to make their own mistakes, much like children, before they learn the way forward?

In fact all nations strive for a stable economy and low unemployment, that’s a given. Unfortunately South Africa is a young country and even younger with its new government. Now this has its pros and its cons. One way of looking at it would be a young, fresh nation could learn from other nation’s successes and failures, and yet another view is that because we are young we have not learnt the lessons other nations already have.

All this being said, big strides have been made into environmental issues and the South African economy is more stable than most. The problem lies in the fact that the population is expanding rapidly as with any predominantly 3^rd world country and there unemployment is high leading to high crime in all areas especially the cities.

Solution?

Well, South Africa has promised to create millions of jobs by 2015, improve standards of living and service delivery of municipal areas and give the power back to the nation who voted for it.

Does this open up a huge opportunity or simply a dead end short term resolve?

South Africa could create jobs by whatever means necessary, satisfy the public and grow our economy. Or the nation could innovate and create sustainable jobs that provide long term solutions to local and international problems like renewable energy etc.

They are going to do the latter right?

Hopefully, however we fear that unfortunately the nation will be increasing nuclear power, building more fossil fuel power plants, increasing links with china’s plastics and allowing international fishing to go unthreatened in out waters, and generally making as much money as we can in as short a time possible while offering as many short term unsustainable jobs as possible.

But then again this is Africa so it doesn’t really matter…does it?

Just a thought…