In his book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel (best known as one of the cofounders of PayPal, along with Elon Musk and Max Levchin) has a chapter titled ‘You are Not a Lottery Ticket’. In it, he criticises the notion that start-ups and countries make progress based mainly on the back of chance or luck, arguing that bold planning and design are essential ingredients.

Countries, people and companies, he asserts, operate under one of four philosophies: definite optimism, definite pessimism, indefinite optimism and indefinite pessimism.

Reflecting on the history of the Western World generally and the US more specifically, Thiel contends that the philosophy of definite optimism – a belief that the future will be better than the present, which leads individuals to work and plan to make it better – dominated from the seventeenth century to around the 1960s. As a consequence, each new generation of inventors surpassed the previous generation with projects ranging from the Panama Canal and the Golden Gate Bridge, to the Interstate Highway System and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Apollo programme to put a human on the moon.

He acknowledges that this philosophy has long given way to indefinite optimism in America, where there is still a belief that the future will be better, but where there are no specific plans to make it happen. Thiel believes that countries need to find their way back to a definite future, by rejecting the “tyranny of chance” and prioritising design and planning.

This proposition has currency for South Africa too. While it is fast weakening, there is still a general sense of optimism about the future, notwithstanding the country’s serious socioeconomic problems and current policy ambiguity.

Ironically, this is not for the lack of a plan. South Africa has gone to some lengths to craft a blueprint to 2030 in the form of the National Development Plan (NDP). But there is still a serious lack of alignment – within government and civil society – with the NDP, notwithstanding the fact that a programme of action has been somewhat firmed up through the Medium-Term Strategic Framework 2014-2019.

Part of the problem lies in this country’s third key deficit after its current account and budget deficits: the implementation deficit. So few plans, good or bad, have been actually implemented since 1994, while big projects have been prone to confidence-sapping corruption. As a result, there is a genuine weariness with official plans and tremendous suspicion about grand plans, such as the proposed new nuclear build.

South Africa desperately needs a megaproject success story if citizens are to fully embrace a philosophy of definite optimism. To write such a story, however, will require extraordinary professionalism and diligence from project managers and far less political interference to ensure the project remains corruption-free.