The entrepreneurial-minded are pouring into South Africa. My taxi driver was from Mozambique. My hotel doorman was from Zimbabwe. Another street trader was from Senegal. Fully half of the economically active black people I talked to were not from South Africa at all. Far from indicating a lack of energy on the part of South Africans, this instead indicates that there is so much room for entrepreneurial activity in South Africa that the country is providing room for all, or at least a great many, comers.
The most memorable entrepreneur I met was Patrick Makone. Tall, fit, young, and handsome, he was selling geckos and other animals made out of wire on the street. "Ah, inexpensive gifts," I thought as he approached my table and asked permission before squatting down to show them to me. They ranged in price from 20 rand ($3) to 150 ($22.50). I bought a chameleon for my 12-year-old cousin Candice and a lizard for my 14-year-old son, James. Makone's English was superb. In exchange for a further payment, I asked for his story.
He was from Zimbabwe, where he made the animals. Once he'd made as many as he could carry, he would buy a city-to-city return bus ticket from Harare to Johannesburg, costing $37.50, with a further duty of $18 at the border.
"Duty, or bribe?" I asked.
"Duty!" he said emphatically.
Once in Johannesburg, or rather its prosperous nodes, Makone walks the streets until all his products are sold, then returns to Harare to start the cycle over again. Things were very bad in Zimbabwe, he said. Bread had gone up in price fourfold in just two months. Six days later, I heard from a refugee restaurateur that it was now up eightfold.
As Makone moved on, my lunch companion, Theresa, an employment and training consultant who does contract work all over Africa, offered the following observation: "Even though we are a basket case, we are still the economic destination of choice for the rest of Africa."
When Numbers Get Serious
South Africa's progress isn't only in big matters like economic growth and entrepreneurship. It's also reasserting itself as a major world power in international sports such as cricket and rugby. For 30 years, South African athletes were not permitted to compete internationally, meaning generations of athletes were denied the opportunity to reach the pinnacle of their profession.
Unlike in the U.S., where being blocked from international competition would have only a marginal effect on the careers of most professional athletes, South African sportsmen suffered greatly from their exclusion. The lifting of both the sporting bans ("We just beat England at cricket!") and commercial sanctions ("I can buy a Mac now!") has been a liberating experience for a country with global ambitions. South Africa has embraced its new freedoms and emerged from its isolation with an enthusiasm that is a joy to behold.
Yet the local newspapers were overwhelmingly negative: Everyone was either dead, dying, infected, unemployed, or committing a crime. "If you are not infected [with AIDS] then you are affected," goes the popular saying. Yet everywhere I looked -- and yes, I saw real problems, particularly in Soweto -- I found reason to be suspicious of the official and widely reported figures of 42 percent unemployment and 5 million people about to die of AIDS as of August 2003.
First, one must distinguish between what Statistics South Africa, the government statistical agency, calls the "expanded definition" figure of 41.8 percent unemployment (total jobless among people between the ages of 15 and 65), and the "strict definition" figure of 30.5 percent (those who are actively and unsuccessfully seeking official employment). While the expanded definition may be an internationally accepted way of measuring unemployment, it does not take into account all those South Africans working in the "informal" sector. From what I saw, a significant portion of that 42 percent is already working in the thriving underground economy, running a staggering number of black-market businesses.
The official unemployment numbers "are definitely not counting on the fact that there are millions at work in the informal businesses you see all over the place," said Eustace Davie of the Free Market Foundation, an independent South African think tank founded in 1975. One estimate puts the number of such businesses at more than 3 million. And beyond the specific enterprises, plenty of individuals are employed informally. For instance, private security personnel now outnumber police by four to one, and many security guards in the informal sector would not be picked up in the government's employment figures because they are not officially employed by anyone.
Yes, there are young men on Soweto street corners doing apparently little and perhaps nothing at all. But the official figure is hard to believe. "It does not add up," said attorney Leon Louw, the executive director of the Law Review Project, based in the Johannesburg suburb of Sandton. "Sales of cell phones, cars, and building materials are booming. There's a phone mast in even the poorest, most isolated village. If you go out on the ground, you simply cannot find the evidence to back up the scare stories. We just do not witness the scale of problems reported in the press. Subsistence agriculture is declining, but this is to be welcomed as it means people have found more productive things to do."
What of the HIV/AIDS epidemic? This is obviously a real and serious problem, but there are reasons to be skeptical of the officially promulgated number of 5 million infected. According to the Free Market Foundation's Davie, early extrapolations of the number of infected were based on tests that included a large number of pregnant women. There is a much greater likelihood of getting a false positive when the HIV test is conducted on a pregnant woman, so those early extrapolations were suspect.
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