South Africa currently has two large Cinderella projects: the Gautrain and the 2010 World Cup.
Both projects are astonishingly expensive. When the Gautrain was announced in February 2006 it was to cost R 14 billion. Now it is suggested that it may cost R 24 billion. The same has happened with the World Cup. It was R 2 billion in the original bid and is now rapidly shooting over R 9 billion.
Nassim Taleb, a specialist financial analyst, has a phrase for unexpected events that have an extreme impact and that are made to seem predictable with explanations concocted afterwards. He calls these "black swans".
Benin Mwangi, who blogs about doing business in Africa, asked me recently: "should the discussion be about how to get the informal sector to become part of the formal sector or should it be how to cater to the informal sector?" This in an excursion into the morass of African poverty and development.
The short answer is: neither; ending poverty has nothing to do with the informal sector.
This is not to dismiss the question, which is an important one. With the failure of most centralised economic policies and governments in Africa the informal sector is the largest employer and service provider in most of the continent.
However the question conflates symptoms with causes. For starters, how do informal markets even come to be?
Scrogues Converse is a feature presented at Scholars & Rogues, a political analysis blog. In this conversation Martin Bosworth and Gavin Chait discuss the nature of Open-source vs Open-standards and the way in which Web 2.0 is not so much re-inventing the web as in repeating the past at a higher level.
Does web 2.0 undermine net neutrality?
Gavin: I feel that net neutrality is being undermined by all the new upstarts; from Facebook to Digg to Wordpress. My issue is this: closed-standards, like all the Web 2.0 platforms, seem a step backwards rather than a step forwards. Try and imagine if Google declared that henceforth Gmail subscribers could only email other Gmail subscribers? They'd go bang in a week.
Yet, that is precisely how Facebook, Digg, Wordpress, etc all operate. I need new login addresses - new identities - for every single Web 2.0 ap. Yet I only need one email address to contact anyone via email anywhere in the world. Various initiatives (like Identity 2.0) aimed at reducing this complexity seem merely to reinforce it.
Learn about the Spyder Curve
