An album of pictures and captions of our Davos adventure can be accessed by clicking here.
By Alec Hogg*
Friday is the last “heavy” day of the annual meetings. It’s also the day when you’re getting used to the reduced sleep that’s an obvious consequence of trying to fit in as much brain food as possible. On average, Davos attendees sleep five and a half hours a night during the WEF’s annual meeting.
I was supposed to kick off the television commitments with an 8am crossing. Thankfully, my producer Svetlana was unable to get anyone crazy enough to come to CNBC Africa’s outside “studio” at this hour. So the start was postponed to a more civilised 9am. An extra hour of sleep here is precious.
It’s always good to connect with South Africans who have been successful in the global arena. So was fascinated by PE-raised, Wits-educated Stan Bergman, CEO of US-based multinational Henry Schlein. Stan reckons a SA-trained chartered accounting qualification is the best in the world (he’s a CA SA) and from the outside looking in, the country one of the finest places on earth to live.
His second point was one I picked up with Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, a long time pal who is as proudly South African as anyone. Alan says the more he travels the more he appreciates the amazing country we live in. He’s a member of the WEF’s Young Global Leader initiative and was quite a hit in Davos with his wi-fi-based free internet initiative that’s going great guns in Tshwane.
He is also a good enough friend to stick around in sub zero temperature while the team overcame problems with the links back to the Johannesburg studio. Unfortunately Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, after agreeing to an interview, soon decided he has another meeting. Can’t blame him. No fun being outside when Alpine weather turns nasty.
There’s something they call a “Davos Moment” here – an incident that would simply never happen anywhere else on earth at any other time. Mine came in the early afternoon on Friday.
The IMC team had set up a discussion for us with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. As she will be taking over leadership of BRICS the day after the FIFA World Cup Final, it was an obvious opportunity to get a close up look at one of my country’s closest allies.
This was Rousseff’s first visit to Davos. And it showed. She over-ran her time in her Plenary address (unforgivable here) and compounded the error by delivering an ordinary speech. In Portuguese and simply a laundry list of Brazil’s achievements. Many of those around me in the audience nodded off. I’ve published a pic of the guy who sat next to me in the Davos Day Three Album. Thankfully he didn’t snore.
Having sat through an hour of her monotone, it was a feet dragging trip to the Hilton Hotel opposite the Congress Centre where the IMC discussion was scheduled. En route I somehow ended up in the middle of Rousseff’s entourage and moved with them into the elevator where I stood next to the leader of the World’s Seventh Largest Economy and introducer myself. The walk with her party continued right into the Brazilian President’s hotel suite. Only then did everyone realise there was a stranger in their midst.
It got me wondering about the efficacy or not of security around national leaders. Sure, heads of state need protection from crazy ones. But does that require the extreme measures we now take as standard? At home, we live just down the road from Deputy President Kgalema Mothlante. Whenever he goes anywhere, the cops insist on sending half a dozen (at least) siren blasting cars with him. You can only imagine what it costs the taxpayer to “protect” President Jacob Zuma every time he travels to his rural home.
We had an extreme example of this in Davos this week. The story goes that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that he wanted to walk the 45 minutes from the Congress Centre to his VIP quarters at the new InterContinental Hotel. This narcissistic decision brought an already stressed Davos transport system to a halt as entire streets were cleared so the Israeli could enjoy the Alpine air.
News of this kind of thing spreads like wildfire with numerous business leaders complaining that because of Netanyahu’s self-absorption, they were stuck in their limos for ages, missing important meetings. He has become the most unpopular national leader at WEF since Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan stormed out of a session a few years back.
Despite her Plenary stumble, I left Davos with an entirely different view of Brazilian President Rousseff. In our IMC-arranged chat she was relaxed and came across as a strong, in-control but well grounded person. She bantered with the Brazilian journalists and forthrightly answered every question. And although the session was billed as being off-the-record, she told us at the end that we could use everything as on-the-record.
Including my question about the Development Bank which, she committed, would be launched before the end of her term as the leader of BRICS. The start of that term has been postponed until the day after the FIFA World Cup Final because, as she put it, everyone, even Presidents, love football.
I tweeted voraciously during two fascinating Plenary addresses by US Secretary of State John Kerry and ECB President Mario Draghi. Will republish all those tweets in due course, but for now it is well worth having a look at them on Twitter – my handle is @alechogg.
The day ended memorably. Knowing that there was a special screening in Davos, Jeanette and I resisted the temptation to see Anant Singh’s movie on Mandela when it opened in SA 10 weeks back. It was worth the wait.
Before the movie in Davos’s only cinema, Anant told us why Madiba agreed to let him do it and took us through his baby’s lengthy birth which goes back to 1994. Singh funded the bulk of the production cost, but enjoyed support from the Industrial Development Corporation and the National Empowerment Fund. The way Anant puts it, had the movie been produced elsewhere it would have cost a multiple of the $35m he had to find. Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies was on hand to make a short address in which he got to punt SA as a movie-making destination.
The movie is a masterpiece. Having lived through much of the drama, I can vouch for its accuracy. This was a movie that only a South African could have made. It’s about as balanced a portrayal as one could possible hope for. And a pertinent reminder of the leadership qualities of our nation’s icon.
On our walk back to the hotel, not for the first time I thought about what SA would be today had the country not been blessed with one NR Mandela. What is happening today in Syria is a warning of what our alternative future could have been.
* Alec Hogg is the founder and publisher of Biznews.com
