Davos Diary Day 5: It’s a wrap, unguided missiles & ‘polecattish’ reversed

So the curtains have been drawn and we’ve come to the end of the 47th World Economic Forum in Davos. Alec’s daily diaries have summarised what’s been going on and below he unpacks a few of the themes. Trump is the global one, and it’s pretty much a black and white view. One camp thinks he’s the disruption the world so badly needs, and on the other hand, he’s an unguided missile. While on the South African front, things were much improved in 2017, and as citizens we can only hope this momentum carries through. Until next year. – Stuart Lowman

Well, for the last time in our Davos Diary, this is a wrap-up of what Davos was this year.

First of all, I’m a member of a thing called the Media Council and every year, we get this pen. This is like the most important thing that I take home from Davos. It’s a beautiful pen and it says ‘International Media Council 2017’ and I’ll keep it with all the other ones going back to 2011, that I’ve got. Anyway, that’s the most important thing.

The second most important thing is that I’m going to be taking home so much knowledge. It’s been an incredible adventure again. A few people have said to me, “You’ve been coming for a long time. Don’t you get bored?” In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It escalates your curiosity and your interest. It’s almost like the brain just wants to know more when you start learning a little bit.

For South Africa, this was extremely positive. In fact, probably the most positive that I’ve seen in 8 years. The team pulled together very strongly. There was a cohesion between labour, business, and government that I haven’t seen here and if you were to compare last year to this year… it’s like they were different planets. Last year we were ‘polecattish’ if you like. It was just after Nenegate. Zuma didn’t pitch for one of his sessions. We were simply, nowhere.

This year, Cyril Ramaphosa was extremely presidential. We had great support from Pravin Gordhan and many of the other members of the team and you could just feel that between business and government, there’s a cohesion that is working, which is great for South Africa. For the world, I’m not so sure.

Today, Donald Trump has his inauguration and his name has been whispered (and spoken quite aggressively). For example, George Soros had a business dinner last and he said that Trump runs what he describes as either a dictatorship or a mafia state. He certainly doesn’t like his new president.

As far as people here are concerned, there are two camps. The one camps says, “Trump is a disruptor. The world needed to get a shake-up and with all his faults and difficulties, he’s going to make changes that are going to benefit us in time.” The other camp says, “He is an unguided missile who’s going to destroy the whole globalisation project – the project of homo sapiens coming closer together” because we are all one species, after all. We might have different skin colours but we’re 99.8% identical if you look at the human DNA.

I’m not sure which camp I’m in and as a journalist, you shouldn’t be in either camp but effectively, the world is going to be very, very interesting in 2017. In South Africa, the forces for good are getting stronger and growing more aggressively. In the world as a whole, the forces for good have been given a big wake-up call and I’m sure that will galvanise them into greater action into the year ahead.

This is Alec Hogg for the last time, from the World Economic Forum in Davos for BrightRock who have very kindly sponsored our coverage this year, as they tend to do every year.

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