After the Bell: Governments are capable of grand, successful ideas that knock your socks off

The big news this week was about Tourism SA’s proposal to spend just less than R1-billion on a sponsorship deal with the London soccer club Tottenham Hotspur to encourage tourists to visit South Africa. The idea has all kinds of pros and cons which have been exhaustively debated on social media and in the press. But it got me thinking about good ideas by governments.

This is a huge problem, but an understandable one. Governments are retrospective by nature, and perhaps more so by culture. So what about this question: which governments have bucked the trend and come up with a brilliant idea or ideas? The payments cost the government $42-billion, and at the time were contrary to the advice of the International Monetary Fund, which was punting infrastructure spending. But they were fast, and they hit the spot. The second round of the Australian stimulus programme did in fact focus on infrastructure and suffered the same problems as other infrastructure projects around the world, including those in South Africa, which were an abject failure.

My first prize goes to the US government for its decision to create the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . Again, it took a crisis for this to happen, and in this case, it was the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik. The central idea of Darpa was to chase wild dreams – moonshots of different kinds.

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