Notes for Sarie magazine: What life has taught me

I asked my daughter Leila for what she felt she had learnt from me in the hopes that it would provoke my thinking.  I liked what she said enough to give it to you.  She said that especially as a new mother (I’m a grandmother! YAY!)  she has learnt: “To give your children space and freedom, also to expose them to different religions, cultures and beliefs, that has been an important part of who I am and how I deal with people now.” She said she  also  learnt  from me as a mother : “The importance of sharing and when you can, try to assist others, but if you can’t you need to know the importance of saying no.”  She also said she had learnt the importance of: “Setting goals.”

 Now my notes:

• -          A day without giving and expressing love is a day wasted.
• -          We become extra –ordinary when we as ordinary people use extra resources to achieve what others (and even we) believe are impossible goals 
• -          Pain is God’s way of directing us to our destiny, we can ignore it or become trapped in self-pity (‘why me’ are the two most useless words in the world) or we can say, okay, God, I don’t know what it is that you want me to do but let me try and progress – and when we do, we do it with a positive attitude, never hating, always believing that we can achieve, always believing in ourselves
• -           I believe in the magnificence of the human spirit, the great reserves of courage that live in all of us, the compassion that when acted upon fills our hearts and is the foundation of happiness
• -          A sense of humour is important to keep you from strangling lousy customer service agents and it is also the spine of every good relationship
• -          Be humble without being a wimp
• -          Never, ever, ever discriminate it narrows your world, creates boundaries in your life and exposes your own inner insecurities
• -          Have an attitude of gratitude, every day give thanks for the goodness you have and the beauty around you and use that to work hard to protect this planet so that our children and their children can enjoy it too.

The Man who created Miracles - Convention is the way in which ingenuity is corralled. Doing what others expect is too often not doing what we need to do to succeed.

We conform, we try to be good people, we’re nice and wonder why our spirit battles to breathe.

It’s only when we do what we need to do and stop caring (too much) what anyone thinks that we find the means to access our real potential and begin creating miracles in our lives and those of others.

I live in an old, pretty neighbourhood, most of the neighbours know each other, it’s a bit like being in a family, you don’t necessarily like everyone but you’re fated to live in close proximity, so you get on. But some of us have been lucky enough to find that within a short walk is someone whose company we really enjoy and so friendships have been formed.

I’m having lunch with one of those people on Friday and I’m sharing his story with you, which I’ve included in my latest book, Committed to Me, because it is a classic story of inspiration and how the best South Africans take situations and make them remarkable.

As we head toward elections that have many of us filled with despair consider the lessons his experience give us.

Francois is a tall, attractive man with an openness and sincerity that draws people to him. At the age of 34, he was an exceptionally successful money market trader and econometrician who lived a golden life. He’d graduated from school and university with multiple distinctions, met and married a woman who was also his best friend, had a beautiful daughter and a brilliant career.

Then, one hazy afternoon while driving home from work, his life changed. He stopped at a traffic light. His window was broken, the doors wrenched open and as he was pulled from the vehicle he sustained two deep stab wounds in his leg, severing muscles and an artery. The four attackers ran off with his cellphone, wallet with a small amount of money and his car keys, but left the car.

‘It started to drizzle,’ he remembers. ‘I collapsed on the pavement, I had chinos on and they were red. I put my legs up on the wall and made a tourniquet to try and stop the bleeding. Within thirty seconds there were thirty people around me. They were all black, very poor, very concerned individuals, and they were saying, “Don’t worry they won’t hurt you we are here.”

‘I phoned my office and told my boss, “I have been stabbed, it’s rush hour an ambulance will fight through the traffic, I need you to fetch me.” In less than ten minutes he and another colleague arrived and drove fast to the hospital with their hazards on and going over pavements.

‘I lay in that car and everything passed in front of me, my whole life. I am religious and a Christian and I prayed, but I also had a certain calm.’

Francois was in intensive care for three days then had to convalesce at home for about a month.

‘I went back to work and struggled with concentration. I was on antidepressants for two months, then threw them away. The attack had a massive impact on my life and on the way I view things.

‘I couldn’t sleep with my wife in bed because my leg was so sensitive. Sleeping on the floor is degrading yet therapeutic; I felt that this was the level to which I had been beaten down emotionally, to a hard and cold place.

