Aweh dearly beloved fellow ruminants & groupies
136/291 days of load shedding in 2022
How do you define failure? Is your career or marriage a success or a failure? Is your country a failure? If you get divorced or fired, then perhaps you can declare your marriage or career a failure. Not getting divorced or fired does not mean that your marriage or career is a success. Many people have miserable marriages and careers. Can your life be a failure? Who gets to judge that anyway other than yourself? Success and failure are not binary categories.
What about the country you live in? Is that a success or is it a failure? Well, of course, this also doesn’t have a yes or no answer. You did not choose the country of your birth, but of course, you can always move. There is an American think tank the Fund for Peace that publishes a fragile states index (FSI). It used to be called the failed state index, but the implied binary categorisation was rightly criticised. The FSI ranges from 0 to 120 with a higher score indicating higher fragility. Yemen is reported as the most fragile country in the world with a score of 111.7 and Finland is the most stable with a score of 15.1. At what score would the term failed state be justified?
The featured image is a heat map of the FSI for the world. Africa does not feature very well with a high concentration of fragile countries. There is only one country, Botswana, that merits a stable rating. There are those that will see this as evidence of bias, colonialism, and racism. The FSI is, no doubt, not perfect and may be biased at times but many African countries are not paragons of stability, human rights, wealth, service delivery, and abundant food. The weightings used to calculate the FSI, and the scoring methodology will always have a subjective element to them. This however does not render the FSI useless.
China is categorised as unstable as opposed to the United States which is classified as stable. The Chinese might have something to say about that. The progress of China in the last two decades has been nothing short of astonishing and it is destined to become the largest economy in the world. It is worth looking at the trends in the FSI. In 2006 China’s FSI was 82.5 and in 2022 it is 66.9. There is a steady downward trend. The United States, on the other hand, had an FSI of 34.5 in 2006 and in 2022 it was 46.5. The United Kingdom has a similar trend to America. China is improving and America and the UK are regressing. Germany and France are improving. Will this end well? How will the clash of ideologies play out? How is liberal democracy faring? Perhaps China will start publishing its own FSI index soon and that might look rather different.
Ukraine has a better fragility index than South Africa and 87 other countries in the world. That is clearly ludicrous and wrong, but the FSI is mainly inward-looking and does not consider a megalomaniac next door sufficiently. How stable can you be if you live next door to a leader like Vladimir Putin?
Now to South Africa which had an FSI of 55.7 in 2006 and 72.0 in 2022. There is little indication that this trend will reverse in the next few years. Fortunately, we don’t have well-armed megalomaniacs next door, so invasion is unlikely. South Africa’s problems lie within its borders. Basic infrastructure and service delivery is crumbling. There is no end in sight to the electricity crisis and emerging water crisis. The performance of the state-owned rail network continues to deteriorate hobbling industry and the country. Education for the majority of South Africans is very poor. South Africa may not be a failed state, whatever that means, but the trend is clear.
As a South African, you can see decay all around you and the evidence is overwhelming. Just to pick one recent example. Kwazulu Natal (KZN) is one of the poorest performing provinces in South Africa and was the epicentre of looting and rioting in July last year which left 350 people dead and R70 billion ($3.9 billion) in damages. Last week we suffered the humiliation of having to postpone two united rugby championship (URC) matches in KZN because two visiting teams from the UK got a bad dose of gastroenteritis. Why is that? In some parts of the world, it is not safe to eat salads or uncooked food, drink the water, or even brush your teeth using tap water. This now includes KZN. In India, you get Delhi belly and now you can add KZN belly. Photographs published last week showed raw sewerage floating on the Umgeni River in eThekwini on its way to the sea. Durban’s sewerage system has almost completely collapsed with 80% of its sewerage purification plants out of order and it is estimated that R135 billion ($7.5 billion) is required to fix this. What does this mean for tourism?
Do we acknowledge the problem? Not so much it appears. The CEO of the URC is suggesting that both teams contracted the disease outside the country. Why did two teams from different countries (Ireland and Scotland) fall ill while staying in Umhlanga? Dearly beloved readers I will leave it up to you to decide whether you would drink the tap water in Umhlanga. I know what advice we will give to guests at our holiday home in Southbroom in KZN. I have been drinking Johannesburg tap water my whole life but water quality is deteriorating across the country.
Perhaps we can take comfort that we are ranked 79th out of 179 countries and that there are 78 countries worse than us. Dysfunctionality is common worldwide, and the quality of our leaders leaves a lot to be desired. In democracies we choose our leaders, so we get the government we deserve.
Has the country you live in failed? Is it getting better or worse? What can you do about it? Is just voting enough?
Thank you for all the ideas and comments. I really appreciate them and please keep them coming.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 