A mile or two from me here in Johannesburg, about half a million people are starting to starve because of the lockdown. They have no work, no money and very little to eat.

One of the reasons they are where they are is cultural. The majority of people in South Africa are group oriented and present oriented. Most of the world's population is group oriented in fact: in exchange for loyalty to a group (normally your tribe), you are protected.

Your identity is primarily one of belonging to the group. This is very different to someone like me who, as a white Westerner, is an individual culture-oriented person with some group affiliations.

Individual culture people value things like small teams, personal responsibility and individual achievement.

Group culture people are loyal to their group, value concepts like nation-building and have unquestioning loyalty to their families, tribes and leaders.

I'll give you a topical example. There is considerable resentment among young black professionals in this town about the 'black tax'. This is money they have to give to their wider families just because they have jobs. It's expected.

I watched it happen in Zimbabwe when the Mugabe regime came in. The newly promoted black civil servant moving into his new home in the suburbs brought his whole extended family with him, goats included. The fact that he was obliged to do that wasn't even questioned.

The wider family back home in the rural areas can be a destructive force. Let me tell you about Vera. Vera was a cleaning lady who lived in Johannesburg with family back home in the middle of nowhere. She worked for a friend of mine and she was really good at her job.

She got together with some friends and started their own cleaning business. They did really well and made an excellent income. When she sent some of this money home, the family back home couldn't understand where it had come from.

They accused her of witchcraft and being a prostitute. She had to shut her business down and let all her employees go.

Welcome to Africa where superstition, ancestor worship and practices that haven't been around since the Dark Ages are still alive and well.

So that's the group culture problem. The present-culture one is possibly even more dangerous at a time like this. Present-oriented people literally have no concept of the future or planning for it. Saving, maintenance, planning for the future - nope.

My daughters tried to explain to their friends that going on a camp with high heels was probably not the best idea. They simply could not explain the concept of preparation for a future event to a present-oriented person. The future is something weird and unknowable to them.

Here's a story that illustrates the group culture attitude I've been talking about:

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-02-21-we-live-like-peasants-in-our-own-country-tales-from-the-forgotten-people-of-south-africa/

'We live like peasants in our own country'

I saved this when I first came across it so I can paste some of the quotes here.

"We live like peasants in our own country. We are treated like non-South Africans yet we are expected to vote."

This is 100% a group culture mindset. This person voted for the ANC - he showed loyalty - and expects to be looked after in return. His problem is that he isn't being looked after by the government.

The ANC itself takes great pains to show that it IS looking after its people. The budget this year highlighted that 16 million people got free money from the government.

Group culture mindset again.

The problem now is that the combination of group culture and present culture is becoming deadly during the lockdown. People who have no concept of the future have unsurprisingly not put aside a month's supply of food, even if they could afford it - which they can't.

Instead of the ANC looking after them during this difficult time, the ANC has instead deployed soldiers and police to prevent them from going outside and to prevent them from drinking and smoking (yes, really).

There's considerable rage building about all this.

I'm not going to get into who really controls this country behind the scenes in this thread (hint: they live in London) because that's a different topic.

But they definitely know how to push the right cultural buttons to cause maximum chaos.

The ultimate goal, at least before Corona-chan came along, was to drive out most white people and massacre the rest so that black people can be restored to "their" land.

Neighboring Zimbabwe is starving because they did exactly this.

If you try and explain this concept to a present-oriented person, they literally cannot conceive of the idea that starvation could happen in South Africa if we go the same route as Zim. It's the future: weird and unknowable.

Naturally, all experiments giving productive land to group-oriented present-oriented people have ended in disaster. Tribes end up fighting each other for the golden goose and end up destroying it because they don't understand where the wealth comes from:

I saw a tweet the other day from a black guy that said if you give a tender in this country to a white man, he'll get the job done and hire 100 people. If you give it to a black man, he'll buy a nice car and give some money to his friends and nothing will get done. Truth.

This happens at the very highest level too. I once had a copy of this book:

https://www.amazon.com/African-Transformational-Leadership-century-Business/dp/0620355026/

It's written by the former CEO of the national power utility. On page 9 is a diagram of how he approaches leadership.

It's a series of concentric circles describing relationships - with fellow CEOs, with government leaders, important people nationally and internationally. Somewhere on the right is a tiny sliver that says strategy and execution.

That's why he ran it into the ground.

A chief executive officer is supposed to execute, not see his organization as a microcosm of a group-oriented culture. When group culture collides with the West, the results are always ugly, mainly because group-oriented people have zero personal initiative or responsibility.

Hopefully you now have some idea why South Africa is in deep trouble. Members of group cultures are literally incapable of looking after themselves in a time of crisis like this.

All else is commentary.

https://twitter.com/Deni707/status/1250272342510465027