We can make the nation as successful as the Springboks

South Africa has been in steep decline ever since Jacob Zuma became president. Things would be radically worse if Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma had replaced him rather than Cyril Ramaphosa, but as we all know, Ramaphosa has not been able to stop the decline.

Eskom, Transnet, SAA, the Post Office and more have collapsed, many of our cities are decaying and we all, rich and poor, live in constant fear of crime. With the masses of youth unemployed, the future seems bleak.

But we are a deeply patriotic people and there is, amid the despair, much that we should celebrate about our beautiful country. At the moment the good story that millions of us are hanging on to is the extraordinary success of our rugby team.

That we have been able to build and sustain a world-class team gives us tremendous pride. That it includes leading members from across the old divisions of race and class shows that we can build a new future. To put it bluntly, while the ANC destroys our hopes, the Springboks show what we are capable of as a nation.

After all, just imagine where we would be if Eskom was run at the same world-class level as the Springboks. Imagine if we approached the crises of crime and poverty with the same seriousness as we do our national rugby team.

The Springboks show us that we can be world-class, that we can make South Africa work, and make it work very, very well. This gives us all hope.

The question, of course, is how we replicate the success of the Springboks in other aspects of our society. There are no easy answers in light of the sad fact that we do not have a single party in Parliament that inspires any hope, and that our misguided proportional representation system is allowing the worst kinds of opportunists to hold the balance of power in coalitions.

It is essential that we fix this. But, in the meantime, there is much we can do as a society. We can, as a first priority, simply refuse to accept incompetence and mediocrity.

Capacity to be world-beaters