Month: March 2023

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

(From Antigonish, a poem by the American educator and poet, William Hughes Mearns)

We went to visit something that wasn’t there.

It’s a place known for its absence — The Big Hole, the site of the Kimberley diamond mines in South Africa. Once diamonds were discovered here, tens of thousands of treasure-seekers flooded into this remote place in a remote continent in the late 1800s. The Big Hole has the distinction (if you can call it that) of being the largest man-made hole in the world dug with manual labor — picks and shovels, with dirt removed one bucketful at a time for each 30-foot by 30-foot claim. Over 49.5 million tons of earth were removed, and over 14.5 million carats of diamonds were pulled from the ground. This is the land of Cecil John Rhodes, who consolidated all the claims and founded the De Beers Group.

Diamonds are not rare, but diamonds are valuable. They are valuable because people say they are. Buyers are willing to pay for clarity, cut, colour, and carat size. And mined diamonds are much more expensive than lab grown diamonds, even though the lab diamonds are chemically and structurally identical to mined diamonds. Why is that? Because people believe they are more valuable, despite their being indistinguishable from lab diamonds without specialized analytical equipment.

That got us to thinking:  How do you decide what’s valuable? Do you take other people’s word for it? Is Bitcoin, something with no physical existence valuable? How valuable?

And it’s not just about money – it’s also about time.  How we “spend” our time is a reflection of what we value.  An economist will say something’s value is what someone else is willing to pay for it, either in time or money – it’s the demand part of supply and demand.

But demand is a state of mind. You decide if you’re hungry enough to pay $10 for a bad hamburger. You decide if driving that fancy car will give you so much joy that it’s worth $$$$$$. You decide to spend your time doing X instead of Y, because X somehow has more value to you.

The real question is: how do we decide what’s valuable to us, as individuals, as families, as communities, and as civic society. How do we find the diamonds in our lives, rather than just the holes?

The Bottom of the Economy

Not only does South Africa have a high unemployment rate among its citizens, but it also has a large immigrant population.  In the Western Cape (Cape Town area), many of these are economic refugees from Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and some of the other sub-Saharan countries that have a lot of conflict and social unrest.  Also, the Western Cape attracts migrants from the Eastern Cape (the area around Durbin).  Many of these migrants and immigrants find themselves unemployed – and often unemployable.

And many of these are reduced to begging, which can be divided into four categories.

First, are the “unionized” beggars who collaborate to stake out individual territories in the city. Walk unsuspectingly across the invisible boundary, and someone (usually female) rushes over to plead for a handout. Their routine is very polished, with all the anticipated “no” answers rebutted. On occasion they have a rent-a-baby to elicit more sympathy (or pity). The nagging is incessant because it works — sometimes. However, as soon as you leave their fief, they stop, and head back to find their next mark.

Next are the men (they’re always men, gender-based violence is widespread) standing at traffic lights with cardboard signs and cups for any coins that might come their way. This is usually where the White beggars are seen (White unemployment is around 8% in South Africa).

Third, there are those huddled beneath an old cloth that once might have been a blanket.  Often they are next to a shop’s doorway. They may not even have a cup for coins or cash. All of them look in pretty bad shape.

The last group are the transients. Every night, they search all the trash cans for

anything to eat, or drink, or sell, or wear. These are the ones with 2 pair of pants on so the holes in one pair are offset by the holes in the other.  One 2-pants fellow was also wearing one shoe and one flip-flop. Many have a dazed look as they scrounge through the trash.

The issues facing these four groups are complex and solutions are similarly complex. Stable countries with strong economies tend not to have much emigration, so helping countries stabilize and grow would be a win-win for both people and countries. But that’s a heavy lift over a longer term.  Providing social services – health care, housing assistance, feeding programs, job training – is resource-intensive, in terms of both people and money.

The word we haven’t mentioned yet is corruption. In the government, the state-owned utilities, and political parties, the C-word is the expected response when you interact with them. Eskom has been accused of having organized gangs inside the company siphon off vast sums. Bloated payrolls, ‘lost’ money, and huge cost overruns contribute to the nation’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the self-reinforcing problems of unemployment, poverty, and crime. I don’t know how the society keeps itself together with the magnitudes of these problems. That’s one reason the church is trying to set up an employment agency, something you’d think was a natural government function.

But, as Franklin Roosevelt said, “One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment… If it doesn’t turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.”