South Africa’s problems can sometimes seem so overwhelming that the solutions we come up with are often so daunting themselves that we shout them out and quickly give up because it’s all too much. Real unemployment at more than 40%, collapsing cities, derisory economic growth, a corrupted state and an electoral cycle that pits citizens against each other almost constantly make it hard to appreciate what we still can do. A lot of people appreciated Duma Gqubule’s column here on Monday, where he argued that “a Marshall Plan is required to rebuild infrastructure and create a public pathway towards providing access to affordable, quality universal basic services”. And it can sometimes seem so. But there’s no happy victor to give us the money, as the Americans did to a devastated Europe after World War 2. I prefer the advice of Eskom chair Mteto Nyati, who noted the other day that “the root cause of our underperformance lies in the quality of the leaders we elect and appoint across all three spheres of government. Merit has rarely been our primary criterion.” We all know this is true. Poor leadership has ruined South African politics forever. Accountability may be everything, but such is the damage our history has done to us that it gets left behind. I know that sounds overdone, but we live in fairyland if we think 1994 made it all go away. Our past didn’t damage hospitals and schools and roads. It damaged people. All of us. And the fix isn’t just going to be money. It is going to be little things. Require, by law like the Germans do, that property owners keep their buildings in good nick and clean their pavements. Or lose their properties. Most of the dilapidated housing stock in our tiny villages is owned by absent landlords and the tenants don’t care. Or follow Eskom’s example. Fixing its plant (leave the pricing for now) has been about doing little hidden things right. It’s called maintenance. It’s a first-rate social good. I’ve been in France for a few weeks, and while I loved it all my lasting impression is how much restoration and maintenance was going on around me wherever I went. My first thought at the scale of the restoration work on Notre Dame in Paris, gutted by fire in 2019, was just how many young French workers must have been involved in making it beautiful again. You can’t buy experience like that. Maintenance is a virtue we don’t value in South Africa. If something breaks we prefer to build anew. But if you think about it, for a young person to fix a broken building means having to learn old skills and appreciate how things were once done with fewer tools and no computers. Experience always trumps qualifications in the real world. My dad came home to the then Umtata after the war in 1945 with no job, so he worked for his father. The small firm won a contract to build a rural church near Engcobo, 95km away. My dad and a team would camp out at the site for weeks. My grandfather was a carpenter by trade (learned from his father, a wheelwright in Butterworth), and he knew the church steeple would be a problem for his beginner son. The architect had drawn it, but before he sent my dad off he built a scale model of the scaffolding he would have to erect on-site to be able to make the steeple in the first place. We must rethink how we teach trades. Strict apprenticeships and demanding written exams just don’t require the vast amounts of money spent on the sector education and training authorities. They need determined people supervising them on-site, and experienced people teaching the theory, so we create a generation of plumbers or electricians who not only know how to install a toilet or a relay, but why it is done in a particular way.As few as 300 young people a year who have earned their tickets as plumbers or electricians could make a measurable difference to the quality of life for many thousands of citizens. As Nyati said, none of this happens without accountable and determined leadership throughout government. And, unfortunately, the only way this happens is to elect them. But I tell you, watching South Africans fight over everything from the faces in a photograph or the headline on a story, while our top law enforcement agency is revealed as a duplicitous criminal machine, and you want to give up. Little solutions or big ones just never matter quite as much in South Africa as the politics do. They almost never have. This is the damage in all of us, but there’s some hope given enough time. We’re fundamentally good people, hard-working and god-fearing. The bones are good and we’ll be a totally different country one day. You and I probably won’t quite see it. The French have had seriously more practice at building and fixing things than we have. Work on Notre Dame began in 1163 and only ended 182 years later. • Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.Business Day