A while ago, I was at a function, talking to a group of people, when I made the comment that what we need is African solutions for African conditions. One of the fellows groaned and said: “Oh, no, not that again.”

I then realised that he had totally misinterpreted what I had meant. Well, maybe I must phrase it better in future. He thought that I meant low-level, simplistic solutions for unsophisticated people. Not at all – I meant just the opposite.

What I meant was that we South Africans need to look at our own conditions and have the confidence to develop our own answers without looking to the First World for an answer. We certainly can look to the First World for advice. We can also look and see how they dealt with a particular problem, but then we must put all that in the melting pot and come up with a solution that works for us.

Let me give an example: It struck me a while ago that there is no such thing as a German electricity grid, an Austrian electricity grid or a Danish electricity grid. The reason is that they are all so interconnected that one has to look at the entire European system. South Africa is larger than the whole of Europe. Pretoria to Cape Town is the same distance as Rome to London.

We South Africans have no other country to provide us with electricity if we suddenly need extra electricity. We are an electricity island. In contrast, in Europe, they trade electricity from country to country all the time. So we cannot say: “Well, the Germans do it like this . . .” without taking into account that they have the massive insurance policy of buying from their neighbours wherever necessary.

The same considerations are true of very many technology solutions. Often, our cellphone relay station transmitter is 100 km from the nearest repair team, so we should design them to perhaps need much less maintenance than a similar mast in Europe.

We have hot, dusty conditions in many places – we can have situations where rain does not fall for years. Spare part supplies may have to come from the other side of the planet. All this means that we need to be able to carry out a strategic analysis from first principles. Start at the ground, so to speak, and then use good science, engineering and economics to come to a conclusion that works for us in our own geographical and operational conditions.

I recall a time, years ago, when I was involved in an armaments development. Our people carried out an analysis and then listed the options for building the device. We then looked at a European country and discovered that it had built such a device, but had used our Option 3. We thought: “What have we done wrong in our analysis?” We went over and over the plans and calculations, but could not find anything wrong. We assumed that the European country must be correct and that we had made a mistake. Eventually, we did it our way . . . worrying.

Ages later, we discovered that the Europeans had come to the same conclusion as us, but Option 1 and Option 2 required a lot of stainless steel, and that was a problem for them. They had been ordered by their political bosses to avoid the use of so much stainless steel because South Africa had 80% of the world’s chrome, needed for the stainless steel, and they did not want to have to rely on us politically to be able to build the device. So, they were forced to use Option 3 because their politics prevented them from using the two best technology options.

So the best technological solution has to take your own surroundings and circumstances into consideration. When I say African solutions for Africa, what I mean is that one must have the self-confidence to design and build what is the correct solution for us. For example, we should not take an e-toll system designed for the Alps and put it in Gauteng!