But you are part of the community.

And I am not being singular here, to say that you are part of a community. That goes without question. You have your family, your neighbours, your village/township/suburb/town/city/country/continent. When you zoom out, and the lens gets wider, you are in the community, and you are a global citizen. You are plural.

So I’m talking here about your existence. And if you look around you, the world is filled with potholes and problems right now. And I see you Covid-19, but I raise you generational poverty, broken democracies, poor governance systems, bad healthcare systems, loadshedding, air pollution, muddy running water and pit toilets, and kids drowning in them pits. We are in the dog and in the armpit.

But there is that little story about how the Asians woke up and discarded poverty. They started with attacking small problems. And copying the shit out of everything that came out of the industrialised West. They got active at using their overflowing populations to attack unemployment and raise per capita GDP. And yeah, they got called out and slaughtered in the media for unfair labour practices and human rights abuses etcetera and so forth, but families got fed bro.

I remember reading through a book by Naomi Klein (titled No Logo) while I was a second year undergrad student in some obscure course that I needed to pass to keep my grades up. She was disdaining Nike for labour offshoring to the East and arguing that Nike was making the world a bad place while making Jordan Air Force 1s.

But not for them Chinese, they would take Nike money and pittance it to the workers, but get Nike blueprints and designs and then flood the world with replicas later. Unethical? Yes, but capitalism has no ethics fam. I must tell you some other time what the economic multiplier effect actually means in real life and real terms.

So here we are in the deep south of Africa, our economies are in malaise, and sovereign debt is sinking 3 future generations into a growing cesspit of tax burden. And the old elite folk that rule us in the ministries dont seem to have a clue on what to do, or what is to be done, and they keep borrowing. And the overdraft grows larger fam.

Yeah, them struggle heroes of our past, taking us into another struggle future. And they are the new rich, oddly enough. How selfish. Out of touch and out of reach.

And pardon you if you dont have a struggle last name. But dont use that as a crutch. Use it as a clutch rather.

You are young and youthful, Africa, your energy may be low, because they shut down the taverns and bottle stores, and you cant find your Marlboros and Camels in legit supply. You are frustrated. And your community has problems in this lockdown and pandemic. And you have black tax on your back too.

But what if I told you a little secret about business. Its all about finding solutions. And Im being a broken record here because I had wine that other day and I got partially intoxicated and didnt stop talking. Forgive me.

Business is solutions to any wicked problem. And Africans and Africa have a lot of those. Its the home of the problems. Get within. Locate the problems, and then co-locate the solutions. And you can price them. And get paper. Geddit?

And you can give paper back. Lift as you rise.

Be of service to your community bruv. You have been blessed with education, and maybe some corporate experience at the call centre gig.

You are part of the generation that this continent has been waiting for, and you must meet with that expectation, whichever legal way you can. If you dont, then you are thieving from the freedom that we gained from the colonial yokes and separatist developmental imprisonment. Im making up these phrases, so dont quote me yeah?

But you have a community, you grew up with them, and your roots never left you. That community is still waiting, impatiently with expectations for what they contributed to your becoming who you are. Shine for them, rescue back and push forward. Locomotive.

It doesnt mean that you will have an answer for everyone and everything, but you must find a solution, or someone to solve the problem, from the networks that you have built, and those that you and I are a part of.

No one person is endowed with a solution to every problem, but communities can solve problems. Zuckerberg aint never built Facebook by his damn self!

Any network is a community. So you are part of the solution, even when you dont realise there is a problem.

If you dont participate, then you are part of the problem.