South Africa is at the crossroads of sustainability

South Africa today faces a critical choice, argue Peter Willis and Monica Graaff. Either it attempts to put ‘business as normal’ back together again – or it strikes out for a truly sustainable future.

To be a South African today is to wake up and go to bed with paradox. As any visitor will attest, ours is an absurdly beautiful land, rich in plant and animal species. Yet our economy is still to a large extent powered by what is out of sight – cheap labour and the reserves of coal, iron ore, gold and other minerals.

While there is a comfortable living to be had in many of the country’s leafy suburbs and glittering city centres, life is still too hard for the majority of South Africans. Like the minerals, they are out of sight – tucked away in dormitory townships and squatter settlements.

While South Africans are confident about their ability to stage the football World Cup, many municipalities still struggle to deliver basic services like clean water, electricity, waste and sewage treatment to our townships.

Fortunately, perhaps, South Africans appear to thrive on paradox. Witness the dramatic shift in attitudes that followed the dawn of multiracial democracy in 1994. Today it is hard to find anyone who admits to having supported apartheid. What was until recently the dominant paradigm has all but evaporated.

This ability to shift quickly will be needed once more as climate change, water shortages and the other challenges set out in these pages tighten their grip.

Climate change is already biting. Some areas have recorded rises of two degrees in average temperature over the last 40 years alone. And we are far from being just a hapless victim. Per capita, South Africa’s carbon emissions are among the highest in the world. Our water is dangerously polluted, and we already consume 98% of what we have. Food security in what was once the region’s breadbasket is becoming a serious concern. Meanwhile, millions suffer from dire poverty, sometimes exacerbated by HIV/AIDS.

The African National Congress (ANC) Government is faced with a major balancing act. It has to raise the living standards of the vast majority of the electorate – while at the same time ensuring a sustainable future.

Our sense is that the period in which we are now living is a significant one – a kind of lull before the storm. Although business and government leaders have access to the warnings of impending challenges, the penny has still not really dropped. It remains acceptable in polite circles to act as though all weneed is an upturn in asset prices and a dampening of community unrest and all will be fine – the good times willroll again.

But beneath this veneer there are ample signs that many South Africans have started to think and act differently.

While working on Ubuntu!, we repeatedly found that we were looking at two parallel South Africas: one that is busy attempting to put ‘normal’ back together again – and another which is seizing the chance of a more innovative approach to life and to business.

Around 400 leaders from South African business, government and civil society have now taken part in the annual seminar staged by the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, as part of the Prince of Wales Business and Environment Programme. Our overwhelming experience of such occasions is that these leaders, whatever their day-to-day preoccupations, are deeply aware that another way of making society work is now essential. And they know that it is up to South Africans – and not to some European or American experts – to work out what that way is, and make it come to life. It is a rare leadership challenge, the sort that only comes to most countries once every few generations. A number have already taken up the challenge, and are profiled within Ubuntu!. Others, we suspect, are waiting for a clear signal – either from the market or from the Government – that the time for large-scale innovation and change has come.

That said, with so many high profile decision-makers taking stock of our current, unsustainable way of life – and the role our institutions play in maintaining it – we would be surprised if South Africa doesn’t turn out an abundance of leaders when the need becomes plain – as it has at critical moments in the past.

Talking with people in preparation for Ubuntu! has unearthed a great reservoir of that precious substance, our shared humanity – our ‘Ubuntu’ – waiting to be drawn upon by South Africans of all races and positions. In the peculiar lull that we are experiencing now, its presence is felt mostly at the micro scale, from one person to another. But when the turbulence begins, we expect it will be drawn upon in pails.

Peter Willis is Director of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership in South Africa.

Monica Graaff is South African Editor of Ubuntu! and an Associate Consultant with Incite Sustainability. She is also 2008 SAB Environmental Journalist of the Year.