We can do it, but only when blame ends

Lunching at a northern suburbs trattoria with friends on the weekend, initial conversation turned to the clamour around the listing of Chinese internet business Alibaba, the largest-ever initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

Investors snapped up more than $21-billion worth of shares for a venture described as a mixture of Amazon, eBay and Google. The stock was placed at $68 a share, but closed on Friday, its first day of trading, at $92, giving the company a market value of $223-billion. If the company was quoted on the JSE, its market capitalisation would exceed the combined worth of our top two listings, British American Tobacco and SAB Miller.

Thereafter, banter drifted to the sharp drop in the rand. Consensus was that our currency was presently undervalued and, in time, would recover. We were a resilient nation that had bounced back from similar situations before. It was an argument slanted by emotion rather than good reason. No one wanted to think of anything that would spoil the perfectness of the day. The sun was shining. The previous night's rain had freshened the air. The restaurant was packed with families enjoying a good meal. Life was far too comfortable to fuss about the headlines.

I didn't feel that sanguine about our prospects, but rather than force my views, I withdrew from the chitchat. The rand's decline was concerning, an ominous sign that things in the country were slipping badly. The currency's performance was a consequence of deteriorating economic and social conditions that severely damaged our standing as an international investment destination.

In a recent Time magazine article, investment banking head Roger Altman identified seven signs that showed America had turned the economic corner. One was that the crime rate had plummeted 45% since peaking in 1991 and by 13% since 2007 - counter-intuitively continuing to drop through the recession and sharp spike in unemployment.

Violent crimes had dropped even more, especially in big cities like New York and Los Angeles. Property crime, he wrote, had become increasingly rare. Most of the success was attributed to crime-fighting technology and better policing. The drop in crime resulted in a better quality of life and reduced economic burden. Safer cities generally meant stronger urban economies.

Regrettably, South Africa is moving in the opposite direction. Our latest crime statistics reveal we are no better than a war zone. Regardless of the hundreds of billions of rands spent on police services and private security firms, murders, armed robberies, sexual assault and carjackings are rising at an alarming rate.

The economic cost of our brutal behaviour is immeasurable. It is not only the loss of earnings of a loved one or, more mundanely, increased insurance premiums that hurt, but the imprint the appalling numbers have on our national consciousness as well.

It is not only crime holding back the country's potential, but poor levels of global competitiveness too. In the latest World Economic Forum's rankings, we've fallen to 56th place from 40th in 2006. While we scored highly in private sector performance and governance, we were bottom in maths and science education, training, labour relations, government wastefulness, unemployment and household debt. More worrisome, the WEF said, was the lack of public trust in our politicians.

While global uncertainties continue to impede our outlook, high levels of lawlessness and our fading attractiveness as a competitive economy are adding to our misery, causing us to underperform against our peers and put pressure on our currency.

Sociologists blame much of the problem on past political policies, but we have to take responsibility for our future. The good news is that, with the right administration, a caring mindset and purposeful business policies the issues are fixable. The US did it, so can we.