What inspired this particular Insight is an excellent book by those two public intellectuals Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum. The book is called “That used to be US” – and the subtitle is - “What went wrong with America – and how it can come back.” This is a fascinating and eminently easy and readable book. However, the method and approach adopted by Friedman and Mandelbaum to resolving the challenges facing the US is relevant to South Africa at the beginning of 2012.

According to Friedman and Mandelbaum, America’s crisis goes back to the historic day when the Berlin Wall was cracked open – November 11, 1989 – and “no one would have guessed that America was about to make the most dangerous mistake a country can make: we were about to misread our environment. ....... We had achieved a long sought goal: the end of the Cold War on Western terms. But that very achievement ushered in a new world, with unprecedented challenges to the United States.”

“No one warned us”, the authors go on to say that “by helping to destroy communism, we helped open the way for 2 billion more people to live like us: 2 billion more people with their own version of the American dream, 2 billion people practising capitalism, 2 billion people with half a century of pent-up aspirations to live like Americans and work like Americans and drive like Americans and consume like Americans. The rest of the world looked at the victors in the Cold War and said: “We want to live the way they do.” In this sense the world we are now living in is a world that we (the US) invented.

Americans, the authors say, didn’t fully grasp what was happening, so they did not respond appropriately. They relaxed, under-invested, and lived in the moment just when they needed to study harder, save more, rebuild their infrastructure, and make their country more open and attractive to foreign talent.

The result is that the end of the Cold War ushered in a new era that posed – and poses – four major challenges for America. These are how to adapt to globalisation; how to adjust to the information technology (IT) revolution; how to cope with large and soaring budget deficits stemming from the growing demands on government at every level; and how to manage a world of both rising energy consumption and rising climate threats. These four challenges, and how the US meets them, will define America’s future, say Friedman and Mandelbaum. The rest of the book is an analysis of these four challenges and what is needed to meet them.

At the beginning of 2012, South Africa faces some very serious challenges. We are not talking about differences within the ANC and the factions which have formed in respect to the question of succession, and whether President Zuma should or should not have a second term. We are not talking about COSATU’s attitude to labour brokers or even to something as serious as the central government’s takeover of five departments of government in the province Limpopo. Or the growing corruption. And rather than have divisive and time-wasting debates about what the main issues facing us are, let’s start with Trevor Manuel’s National Development Plan which was launched toward the end of last year.

We’ve come out very strongly in favour of the plan. We believe that if this is not taken seriously by all members of government, the private sector, the trade unions and all political parties, the country will drift with declining economic indices, increasing unemployment, and growing social discontent. While there are aspects of the plan and its assumptions which we question, and which we will deal with at a later stage, we believe that this is a road forward. We see this very much in the light of the publication and approach of Friedman and Mandelbaum in their book on the US.

The central challenges identified by the Plan are:

1. Too few people work.
2. The standard of education for most black learners is of poor quality.
3. Infrastructure is poorly located, under-maintained and insufficient to foster higher growth.
4. Spatial patterns exclude the poor from the fruits of development.
5. The economy is overly and unsustainably resource intensive.
6. A widespread disease burden is compounded by a failing public health system.
7. Public services are uneven and often a poor quality.
8. Corruption is widespread.
9. South Africa remains a violent society.

Those were the central challenges identified by the Planning Commission but which goes on to say that it believes that two are critical and interrelated: too few people work and the quality of education available to the majority is poor. “While all nine challenges must be tackled in an integrated manner, increasing employment and improving the quality of education must be the highest priorities.”

Let’s regard these as Friedman and Mandelbaum do as the main challenges facing this country. And let’s do so by utilising All the skills of All of South Africa’s communities.