Is it possible that we South Africans expect too little of ourselves, and the low benchmarks by which we measure ourselves explain our failures?

The increasingly hostile conversation between government and the media is often about the perception that reporters spend their time trying to dig up negative stories.

In my case, however, and I am sure other newspapers pursue versions of the same agenda, the real search is for stories of success and evidence of development.

But in spite of self-congratulatory speeches promising better things to come, most local and provincial governments have little or no progress to show for their time - and our money - that we would consider positive.

The first problem seems to be in the definition of the terms, causing us to talk past each other.

Government spokesmen see a presidential speech promising to eradicate mud schools before the end of the year as positive news - and it was when Thabo Mbeki first made that pledge in 2004.

But the promise has been repeated again and again since then, and yet 198 of around 250 schools in the Mount Frere district in the Eastern Cape are still made of mud.

So we just lower our expectations. We adopt comfortable targets so that anything good is rated excellent, most things bad can pass for good and improvement from any low base can be labelled success.

At a recent Buffalo City council meeting, the ruling party tried to paint a move from a so-called disclaimer by the provincial auditor-general, Singa Ngqwala, to an adverse opinion as progress.

The council had moved from failing to produce documentary evidence of its spending to providing false evidence.

If that is progress, what is the benchmark?

Because our performance is so low in so many areas, we have become locked into a system of evaluation which sets a clean audit as the pinnacle of performance.

The national Treasury under Trevor Manuel, and more recently with Pravin Gordhan at the helm, has been trying for years to get past that benchmark, which merely requires a department to know where its money went, to a measure that assesses the quality of that spending.

If we continue to think that spending all the money allocated for housing is the hallmark of excellence, we will never get to a point where we measure the efficiency or quality of that spending and the private sector, which plays by other rules, will always do a better job.

When South Africa was awarded the right to host the Fifa World Cup, the early talk was about presenting an "African" event with facilities more suited to our own expectations than those of the West. We tried briefly to adjust the benchmark down to match our own expectations, but Fifa was having none of it. We were held to an international benchmark and excelled.

We do equally well in other areas where the benchmarks are not our own, which suggests we can do as well as anyone if that is what we demand of ourselves.

National Treasury, the South African Revenue Service and the central bank all operate in a global environment which sets the same exacting standards as the private sector and they excel.

Had they been allowed to operate in a purely domestic environment, they may have set more comfortable benchmarks and judged themselves just as successful. Because we are not and never will be a banana republic, the world would not allow that.

The same imperative is evident every day in our listed corporations which, even if they are traded only on our own JSE, succeed or fail according to the norms of the global marketplace.

When Mbeki was asked in 2005 why mud schools had not been eradicated on time, he said it was a capacity issue.

That might have been a reasonable explanation in 1995, but a decade into democracy the excuse was wearing thin and now, 18 years on, it has no substance.

Many leaders from failing departments have moved into the private sector and done very well. Many of those moving the other way have wallowed.

Teachers and nurses who move between the public and private sectors or between institutions in South Africa and abroad seem to perform most poorly where the benchmarks have been designed to make the weakest link feel good about his performance.

Management, working conditions, training, incentives and pay all contribute to better performance, but if everything is benchmarked against the acceptable minimum rather than the achievable maximum, we are unlikely to break out of mediocrity to claim our rightful place in every other field as we did on the soccer stage - if not the pitch - in 2010.