‘I saw myself as the one the family depended on. I was set on being the best guy at the office, the hardest worker, most innovative, most caring, but after the incident I felt emotionally blunt. I began questioning my focus.’

To the concern of his colleagues and some of his friends, he stopped working. His wife, supported him. ‘I told my colleagues that emotionally I was unstable. One guy said, ‘Don’t get too depressed.” I said, “I am trawling the bottom, I am switching the lights off, I am going to hibernate. I need it.”

‘You have to make the decision to live, and you have to make it every day, make it over and over again. You have to confront your fears. I find it a very big struggle in today’s modern life to balance family, work and personal time, but I’m learning how to do it.’

He spent a lot of time with his daughter, reading or listening to audio books. ‘I drive into traffic so I can get stuck and listen,’ he says. These days, every week he and his wife play two hours of golf before work. His marriage has became richer, more nuanced.

‘I realised that the way I was going, I was going to be the guy who was going to have a heart attack on the trading floor. I needed to give myself personal time. The fact that the attackers came into the car and touched me and stabbed me violated me completely.

A hidden blessing came from the community Francois and his family moved into. He says: ‘In the community we moved into people are older, the trees are mature and established and there is a perception that people care. A day after we moved in a neighbour walked over and his wife baked us a cake. I said to my wife that if the only good thing that happens here is that a neighbour brings us a cake that makes moving here worthwhile.

‘We all need to feel wanted – to belong. When we moved in the person next door hadn’t mown his lawn. There was a little swing made of iron, just left there. The trees had grown through it. He looked as though he had given up on life. He is very neat but doesn’t speak and goes to work in a battered car. I and a helper cleaned up his yard, and the most wonderful thing happened. He bought a hosepipe and now waters his plants. His old post box was broken and I threw it away. He bought a new one and installed it. It’s the most beautiful post box.’

And so a man who thought he needed a miracle to live instinctively began creating miracles for others and giving them reason to live.

Mother Nature and Father Greed
By Leila Beltramo and Charlene Smith (16 May 2009)

Mother Nature and Father Greed have both reached crisis at the same time, environmentalist Monica Graaff told an Institute of Directors breakfast in Cape Town last week.

One businessperson at the breakfast challenged: “Why should business change when what is going to happen is going to happen regardless?”

Two days later the Cape of Good Hope became the Cape of Storms. In Johannesburg, accustomed to rush hour thunderstorms in summer, cold was banished by rush hour thunderstorms in winter. In the Arctic a BBC crew kept falling through ice that is so thin it can barely sustain human footsteps.

Global warming isn’t a distant concept, it’s here and a businessperson who does not see its impact on profits is driving wearing blindfolds. Ernst & Young calls it Radical Greening which they say is a strategic risky for business driven by consumer and regulatory responses to climate change. In its Strategic Business Risks 2008 E&Y says, "Going green is expensive but could pay dividends if consumer tastes and regulation shift quickly. Carbon trading is a reality in Europe and will almost certainly happen in the US." Companies will increasingly be expected to know and reveal their carbon footprint.

Every hour, three endangered species disappear. The destruction of flora and fauna costs the world €2 trillion annually – six percent of the planet's total income. The UN Convention of Biological Diversity says the destruction of natural habitats and pollution has created the worst rate of species extinction - three an hour - since dinosaurs died 65 million years ago. Those endangered include one in four mammals, one in eight birds, a third of amphibians and 70% of plants.

In South Africa beaches are littered and rivers are filthy. The Black River in Cape Town is so polluted that paramedics say anyone who falls into it comes out with deep weal's that resemble burns. Environmental scientists say the river is so dirty it is in danger of spontaneously catching fire.

In Namibia there is research into a type of acacia (Acacia mellifera also known as blackthorn, swarthaak or omusauna) that in Mpumalanga game reserves guides refer to as ‘acacia nightmarius.’ It has proliferated so fast that it is choking game and beef farming areas because farmers have effectively stopped the natural cycle of fire that otherwise retards its range. Some innovative ecologists have found a use for it in charcoal and others are considering its application in electricity generation, but the costs will probably be too high and so, for now, it will continue to strangle potentially productive land.
Humans have interfered too much with Gaia (mother earth) so for businessmen to say that ‘interfering with the inevitable’ – environmental destruction – ‘is pointless’ is a little like saying suicide is a better option than medical care.
As Graaff noted at the Institute of Director’s breakfast: “We think we are a clever species and that we can predict everything and think our way out of things: it is the making of humanity and the undoing of us. Eco-justice means we have power over the earth.”

