True radical economic transformation is about giving people opportunities

By Jonathan Foster-Pedley, Dean and Director of Henley Business School Africa

THERE’s a wonderful African proverb that’s perhaps more relevant now than ever before: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone if you want to go far, go together. It’s something that’s embedded in our concept of ubuntu, defining ourselves by our relationship to one another and implicitly understanding that one person’s success is incomplete while there are others left behind.

Collaboration is the only way that we will be able to successfully emerge from this pandemic and build back better, repairing, not papering over the chasms that COVID-19 revealed. We have to work together, not just because of the moral and ethical imperatives, but also out of sheer, unadulterated pragmatism: the old normal is gone and we don’t have a playbook for that which is busy replacing it.

None of us actually have the answer, or answers, since this post-pandemic era truly is one of volatility, uncertainty, chaos, and ambiguity – the most disruptive in living memory. The only way we can begin to have an answer is by working together, harnessing our collective imaginations and talents to find something that will work faster and more efficiently than we can do alone, taking a leaf out of the vaccine development programme. When we do that, we will overcome and we will flourish.

We have to lift as we rise, as the legendary Charlotte Maxeke reminded us a century ago. We do that by creating prosperity, not just expanding and increasing jobs within our own organisations but by helping our supply-chain network do just that. It is only by assisting start-ups to become sustainable small businesses and giving small businesses the opportunity to become medium-sized enterprises that we will start to make inroads into this apparently intractable problem of unemployment in a sea of jobless, with people rapidly being rendered unemployable.

True radical economic transformation is about giving people the opportunities that have been denied them for so long to unlock their potential. It’s dependent upon collaboration, creating opportunities, sharing knowledge, and helping one another. It’s only by collaborating that we can create a society that lives up to the promise evinced by our founding fathers. It was always thus. It’s just that the pandemic moved the second hand almost up to the hour on the Doomsday Clock.

We don’t have that much time left if we don’t collaborate.