Editorial
Johannesburg - Whenever there is an international survey and South Africa is included, we’re normally at the bottom of the pile. We only make it to the top when it’s a survey about bad things: lack of safety, violent crime, corruption.
But this week it emerged that we had moved up from halfway to the top 20% of a very positive survey – generosity and specifically charitable giving. For outsiders it must be an unimaginable irony that a country like ours, with its incredible inequality and centuries of oppression, is also capable of acting in exactly the opposite manner during a global pandemic of all things.
And so it is in the Charities Aid Foundation’s World Giving Index: for the first time since its inception, five major western countries have fallen out of the top 10, while South Africa has moved up on the list of 114 countries from 45 to 21.
We shouldn’t be surprised. South Africans have hearts as big and as wide as their country ‒ and a lot of that generosity came to the fore during the tough lockdowns at the start of Covid-19. We had Siya Kolisi and his wife working tirelessly to bring food parcels to the desperate; the Solidarity Fund which helped pay for vaccines; and, many other community outreaches like the Angel Network and in Durban, the Denis Hurley Centre.
But the greatest of them all has to be Imtiaz Sooliman and his Gift of the Givers. His team have stepped in literally where government has failed; drilling for water for parched hospitals, finding ventilators and renovating sub-standard wards and operating theatres over and above providing vital food parcels and running soup kitchens.
We need to keep giving generously, to keep caring about one another. It’s ubuntu. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s also what makes us uniquely South African.
It’s very special that the world has seen this.