One of the surprisingly great movies of the late 1980s was A Fish Called Wanda, a heist movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis as the femme fatale, John Cleese as the stuffy English lawyer and Kevin Kline as the Anglophobic, aggressive, dumb cluck American who reads philosophy but can’t understand it.

Curtis, as Wanda in the movie, and Kline, as Otto, double-cross their British counterparts and rush off to collect the loot at the designated spot, expectantly and excitedly opening the safe, only to discover it’s empty. They have evidently been double-crossed by the people they double-crossed, which I suppose mathematically would be a quadruple cross.

Anyway, as Curtis opens the safe and discovers it’s empty, Kline says simply and aggressively: “Disappointed!” For some reason, the line is incredibly funny. It’s just the baldness of it.  

Kline mastered the part, playing a crazy, idiotic, sometimes wily, thug. Otto and Wanda later fall out, and Wanda lambasts him with multiple insults, including: “The London Underground is not a political movement … Lincoln’s address is not the place where he lived, and the central tenet of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself’.” And so on.

Anyway, the one-word retort, “disappointed”, in the style of wily, has entered my personal lexicon and has sadly stayed there for far too long. Last week, the IMD, a Swiss organisation, published its annual global competitiveness report. And, what can I say? Disappointed!

There was a time when we in SA would follow these things in minute detail. It’s revealing that although the report was published last week, it barely made the press in SA. We don’t seem to care any more, or just expect to be “disappointed” now.

There are two global competitiveness reports published every year; one covers almost all the countries in the world and is published by the WEF and the other, by the IMD, covers only the top echelon of larger countries. SA is now 61st out of the 64 countries in the report – one down from last year. I mean, really.

Of course, these reports are controversial, as all global tallies are. The 2023 report has Denmark first, Ireland second and Switzerland third. The US, transparently the largest and most innovative country in the world, comes ninth. The US’s main competitor in both size and innovation, China, comes in 21st. Clearly, there is a slightly self-delusional, pro-European bias going on here.

Nevertheless, this is an extraordinarily detailed, carefully constructed brief, combining an enormous number of criteria, including financial health, educational systems, technological readiness, as well as a survey of business activity. 

The bias, I suspect, creeps in because infrastructure is very highly rated, and that provides an inherent boost to countries that have a long developmental track record.

But even if you assume the measurements are somewhat off from an absolute point of view, as long as the methodology remains more or less the same, you don’t want to be declining relatively. And this is what has been happening to SA over the years.

On this measure, South Africa has gone from 38th in 2008 to 44th in 2010 to 61st this year – narrowly beating out Mongolia. I am not making this up.

At the start of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency, he specifically called for SA to concentrate on these international measures, which have the enormous virtue of largely being fact-based ratings in a broadly academic mode. And it’s noteworthy that SA has been sliding on the scales of both the WEF and the IOD.

They are also important as judgements made against an international set of benchmarks, and not by locals, which contain the danger of marking your own homework. 

I’ve read some local commentary that marvels at SA’s miraculous ability to avoid becoming “a Venezuela”, which, honestly, I don’t think is much of an achievement. The claim is that South Africans talk as though we resemble Venezuela, when in fact the country is not “collapsing”.

That may be the case, but when you drop from 38th to 60th, there is only really one description that matches. Disappointed! DM

• The original version of this story confused the IMD with the IOD. Apologies.