Quite a question to push out a few weeks before Xmas where it’s all about rewarding good behaviour! However, it’s a question that came up yesterday at an International Volunteers Day celebration in Hanoi.

A new volunteer, that is new to Vietnam, had just experienced her first two weeks at work in a fairly remote Northern Province city. It’s a new VSO partner so virgin territory so to speak.

She had had a busy two weeks being taken around and shown off as The Volunteer. Happens all the time in Vietnam. Volunteers are considered a sign of respectability. You got one of those? Good, you’re in.

During her recounting of her work she mentioned that she had brought more books than clothes and the University she is attached to grabbed them to copy them. She sort of wondered whether that might be legal or not. She’s from a European country.

The Canadian volunteer and myself, her audience, fell about laughing. What a question to have from a European person. Copyright infringement should surely be something everybody in the developed world knows about. Or so one would imagine.

What it did do though, this outrageous statement, make us reflect on how quickly we as volunteers could get corrupt ourselves – not that we necessarily consider the new volunteer corrupt I hasten to add. There was an exercise we did during our pre-placement training which made us reflect on when our moral barometer would kick in.

At what stage did we think the particular example of corruption was now wrong and what corrupt and illegal activity did we feel we wanted to allow because it would lead to doing some good.

At what stage would we consider the end would justify the means was the question we reflected upon. At the time we all had very strong ideas of right and wrong and where we would draw the line. Yet here was a volunteer two weeks into her placement and she was already breaking an international law.

But then you (and I) would be inclined to defend her action by saying that everybody copies books, music, designs and other easy to copy intellectual property.

Well exactly.

But what’s next? Do we shrug our shoulders when we see bribery openly discussed? Or do we buy into that too?

Let me give you an example. The Centre I work at trains up young disabled people in handicraft skills and at the same time sources business to give them employment should they not find employment with their new skills.

The Director has a great vision of building a model village at a more outlying area of Hanoi and has the land in mind, and in fact is renting it already, that would serve this purpose beautifully. Negotiations are quite far along to give her the land for the Centre, an NGO,. for an extensive lease period at little or no cost.

What is stalling the process? A bribe so large that she just doesn’t have the money for it. And what’s more, we have an interested donor to pay for the buildings.  What do you do? Do you find a donor to pay for the bribe?

Do you invent a project so that you can get the money to pay the bribe? Do you even know if this is the last bribe or are there more to come?

And what makes this situation any different to many others worldwide? It’s just the bribe that looks different surely. In the USA you might need that amount of money to pay for a lobbyist.  Actually probably a lot more!

In South Africa a decent sized motor vehicle usually does the trick. In fact talking moral issues here. here’s another one for you. Should BMW allow it’s cars to be bought for bribery purposes? Good question isn’t it?

So where do you think you would draw the line? And at what stage, and with what humanitarian outcome at stake, would you bow to the dirty tricks the world constantly dishes up to us? Got you scratching your head, I would imagine.

We come across the concept of tipping point mostly in popular culture, business or in trends. At which point does a smart phone move from being a gadget for the elite to an everyman’s have to have tool. Or an iPod becomes common.

Santiago Calatrava

The thought crossed my mind when I came across an amazing architect called Santiago Calatrava. Or at least I found pictures of some of his building designs. They are breathtakingly different and beautiful and unbelievably courageous.

At what stage did another human decide that this so obviously different architectural style was safe enough to invest in. Because that is the question isn’t. When was the tipping point.

Because at some stage, once a few of us ordinary mortals have realised what magnificent work this is, then the reputation is made. He can design anything really and it will be approved.

How many beautiful buildings did he need to have designed and built before people thought of him as first choice. For instance the Olympic Stadium in Athens. Did somebody on the committee say, yes we have to have this architect?

As human beings we have the propensity to play it safe.We tend not to take risks and most of us have most ordinary tastes and opinions. We do safe and bland very well.

Just look at the houses we live in. The one is the same as the next. There are whole roads of same. We have the same kind of furniture, the same colours dictated by some fashion guru and we buy the same accessories.

In fact at one stage you could see which decade people got married by the furniture and colour schemes in their homes. Only reason that is no longer true is that marriages don’t last anymore.

This is us. No denying it. So how does an extraordinary designer get away designing and building these wonderful bridges, stadiums, buildings when we the public are so uninspiringly ordinary?

But there’s more! We ordinary folk can’t actually imagine the finished product if we see a sketch or architectural plans. It’s one of the biggest headaches architects have. Their clients cannot imagine what the completed building is going to look like.

And remember that buildings are not cheap. Bridges, especially the type this genius has designed, require extra special expertise and workmanship to make them happen. No ordinary concrete blocks, these designs.

Can you imagine what it must have taken to sell his first designs. According to Wikipedia it took ten years of his practice until he was allowed to build his first special project in Barcelona. He added the qualification of civil engineering to his portfolio of skills and his bridges are magnificent.

All I can say is thank goodness there was at least one if not a few brave people who had the capital resources available to them to be able to be the first to use this wonderful designer’s work and deliver a stamp of approval. It would have been a great loss if that had never happened.

