By Alex Mabunda
The past two-and-a-bit years have been characterised by so much bad news on the economic front that society has become numb to the pain of bad news.
Statistic SA’s latest consumer inflation figures, which show a marginal decline of one tenth of a percent point to 7.5%, sounded like good news. This is even though the Reserve Bank will likely hike the repo rate at their next meeting in pursuit of their 3% to 6% inflation target range.
Such a hike will unfortunately add into an already high cost of living. Added to that are unemployment figures that have plateaued at an all-time high, unprecedented levels of load shedding and a threat of a war between the big military powers. This is indeed a perfect recipe for numbness and despair.
Times are bad! But, for us entrepreneurs, practising and aspiring for profit and social alike; should we really be despaired?
Well, not according to one of the greatest successes in this field, Jack Ma, co-founder and former chairman of the world’s largest online marketplace, Alibaba. Jack believes that “as entrepreneurs, if you’re not optimistic, you’re in trouble”, and that “when you are optimistic, there is always an opportunity”.
I also remember him also saying in one interview, that when the conditions become favourable, the opportunity is already gone. I cannot agree more with this entrepreneurial icon. Entrepreneurs should be to greater society what a loyal servant is to his master. It is our role as entrepreneurs to solve the problems of our communities and society at large.
In times when society is besieged with challenges like we currently are, it must be us entrepreneurs who make good of a bad situation. We must design and offer solutions that respond to the challenges. Above priests, political leaders, and royal leaders, it must be entrepreneurs who give people the lived experience of hope in bad times.
This is so, not because entrepreneurs can preach a better gospel to the priests, nor discharge better rhetoric to politicians. It is not even because they can provide a better sense of identity than that of royal leaders. Entrepreneurs must give people the lived experience of hope through the products and services they offer them to alleviate their situation. Indeed, by nature, persons, including the juristic, always have needs to fulfil, irrespective of the prevailing circumstances.
Perhaps the greatest need to fulfil under severe financial strain, such as the one presented by Stats SA, is to solve the affordability problem. I’m using this specific example because I can already hear murmurs about ‘people not having money to buy goods and services’.
Well, people not having money to buy goods and services is in itself a problem that creates a need for someone to solve. Providing cheaper alternatives, or a bartering system of sorts, could be one way entrepreneurs can create value in this situation; and that simply means: satisfy a need to deal with the affordability problem. So, there is no universe of problems whose proportion or nature is outside the realm of entrepreneurial solutioning.
It is up to us entrepreneurs to continually ask ourselves: what value can I provide to my community or society out there considering the prevailing situation? We must do this because, certainly in my books, entrepreneurs are and should be driven by the need to serve, the need to alleviate needy situations for others. The greater the need, the bigger the opportunity to meet the need.
One commentator on the subject went as far as saying that if you want to be a billionaire, you must solve the problems of people in their millions and billions. The greater the reach for our solutions, the greater the riches for us.
Without entrepreneurs doing what entrepreneurs ought to do, we are doomed to fail as a country. Let the priests nurture the souls of entrepreneurs with a message of hope, politicians their minds with the rhetoric of optimism, and royal leaders their identity with patriotism for them to stand up and be counted.
Unless we, as entrepreneurs, actively and openly “preach”, encourage and instil a culture of serving the needs of those around us, and especially to our young, we shall remain a society forever numbed and despaired by the never-ending streak of bad news.
* Alex Mabunda is the Group Chief Executive Officer at Ntiyiso Consulting Group, whose mission is to “empower institutions that enable Africa’s development”.