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South Africa, where to now?

A Focus on Solutions

Peter Turner
Welded Thoughts
Published in
6 min readJul 18, 2021

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This article attempts to use Root Cause Analysis on South Africa’s Triple Challenge in an attempt to find the most effective set of solutions that can be taken, and by whom — the article is not intended to provide all the solutions so much as to suggest a framework that we as a collective may use to start to better address the problems that our country faces.

The end result — if enough interest is shown — will be a collaborative web app to allow for many people to build the diagrams below, together.

See original article here.

Problems

The problems are better highlighted in a previous article, but mainly include high poverty, inequality, and unemployment — collectively refered to by the World Bank as the ‘Triple Challenge’ — and which have been inflamed by the global COVID-19 pandemic and the rampant corruption seen over the past decade under Jacob Zuma’s presidency.

South Africa’s Triple Threat of High Poverty, Inequality, and Unemployment

Cause Mapping

The hypothesis is that many of challenges facing South Africa can be thought to be causally linked, myself and several friends have attemped an initial draft of this linking, with the results shown below:

Simplistic Root-Cause Analysis on the Triple challenge (PWM — People with Means, PNH — People Needing Help)

Solution Mapping

Brainstorming of ideas to address above-mentioned root causes

Some root causes have been deliberately left ‘on-ice’ , these issues, though undoubtedly extremely significant, have been spoken about many times and I wanted to focus on things that ordinary citizens could more directly influence.

Agents of Change

So we have a (rough draft) of the problems, their causal links, and a potential solution set — now what?

Let’s take a look at the various entities we have to solve this stuff.

Potential ‘agents’ to address above-mentioned root causes

Agent Mapping

Now that we have a potential solution set — aimed at directly combating above-mentioned root causes — as well as a set of agents to inact these solutions, let’s attempt to map the agents to the solutions.

Sankey diagram showing (potential) means of addressing root causes, linked to (potential) ‘agents’ that could execute them (subjective, non-exhaustive)

On the fiscal policy level, Colin Coleman — previously CEO for Goldman Sachs, Sub Saharan Africa — recently outlined an action plan to pave the way for an “economy that works for all citizens”.

The plan includes: 

  1. Introducing a fiscally neutral basic income grant 
  2. Introducing tax reforms to fund the basic income grant 
  3. Waging war on the illegal economy 
  4. Providing urgent relief to businesses 
  5. An economic growth plan 
  6. Assisting small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) 
  7. Unlocking infrastructure projects 
  8. Creating an “E- Government” platform to modernise the public service 
  9. Fixing Eskom 
  10. Reviewing and redesigning South Africa’s industrialisation architecture
  11. Ending apartheid spatial planning by targeting densified, integrated urban settlements

I would highly recomend reading the article, and diving into what he has to say (Coleman, 2021).

Conclusion

This article is based on the premise that their is a specific set of actions that can be taken that will best increase the probability of achieving a desired future state — in this case that state being a South Africa where the triple challenge has mostly been solved.

I think that the engineering process of Root Cause Analysis provides us with a good methodology through which to find these actions. I have attempted to do this myself but my knowledge, experience and intelligence are limited — thus this article is more to suggest a similar but more collaborative framework whereby many citizens can efficiently come up with a plan of action to take the country forward.

References

Special thanks to friends and family including Ricky Klopper, Jacques Stander, James, Mallett, Anne Turner, Garth Turner, Petrus Swart, Ashleigh Cole, Sheldon Lansdell for their feedback and input into this article.

South Africa
Inequality
Africa
Mandela Day
Hope

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Peter Turner
Welded Thoughts

Written by Peter Turner

403 Followers
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Inquisitive EdTech cofounder. Software person. Interested in history and historic fiction.

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