She suggests that neo-liberalism has, “in this case been good, because of globalisation which reminds us that we are intricately interconnected in the world.”
She suggests that the arrogance that has led to global warming has also led to a consumerist culture which in turn has led to debt traps and the financial meltdown; it has resulted in uneven trade rules and crass inequities.

But climate change and greed are exerting pressure on the world at the same time. It is almost as thought the seas, skies and stock markets have united to say the same thing – a world without values is a world doomed to fail.

Graaff suggests:”the world is out of kilter – spiritually and physically.”

And those like the businessman who suggested we ‘accept the inevitable’ are most in danger of terminal failure and yet ordinary people know it and are responding to the threat: religions are seeing a major renaissance, organic produce is a growth market and anything climate friendly is being sold at a premium. Business practices are coming under greater scrutiny with everything from corporate governance to the Equator Principles. Developed nations are starting to demand more environmentally friendly agricultural and manufacturing principles in imported products.

Minister of Environmental Affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk has travelled the world signing progressive environmental policies, but has spent too little time at home ensuring they are implemented.

A delegate at the IoD breakfast shared an anecdote from Jared Diamond’s book, “Collapse” – the people of Easter Island in the Pacific cut down every single tree on the island. The tribes competed to have the biggest and tallest idol on the island which they believed would save them. But they destroyed the forests that sheltered them, that gave haven to birds and creatures they could eat, it allowed environmental erosion - their greed resulted in the collapse of the civilisation on the island, today there is little left but monuments to greed.

There is still time to change.

If SA can’t create 500 000 jobs, then your job is on the line
by Charlene Smith (c)

 President Jacob Zuma says we have to create 500 000 jobs by year-end.  As a nation of dedicated whingers, we look at that stat, sit back and say, “We can’t do it.” Actually if we can’t do it then we need to figure out how much financial pain, we the employed, are able to bear in terms of a growing personal tax burden and rampant debt.

Individuals in South Africa are already the most heavily taxed in the world, those in jobs not only pay PAYE and VAT, we carry the can for those who can’t afford or refuse to pay vehicle insurance, hospital bills, traffic fines, school fees, university loans, property rates, electricity, water, sanitation, now a new health tax... the list gets ever longer.

If the fact that our unemployment figures exceeded 40% even before this recession, that 54% of our people live in poverty (Human Sciences Research Council), that 250 000 graduates were unemployed (StatsSA, 2008), that half of our matriculants have failed two years in a row and of those that pass around seven percent will  not  find work doesn’t bother you – then consider this: how much more tax can you bear?

Those already paying tax are going to be taxed more. The burden of a 30% electricity tariff hike will be carried by the small percentage already paying for electricity, not the majority that use it illegally. Road traffic fine collections at present, as an example, through websites and banks rely primarily on those with credit cards to pay, as for the rest? Ag suga, as a friend used to say – go whistle for it.

But wait a minute, so far what I have written gives more fuel to the whingers, to the self-pitying honourable (who probably largely form the 80% of South Africans prepared to pay (bribe) an official to get what they want (Morality survey, Sunday Times, June 2009).

There should be only one reason why we find work for 500 000 people before the end of this year and a million by the end of next year: because the economy demands it. Because if we are to get beyond economist lies about us ‘doing better’ than other countries through this economic crisis (with the figures in paragraph three, we are doing well?) we have to get innovation and hard work back into gear.

Cosatu is right big bonuses and ridiculously expensive cars as part of executive packages have to go – it’s happening elsewhere in the world, why not in this land of profound inequity?

You have to be really stupid or terminally ignorant not to see how fast and how badly this economy is sliding and to realise that we will not be out of this mess early next year, as some economists now say, we will be lucky to start lifting our head above water by 2013.

Take a look at this graph for South Africa’s GDP:

Source: Dr Azar Jammine, Econometrix June 2009

Still not scary enough for you? Try this and since this graph was published a month ago, ABSA revealed this week that house prices have dropped a further 3,6%.

