It is Super Bowl Sunday, the day on which the National Football League (NFL) yearly championship is played in the US. Well, where I am, it is close to midnight, with Monday only minutes away as I prepare to watch Super Bowl LI (‘LI’ being the Roman numerals for 51). The New England Patriots are playing against the Atlanta Falcons in a game that, I must admit, I still find most confusing. Even the game’s name is confusing. Unlike the other types of football, the game is, with the exception of the very occasional kick, played with the hands.

If there is one thing that the game has in abundance, it is statistics. Within seconds of the conclusion of any play, statistics are produced and then rattled off by an array of commentators. I am reminded of South African-born comedian Trevor Noah, currently the presenter of The Daily Show, who related how, when watching a NFL game, he was bombarded with all sorts of statistics. He then changed channels to a business programme, where economists were debating the state of the American economy, only for them to berate the apparent lack of economic statistics. It is all about preferences, not so?

With a television audience of more than 110-million, companies paid in the order of $5-million for a 30-second advertising slot, a $500 000 increase on last year. Then, at half-time, Lady Gaga entertained viewers with a set of her greatest hits.

Well, back to the game, which consists of four quarters of 15 minutes each, separated by a 12-minute break at half-time, with two-minute breaks at the end of the first and third quarters.

At the end of the third quarter, the Patriots were trailing 28 to 3, with the game all but over – bar the shouting. Then the Patriots’ 39-year-old quarterback, Tom Brady, spearheaded the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history, levelling the score at 28 to 28 and forcing the extra period – the first in Super Bowl history, and the Patriots subsequently ran out victors 34 to 28.

The comeback was reminiscent of Al Pacino’s ‘Inch by Inch’ speech in the 1999 motion picture, Any Given Sunday. If you have never seen the movie, the speech, all of 4 minutes and 44 seconds, is more than worth the time spent. The words from that speech that resonate with me are: “You know when you get old in life things get taken from you. That’s part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out that life is just a game of inches.” If anything, South African needs to start fighting for the inches.

Although it was quite encouraging to note that, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s ‘Global Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) of 2016’, released on February 1, South Africa increased FDI by 38%, it actually “remained at a relatively low level”. To put this into context, an African context, that is, Egypt’s FDI increased from $6.9-billion to $7.5-billion and Nigeria’s from $3.1-billion to $4-billion, while South Africa’s stood at $2.4-billion. Clearly, South Africa is significantly lagging behind Egypt and Nigeria, which is, and should be, of great concern. With these two countries vying to be the largest economy on the African continent, it does not bode well for South Africa.

Internationally, FDI fell by 13% in 2016 to $1.52-trillion, with the decline attributable to global economic growth remaining weak and world trade volumes achieving anaemic gains. FDI in 2017 is expected to improve, but only slightly so.

So, where will, and should, South Africa engage to solicit FDI? Strange that one would ask, as, on February 6, about 6 000 miners converged on what is recognised as Africa’s biggest yearly mining conference, the 2017 Investing in African Mining Indaba. But just before you become too euphoric, on February 5, fin24.com ran a story titled ‘Miners head to SA, but leave cheque books at home’. The Mining Indaba is hosted in Cape Town, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Attracting global mining bosses and fund managers to the city is not a particularly challenging endeavour. But convincing the mining bosses and fund managers to dip their hands into their pockets is quite another thing. This is attributable primarily to South Africa’s shrinking reserves, rising labour costs (and the threat of industrial action), frequent stoppages and regulatory uncertainty. This is so, despite South Africa being home to the world’s largest platinum, chrome and manganese reserves and the source of one-third of all gold ever mined.

According to fin24.com, Anglo American, once a keystone of the economy, is selling half its assets in South Africa, while BHP Billiton and Gold Fields both spun off their South African operations in the past four years. AngloGold Ashanti tried to do the same and will, no doubt, attempt to do so again.

South Africa still possesses what might be considered to be ‘good infrastructure’ and even ‘great technical skills’, but these are attributable to an extended history of mining, which implies that the best deposits have already been extracted. So, to remain an attractive mining destination, certain sacrifices need to be made by South Africa, such as making it easy to do business in the country. This is nothing new, and it must be the priority – the immediate priority. But I anticipate that the issue – or distraction – of job creation will again take centre stage, most likely to be mentioned in the same sentence as wealth creation. This merely perpetuates the belief that the creation of jobs leads to the creation of wealth – if you will, the trickling down of wealth. Wealth simply does not trickle down, and it does not flow down either. Quite simply, wealthy people do not create jobs; do not be under any illusion about that. The cynical among us might remind us that j-o-b is an acronym for ‘Just Over Broke’.

With the world that we know having changed unmeasurably, and is continuing to do so at an unprecedented rate, South Africa cannot simply expect to continue to conduct business in the manner it has done in the past. It is time for South Africa to stop talking change; it has to introduce change. It has to do so as a matter of course in order to attract investment. It is quite evident what investors require of South Africa. Since they hold the power, South Africa’s leaders should acknowledge this and act decisively.

Attracting investment is a fight, a battle – a battle that Team South Africa needs to wage. It is not a battle of the future; it is a battle of the present, the now. South Africa is behind on the scoreboard, but let us believe that it has another quarter left.

As Pacino says to his team in Any Given Sunday: “The biggest battle of our professional lives all comes down to today. Either we heal as a team or we are going to crumble. Inch by inch, play by play, till we’re finished.”