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South Africa is hurting. The country is experiencing a declining economy as the people look on, in shock, at an organisation they believed in so dearly wilting in front of their very eyes.
A very successful black businessman once said to me that this was not surprising.
His theory is that we black people are inherently unable to work with one another.
We are quick to find the things that divide us rather than those that unite us, and when there is a disagreement we prefer to burn the whole house down rather than reach a compromise.
Understandably, we have spent far more time fighting apartheid than building the nation.
The same is true in boardrooms.
The scanty resources that are allocated to black executives through employment equity cause them to ferociously compete against one another.
If you look at companies where black executives have been persecuted, the majority of board members are black.
Often they are as quiet as a mouse in a wardrobe, as if they have not earned the right to be at the table.
An exceptionally talented black executive once told me that she was afraid that someday she would be found out to be an imposter.
She subsequently left the corporate world to join the family business that her husband started.
She is doing very well there and has helped grow the business through difficult times, thus proving that her fears and self-doubt were totally unfounded.
Many business organisations have been slyly selective in their selection of black executives.
They have chosen people who are naturally bland and who can effortlessly blend into the existing culture and will not try to dilute it.
It is assimilation at its worst, an instinct perfected by evolution over a long time.
Evolution is ruthless, it kills the weak, and the world is none the poorer for it.
So weak directors or executives who are not worth their salt, who do not read the board packs and cannot give guidance on crucial issues or cannot take a stand, will soon be buried by extinction.
Travel around the country and see how people burn dead grass in winter, and then see the green shoots crop up through the scorched ground, and later see different wild flowers bloom to reclaim the living earth.
As I traverse the boardrooms of this country, I am inspired by the new and diverse generation of managers and entrepreneurs whose heads are popping up like new species that will withstand the new climate in the corporate world.
They are confident of who they are and what they can achieve.
They are the people who will create millions of jobs that the country needs.
They are the species that will rebuild our morale and take us back to our place at the table of great nations.
It is through them that South Africa will be respected in Africa and the rest of the world again.
These people, most of them young, have seen the fallacy of spin and public relations for what it is.
They understand that content comes from their real value and not something to fill the vacuous space of the omnipresent social media.
They are not concerned with being accepted in the old; they are charting a new path high up in the peaks of greatness.
They are not starting the engines of the economy, they are building new ones, which the economists of today do not even understand.
Their wisdom is a confluence of the many eminent hearts and minds that have forged this nation.
Young people such as Simphiwe Masiza of Empowaworx are waging a silent revolution that will propel this nation into a great rediscovery of what it is.
They understand that jobs do not grow from the fire of negativity, but from the burning desire to see fellow humans summit the highest echelons of happiness.
Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive, an advertising agency