So your tax rate is going through the ceiling and your investments are collapsing through the floor.  It doesn’t take huge leaps of awareness to understand that this economy has to grow; it simply has to, if this country is to have any chance of remaining a strong investment locale for foreign and domestic investors.

We don’t have enough strong reliable underpinnings in the economy of the 21st century to have the same whining approach of the late 20th century – mining, which built this country, is now a weaker sector than agriculture and our agricultural fortunes have been collapsing for at least two decades. We are no longer a major grain exporter, many of our beef farms are now game farms and production generally is less than impressive.

So how is the rest of the economy doing? Economic data from the SA Reserve Bank show that debt summonses soared 14,4% in February and personal bankruptcies rose after hitting 40,4% in January. Wholesale trade dipped 8,9%, retail sales plunged 4,5% - a record drop.

In early April the National Treasury announced a programme to co-ordinate its borrowing with that of the six major state-owned entities. The Treasury will borrow R70.5 billion, the SA National Road Agency R13.3 billion, electricity utility Eskom R12 billion, Transnet R6.9 billion; the Development Bank of South Africa R6 billion, Airports Company South Africa R3.6 billion and the Trans Caledon Tunnel Authority R1 billion. So we’re all in debt and there is more; the total number of liquidations recorded for the first quarter of 2009 increased by 46.7% (from 687 to 1 008) compared with the first quarter of 2008, statistics released by Statistics South Africa show (28 April).   Everyone is in debt. 

When comparing the first quarter of 2009 with the first quarter of 2008, there were increases of 58.7% in company liquidations (from 312 to 495) and 36.8% in close corporation liquidations (from 375 to 513).  Labour lawyer Celeste Allen who runs the Labour Law course for AstroTech says that since November last year she has done little else but retrenchments, “with some companies into their third round of retrenchments.”

Is creating 500 000 jobs a pipe dream? We should have been committed to it years ago when economic growth was booming, instead those who should have been fuelling job creation were investing in holiday homes and bigger cars and even a stable of vehicles, a car for work, a vehicle for the weekend, another for game drives…

Zuma’s vision is that the 500 000 jobs should be via an expanded public works programme, certainly our streets could be cleaner – especially filthy Durban; we have a zillion potholes that need filling on a collapsing national road infrastructure (try the road between Johannesburg and Kimberley sometime for a terrifying experience), our public hospitals and schools could be considerably cleaner, they need repairing and walls painted.

Trevor Manuel, Minister of Planning in the President's Office, has defended plans for this large-scale job creation saying the intention was not to create permanent jobs, but an emergency measure to stand between poor families and absolute starvation.  Already social grants are swallowing an ever growing part of the budget, we need to put those people to work instead of creating, as we are, those who rely on social grants.

But we need to go beyond relying on government to create jobs, we know what its track record on delivery is – we need to create jobs and if you can’t employ one more person, then ensure instead of retrenching two more that you send them for training, Keep skilling your workforce let them know you are doing this instead of retrenching them, motivate them to produce more and better, it’s the path some of the world’s greater organisations are already taking – they intend being in business for generations more to come.

Toyota which is experiencing its worst sales and profits ever, is not shedding jobs, it is continuing to pay workers and is using downtime to train workers or use them on public service projects. Public service projects as a way of seconding employees rather than laying off staff is gaining ground. New York-based law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett offers associates a year off to work on a public service project and get paid $60 000 plus benefits – less than half their normal pay but a lot better than being retrenched.

FedEx has imposed graduated pay cuts, less for front-line workers and more for managers.

And on 18 July, Mandela day, take 67 minutes off work for you and your staff and get out there to make a difference in the lives of those who are really struggling in this economy. Barack Obama has called for something similar in the USA, where he has called for a greater ‘service’ ethos – a greater idea than writing cheques to charities for tax breaks.  There is more to life than buying a new car, getting a bigger house, if you intend remaining here, if you want to still be in business by this time next year, then you are simply going to have to work harder, with more imagination and greater empathy for those around you and that applies as much for South Africans as it does for Americans, Europeans … the world is in trouble, it requires something extra from the ordinary to get us out of it.