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No matter which part of the world I grace with my presence, natural disasters occur. My track record on attracting natural disasters and calamities doesn’t leave a great deal to be desired. Where yours truly pops up things do happen. During my stint in Miami in 1992, I left Miami for a week on vacation/holiday in San Francisco. At that time, I was still comparatively innocent and worried about earthquakes there. Nothing happened. After returning to Miami and spending exactly one night in my apartment, I got evacuated because of hurricane Andrew. Since that experience, I no longer worry about that sort of thing. When South Africa was going through the transition from Apartheid to multi–racial democracy I lived and worked in Johannesburg. One morning the Inkatha Freedom Party organised a march to the Shell building, the ANC headquarters. About fifty thousand Zulus in full combat gear were marching in the central business district of Jo’burg. The march led to a shootout. The South African army had to virtually reconquer the central business district. At the end of the morning, more than two hundred folks were dead. And I couldn’t leave my office for lunch. While doing whitewater rafting on the Zambezi on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia I managed to fall into the Zambezi. There are said to be little crocodiles in the Zambezi. But nothing really happened. This little episode doesn’t really count. When I lived in Auckland the city of sails suffered from a power cut (if memory doesn’t fail me it was in 1997). Auckland had no electricity for more than a week. When this sort of thing happens in New York a bunch of riff raff starts a riot and goes looting. Auckland, however, was peaceful and quiet. During my second year in Colima, while spreading my wisdom in the classroom, a serious earthquake hit Colima. I reckoned afterwards that we could continue with the class outside on the lawn. But students insisted on going home. I went home as well and slept like a baby. During my first year in Colima a friend of mine sent me an Email because the volcano here was getting active. I hadn’t even noticed. The World Bank report itself makes sense for me. It includes ideas about preventing damage to the economy and infrastructure caused by natural disasters. However, at a personal level, my attitude may be summarised with “I don’t give a row of beans”. After going through a few of the experiences I’m rambling about you get a little more relaxed. As a result, there are no longer a bunch of things that manage to make you lose your composure. Moreover, at
the end of your life you can’t complain about having had to endure a life
that was dull and boring. In a nutshell, looking at those events in hindsight,
they contribute to making your life more colourful and interesting. In
the course of time, you turn into a more rounded personality. Folks who
spend half their lives in front of the box and join the ranks of the departed
while being sound asleep in bed can’t honestly make this sort of claim.
There – in the “more developed world” heaps of multinational corportations are headquartered that shiploads of opponents to globalisation and other do gooders accuse of ripping off the less developed world. That black and white scenario appears to be changing now. There are now more and more multinational corporations headquartered in the less developed world that are keen on investing overseas, in both the more and the less developed world. Louis Wells, a professor at Harvard Business School, is fond of naming these outfits “third world multinationals”. These outfits come primarily from so–called middle income countries, such as Brazil, South Africa, India. For example, the Indian outfit Tata acquired in 2000 the British tea company Tetley. Pepkor, a South African retailer, has started to open shops in Mozambique and Zambia. South African brewery bought a significant chunk of Tanzanian brewery. These examples illustrate that there are increasingly more and more multinationals headquartered in the less developed world. They hop across borders and expand globally because they feel confined within their national markets. It appears to be particularly easy for South African companies to break out of their national market. Challenging new markets are located just north of South Africa, virtually all over Africa. The SA Foundation, a South African business lobby organisation, recently pointed out that South African outfits are preferably inclined to conquer countries that have opened up their economies. Those economies offer stability and transparency. I can’t claim to be surprised by that preference. All this indicates to me that the worldview of loads of do gooders often tends to be a little simplistic. Things aren’t often as black and white as they reckon that they are. Gaining a little experience in the real world may help them develop a more profound perspective. The following is a list of articles written by Jurgen for the magazine:
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Some
Thoughts On Living In Latin America ~ 