Making a Plan: Our Greatest Strength or Our Biggest Weakness?

 

There are few phrases more South African than:

“Don’t worry, we’ll make a plan.”

Car won’t start? We’ll make a plan.

Power’s off? Make a plan.

Water’s off? Make another plan.

Pothole swallowed the left front wheel? Someone knows a guy.

It is one of the things I love most about South Africans. We are resourceful, adaptable and almost pathologically unwilling to be defeated by circumstances. Give us a problem and, before most countries have established a commission of inquiry, someone in Boksburg has built a solution out of two extension leads, a pool pump and something he found in the garage.

It’s magnificent.

But lately I’ve started wondering whether our remarkable ability to make a plan has also become part of the problem.

Because if citizens continually find ways around dysfunction, what incentive is there to fix the dysfunction in the first place?

The Country of Plan B

South Africans don't really have backup plans anymore.

We have backup lifestyles.

Electricity unreliable? Solar panels and batteries.

Water unreliable? JoJo tanks and boreholes.

Security concerns? Electric fencing, cameras, armed response and a dog with anger-management issues.

Public healthcare struggling? Medical aid.

Public education struggling? If you can afford it, independent schooling.

We have slowly constructed private alternatives to many of the services our taxes were supposed to provide in the first place.

And remarkably, we've become rather good at it.

The South African middle class can now generate its own electricity, store its own water, secure its own neighbourhood and educate its own children.

At this rate, all we need is a small runway in the garden and we'll have completed the set.

Resilience Is Our Superpower

None of this should diminish something genuinely extraordinary about South Africans.

We adapt.

Businesses install generators and keep trading. Communities fill potholes. Residents clean parks. Neighbourhoods organise security. Ordinary people step into spaces where institutions have failed and simply get things done.

We complain spectacularly, obviously - usually at a braai while explaining exactly how the country could be fixed by Tuesday - but then we get on with it.

That resilience is something worth celebrating.

But resilience has a darker side.

Because there comes a point where resilience becomes accommodation.

And accommodation eventually becomes acceptance.

Have We Become Too Good at Coping?

Imagine employing someone who repeatedly fails to do their job.

Every time they fail, instead of confronting them, you quietly do the work yourself.

Eventually, two things happen:

You become exhausted.

They become extremely comfortable.

South Africa sometimes feels rather like this.

The pothole isn't repaired, so we learn where it is.

The traffic lights don't work, so we develop an extraordinary ability to negotiate intersections using eye contact, hand gestures and prayer.

The electricity fails, so we buy an inverter.

The water disappears, so we install a tank.

And life continues.

Which raises an uncomfortable question:

Are South Africans so good at surviving dysfunction that we've inadvertently made dysfunction sustainable?

The Taxpayer's Peculiar Arrangement

This becomes particularly interesting when you consider what many South Africans are actually paying for.

First, you pay tax.

Then you pay again for the services the tax was supposed to provide.

Private security. Medical aid. School fees. Solar. Water storage. Insurance.

It's essentially a subscription service where you pay twice and receive one product.

Try explaining that business model on Dragon's Den.

“So, what exactly does the customer receive for the first payment?”

“Well... theoretically quite a lot.”

“And in practice?”

“They buy it again.”

Ingenious.

But Not Everyone Can Make a Plan

And this is where the joke stops being quite so funny.

A solar installation is a plan - if you have the money.

Medical aid is a plan - if you have the money.

Private schooling, armed response and a borehole are plans - if you have the money.

Millions of South Africans cannot simply opt out when public systems fail.

When the electricity goes off, it goes off.

When the clinic doesn't function, there may not be another option.

When the local school fails a child, there isn't necessarily another school down the road.

The people most affected by institutional failure are often those least able to build their own alternative.

And that means functioning public institutions aren't merely about convenience.

They're about equality.

When Resilience Enables Incompetence

Perhaps this is the uncomfortable conversation we need to have.

Resilience is admirable. But resilience should never become permission for incompetence.

A community filling its own potholes is inspiring, but it is also outrageous that it has to.

Parents fundraising to repair a school demonstrates wonderful community spirit.

It also tells us something isn't working.

Businesses generating their own electricity demonstrate extraordinary adaptability.

But they shouldn't have needed to become amateur power stations in the first place.

We have become so accustomed to applauding the people who fix things that we've stopped asking difficult enough questions of the people whose job it was to prevent them breaking.

Maybe We Need a Different Kind of Plan

The answer is certainly not for South Africans to become less resilient. Our ability to adapt is one of this country's greatest assets.

Perhaps we simply need to redefine what “making a plan” means.

Instead of always finding another workaround, perhaps that same ingenuity, energy and stubborn determination should increasingly be directed towards demanding better.

Holding institutions accountable.

Supporting the ones that work.

Building stronger communities.

Refusing to accept incompetence as an inevitable feature of South African life.

Because there is an enormous difference between saying:

“We can handle this.”

and saying:

“This is acceptable.”

The South African Paradox

Perhaps that's the great South African contradiction. We are extraordinarily resilient because we've had to be.

Our challenges have created entrepreneurs, innovators and communities capable of solving problems with an ingenuity that would make an engineering department nervous.

We bend.

We adapt.

We laugh.

We make a plan.

And somehow, despite everything, we keep moving forward.

That is something worth being proud of.

But our resilience should be the tool with which we build a better country, not the cushion that makes a dysfunctional one more comfortable.

So yes, when things go wrong, South Africans will make a plan.

We always do.

So, ahead of our upcoming elections on the 4^th of November, we should consider that perhaps it's time the plan wasn't simply about how to live with the problem.

Perhaps the plan should be to fix it.