A fair amount of drama is happening in the old homeland this week-end. It’s the Mbeki/Zuma stand-off in the high street, guns at the ready. For the bulk of the white population, as well as some of the Black Diamonds a name given to the emerging black middle class, this is a scary time. The ANC, the ruling party of South Africa, is getting together this week-end to appoint its new leader.

As so often happens, coincidentally I am reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and the chapter on South Africa is particularly relevant to the entire Mbeki/Zuma debate. I strongly recommend this book. It is worth reading.

For me the issue about the leadership of the ANC boils down to one thing and that is the fact that the ordinary citizen in South Africa is no better off now than during the apartheid years. The reader may replace the word ordinary with the word black.

In fact some of the statistics I have seen recently have shown that the bulk of the black people are worse off economically than under apartheid rule. And yes, some of the whites have also seen a drop in their living standards. The black South African may have the vote, but the majority are starving and living in slums.

The ANC led government may have provided the citizens with cheap housing and services such as running water, electricity and landline phones. However, the cheaply built houses are falling apart and the people can’t afford to pay for the services.

Some stats from Naomi Klein’s book which were recorded in 2006 show that the number of people living on less than $1 per day has doubled from 2 million to 4 million by 2006 (from a CSMonitor report). Between 1991 and 2002 the unemployment rate for black South Africans has more than doubled from 23% to 48% (report in Le Monde diplomatique).

What happened in South Africa? Where did the rainbow nation go wrong? Of course economists will state that nothing went wrong. The SA economy is booming, inflation is under control and eventually the wealth will trickle down. I don’t think so. There is a world wide trend of labour losing jobs or workers forced to live on less income.

A United Nations University study reports that 2% of adults in the world own more than half of the global household wealth. 10% of adults account for 85% of the world total and the bottom half of the world adult population owns barely 1% of global wealth.

Going back to South Africa, when the ANC took over after democratic elections, Mandela and his government tried to address the inequalities the apartheid years had inflicted on the majority of the population. Every time they moved in this direction, such as land redistribution, the developed world punished them by withdrawing its investments. No matter the road-shows that the then VP Mbeki and his Minister of Trade & Industry Alec Erwin held to get the world to invest, they came away empty handed most of the time.

If South Africa wanted to play on the global economic stage, it had to follow economic principles set down by the powerhouse economies of the world. And these included such killer steps as keeping inflation low at all cost. As an aside and talking of killer steps, watch the current Governor of the Reserve Bank kill off the growth by hiking interest rates and pushing the cost of borrowings out of reach of the manufacturing sector. More job losses?

It has taken years for the ANC led government to earn some brownie points on the global economic stage. Even taking on and paying off the debts incurred by the apartheid government has not been enough to provide sufficient credibility to the external dictators.

After all the kowtowing and letting of blood at the demands of the IMF, World Bank, International Trade Organisations and other foreign institutions, these brownie points are still not sufficient to encourage a flood of investment into the country. It has purely stopped the large scale exodus of money out of the country.

According to Naomi Klein, one further important reason why South Africa’s democracy ‘was born in chains’ was local white business. In retrospect this makes total sense to me. According to Klein, white owned South African business dictated the shots during the negotiation period before the first democratic elections. White business felt that the black masses could have the political clout as long as the economic one remained in their hands. Who cared about the vote as long as the bank balance was as high as ever.

It’s difficult to compress the point I am trying to make into a short article on a blog. Books have been written about this, especially worthy ones such as Naomi Klein’s. It can be nothing more than a very superficial process. So why try at all?

It’s the unfair deal that black South Africans have been dealt that has worried me for years. It’s not right that people who really want to work and earn money to feed their families can’t do so. They want to educate their children and ensure a better future for them. The squatter camps are testimony to the fact that the current government has not delivered to its mandate.

Mbeki and to a certain extent Mandela have been running the country with one eye constantly on the approval of the powerhouse economies of the world. Not only that, they are also at the mercies of white owned business at home. They have let their people down. What is so sad is that they have done this inadvertently, thinking they were acting in the best interests of their country and people. But it has not worked.

The people are hoping that Zuma will deliver for them. They are hoping that he will create jobs, provide better health services, quality education and control crime. Will he deliver? I don’t think so. His hands will be tied just as Mbeki’s have been. In essence whether Zuma runs the show or Mbeki, one thing is fairly certain, nothing will change. To gauge sentiment, watch by how much the JSE (Johannesburg Stock Exchange) will drop once Zuma is confirmed leader of the ANC.

And the dreaded question the whites are too scared to ask? Will South Africa end up like Zimbabwe? There are two points here. Yes it will end up like Zim if whites continue to control business. They still do although a few percentages have been hived off to Black Economic Empowerment groups. There is even the odd black CEO. And the second yes, if the world continues to dictate economic policy, it surely eventually will become another African country in pain. It’s what happened, in one form or other, in Zimbabwe and Kenya and Mozambique….