The Southern Cape Corridor looks East
~The Longview ~
BREAKING NEWS – Mossel Bay, South Africa, 27 March 2024
Mandarin Language School graduates posted to Beijing, China as translators and interpreters for new Sino-ZAR Trade Deal brokered by Southern Cape Corridor team.
or how about …
NEWSFLASH – Wilderness, South Africa, 27 March 2024
In an exclusive interview with The Gremlin, Trade Emissary to New Delhi, Scott Mendelt announces details of ZARs new multi-billion US$ trading relationship with the Indian sub-continent. Mendelt says accolades must go to the S.C.C. Trading School at Wilderness, his alma mater.
In Art of the Longview, published in 1991, Peter Schwartz argues that, by deploying strategic foresight, it is possible to better forecast and manage future risk. He introduces the technique of scenario building, which he proposes can assist leaders and managers to ‘see what’s coming over the next hill … before you get there’. Mathematics (The Numbers) and Trends Analysis (The Stats, Tables & Graphs) will prove the picture – population size, age and growth rates, literacy and numeracy levels, innovations and patents, trade balances, trading scope and scale, gold reserves etc etc. Military-induced Apocalypse aside, the next World Super-Power will be The Red Dragon, and we should focus the trading sights of our S.C.C. sharply on China and south-east Asia.
(Aside: All that China now lacks is depth, breadth and sophistication in its financial and money markets – but this is not a problem as China is a Master of the Longview !)
Not too far from the western end of our corridor lies the most southern most point of Africa, Cape Aghullas, and far out to sea we could find the location of the fabled meeting of the warm Indian and much colder Atlantic Oceans. Oceanographers will tell you that there is no specific spot where the sample cup of seawater will come up luke-warm. Rather there will be a gradual temperature gradient over many hundreds of sea-miles and fathoms of depth. Cape Aghullas is simply a handy spot to mark with the cartographers X as being the place where the great eastern and western oceans meet at that southern most tip of the Old World.
When it comes to positioning our S.C.C. for trade, we cannot blow ‘hot and cold’. Using all the skills, insights, connections and foresight at our disposal, we must set our sights on trade with the East. The enterprise approach would see us doing our homework, and approaching the eastern market in a state of high preparedness. Most basic to this would be a thorough working knowledge of the eastern cultures, customs and languages. There are only excellent reasons to encourage our primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions to launch Mandarin Chinese language classes. In the town I call home, we have five-year old Chinese children already fluent in English, Afrikaans and their mother Mandarin.
The S.C.C. will be a trading platform for the communities of our Garden Route and southern Cape, and as such must be built on solid trading and enterprise foundations. Again, the outmoded, outdated economic and business theories of the 19th and 20th centuries will hold little water in the decades ahead. Our future success must be founded on a refreshed, more pragmatic view of the world and of the paths to success, security and sustainability.
Ni hau ma ?
Pjm
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