We should learn from foreigners

I’m beginning to think we should be learning from foreign nationals instead of blaming them for almost everything that is going wrong in this country.

Most of them come here with only the clothes on their backs and start selling us cheap curtains, duvets etc. for a living. They grow right in front of us while we are busy calling them names, making fun of them. They don’t care they struggle every day, vending from door to door, to opening spaza shops that we see mushrooming everywhere.

We even rent them shops that we as locals fail to run because we don’t support each other. We hate starting small. As a result we rob them, we harass them, and when they fight back, we loot their shops. You will never see a South African citizen doing door to door vending and grow from that to open a shop. We don’t have what it takes to start small. The government makes things worse by not doing enough to teach and support locals on starting and grow small to medium size businesses and to making it big.

The reality is when we are struggling in this country we always want someone to blame and our African brothers always fall victims of our misguided anger. Let’s use these guys to educate us locals on business strategies and tactics to successful entrepreneurship. Not all of our African brothers are here to take our wealth – which we still don’t have really. Not all of them are here to sell drugs, we doing much better in that department as we all know. Let us not always blame them for all the crimes, we had criminals long before they came. We all know that we have our own self inflicted social ills as a country. We were once foreigners in some of these people’s countries in our pressing times. Now that we are somehow free we don’t want them here. It doesn’t make sense and definitely won’t make cents. Let’s learn from each other and succeed.

NTOKOZO MCINEKA KA MAKAMU

Groutville