It is June 17 as I find myself humming Chubby Checker’s Limbo Rock: “All around the limbo clock; Hey, let’s do the limbo rock; Limbo lower now; Limbo lower now; How low can you go . . .”

A few minutes earlier, I had completed reviewing the International Institute for Management Development’s ‘World Competitiveness Ranking 2021’, which, unsurprisingly, had solicited no official government response.

The report has been published since 1989 and its rankings are compiled using two types of data: two-thirds hard statistical data from international and national sources, and one-third from an executive opinion survey.

It’s helpful to be reminded that competitiveness is defined as the possession of a strong desire to be more successful than others. This begs the question: Has South Africa lost its zest and settled for mediocrity? This reminds me of a poster I saw recently. It read: “MEDIOCRITY – Set the bar low enough and everyone is exceptional”.

Now to the numbers. This year, 64 countries were ranked. Do you want to guess South Africa’s ranking? If you want to take a bottom-up approach, then South Africa would be in a medal position – a bronze medal position: sixty-second. In 2020, it ranked fifty-ninth, compared with fifty-sixth in 2019 and fifty-third in each of 2018 and 2017. In the prior five-year intervals, it ranked fiftieth in 2012 and 2007, thirty-ninth in 2002 and forty-second in 1997.

This reminds me of the joke: What do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your house back, your wife back, your dog back, your truck back . . . In other words, the past is so bright you have got to wear shades. Sincere apologies to Timbuk 3.

According to the report’s ‘Country Profile’, South Africa’s challenges in 2021 are: deteriorating headline and youth unemployment; rising public debt amid a shrinking fiscal space; a lack of decisive plans to revive the struggling economy; ongoing electricity shortages; and a vaccination rate that is too slow to fast-track the post-Covid-19 recovery.

With respect to ‘Basic Facts’, South Africa ranks sixty-third, or second last, for unemployment rate and sixtieth for gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP). To clarify, PPP is a measurement of prices in different countries. One of the reasons for the low ranking of South Africa’s GDP PPP is consumer price inflation, which ranks fifty-third. South Africa’s ‘real’ GDP growth rate ranks fiftieth, while its direct investment flows inward (as a percentage of GDP) rank forty-fifth.

Let’s consider the four broad ranking categories of infrastructure, business efficiency, government efficiency, and economic performance. With respect to infrastructure, South Africa ranks sixty-third for education infrastructure, sixty-second for basic infrastructure, and sixty-first for technological infrastructure. In terms of business efficiency, it ranks sixty-first for attitudes and values, and fifty-ninth for labour market. In terms of government efficiency, it ranks sixtieth for business legislation and public finance, and fifty-ninth for social framework. With respect to economic performance, it ranks sixty-fourth for employment, and sixtieth for domestic economy.

The top three key attractiveness indicators are effective legal environment (64.9%), open and positive attitudes (53.2%), and quality of corporate governance (50.6%). The bottom four are competence of government (3.9%), high educational level (15.6%), business-friendly environment (18.2%), and skilled workforce (26.0%).

In case you don’t consider South Africa’s performance to be that bad, it places below Mongolia and, more worrying, below the only other African country in the rankings, Botswana, which is ranked sixty-first.

Possibly the only solace that South Africans can take from the country’s failing is the quote attributable to Greek philosopher Socrates: “Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen.” But has South Africa stopped falling?