A bridge in the river

"Hijack victim killed after being thrown from van on freeway!"

"Political corruption trial of real estate developer begins."

"SABMiller executive killed in attempted robbery!"

Front page story: "City pothole crisis! We send our reporter to find the city's worst pothole!"

Depressing, maddening headlines. I'm glad I don't live in Chicago!

I know many would think those headlines came from South Africa, but they are all from the Chicago Tribune, published over a period of about two weeks.

Another story from the Chicago Tribune that I will never forget was published on August 1 2007. On that day a bridge carrying Interstate 35 over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed during rush hour due to a lack of maintenance.

Hundreds of cars were sent plunging into the waters of the river below. Dozens of people were killed. I remember that story well as a friend of mine travels over that bridge every day on his way home from work. He left the office half an hour earlier that day, and just missing the collapse of the bridge.

Imagine this incident had occurred in South Africa, if a bridge carrying the M1 in Johannesburg collapsed, due to a lack of maintenance? Can you picture the complaints, the vitriolic letters to the editor, the whining about how the country is falling apart?

We would never hear the end of it. People would pack for Perth the next morning. Yet it happens in America, the richest country in the world, and it's not the first time it's happened there.

The Interstate 35 incident got me thinking. In South Africa, we often hear people complaining that things are falling apart, that we are so Third World and that these kinds of things could never happen anywhere else but here.

But these complaints don't make sense to me. I am an engineer and the last twelve years of my life, I have spent six in America and six in South Africa. The only time I have driven through a pothole that has wrecked the tyre of my car has been in Las Vegas.

However rather than rely on my own pothole-driving experience, I decided to consult with the experts. In 2005, the South African Institution of Civil Engineering brought out a Report Card on the country's infrastructure. They based this on an identical exercise done the previous year by the American Society of Civil Engineers on America's infrastructure. They looked at about twenty categories: roads, rail, bridges, etcetera; and gave each a grade: A, B, C and so on.

South Africa's overall grade came out as a D+. Now that sounds really bad, until you realise that America's overall grade came out as a D. In fact, of all the categories studied, in only one - solid waste disposal - did South Africa come out worse than America. In every other category, South Africa was as good as, or better than, America. For example, in drinking water, South Africa gets a C+, America a D-. In rail, South Africa gets a B, America a C-. In roads, South Africa gets a C, America a D. And in our current favourite, electricity supply, guess which of the two reports this passage comes from:

"The power transmission system is in urgent need of modernization. Growth in electricity demand has not been matched by investment in new transmission facilities. Maintenance expenditures have decreased 1% per year since 1994. Existing transmission facilities were not designed for the current level of demand, resulting in an increased number of `bottlenecks' which increase costs to consumers and elevate the risk of blackouts."

I challenge you to admit that your first guess would have been South Africa. In fact, that statement comes from America's report.

It always amazes me to hear how people complain about South Africa when the facts do not support it. Crumbling and inadequate infrastructure is a worldwide problem, from South Africa to Australia to China to America.

Just think of that bridge that collapsed into the river.

I have been concentrating on infrastructure partly because I am an engineer and partly because it is on everyone's mind at the moment. But the same is true in so many other fields. It's almost as if people want everything to fail and therefore seize on any negative news and ignore the positive. We don't realise what wonderful facilities and opportunities we have here. And I should know.

In 1999 while I was studying in America I won the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Student Paper competition, and was approached with job offers by several top engineering firms in California. If earthquake engineering was a more glamorous field, like law or journalism, I might have been like the people you see in the movies being offered jobs at the top law firms or the biggest newspapers. Granted they didn't offer me anything like the money you see in the movies - they don't pay engineers that well - but I turned them down to return to South Africa to make a difference. And I have never regretted that decision.

I don't say that because if I had stayed in America I wouldn't be able to by my furniture and groceries at the traffic light, or be able to hear an English ad in the middle of a Xhosa programme introduced in Afrikaans, or get that gastronomic delicacy known as Bunny Chow. No, while I would have missed those things, that's not the real reason.

I feel at home here. I feel that I am in a place where things are happening, rather than where things have happened, and that I can make a difference. I can get out of bed each morning and think that today I can do something to make South Africa better. I could never feel that way about somewhere that wasn't home.

I'm not trying to defend the government or say that everything is perfect. Politicians should be criticised and held responsible for their mistakes. But if one looks at our problems from a global perspective, you'll see that the grass is not always greener on the other side.

If we concentrate on the positives and work together we can make a better life for all in South Africa. So the next time you hear someone complaining about how things falling apart in South Africa, just remember, in the richest country in the world, the bridge that collapsed into the river.

By Chris Roth

Chris Roth is a lecturer at the University of Pretoria.