The Value of What Never Happened
South Africans often joke that we pay for everything twice.
First through our taxes, and then again for the things we can’t live without: security, medical aid, insurance, internet and a long list of services that people elsewhere may take for granted.
It’s easy to see this purely as a symptom of what’s broken.
While filming Fire Pilots, I noticed something I had somehow never paid attention to before. Several of the helicopters had stickers from different insurance companies plastered across them.
At first, I assumed it was sponsorship.
It wasn’t.
Those stickers introduced me to the Quick Reaction Force, or QRF: a partnership between several competing insurers who have agreed to fund the first hour of aerial firefighting.
The logic is simple. If a fire is threatening people, homes or animals, the helicopters fly immediately. The paperwork can come later.
Wildfires move quickly. Systems don’t.
Ordinarily, before a helicopter can get airborne, there are questions to answer. Who is paying? Who authorises the flight? Who takes responsibility?
By the time those questions have been resolved, a manageable fire can become life-threatening and vastly more expensive to contain.
The QRF removes that hesitation.
These insurers spend most of their time competing with one another, but they recognised that the cost of delay was greater than the cost of cooperation. So they pooled their resources and created a system that allows experienced people to act first and deal with the administration afterwards.
The results are extraordinary. The QRF has reportedly protected more than R4.5 billion worth of property at a cost of less than 1% of that value. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a better investment.
But even those numbers don’t tell the full story.
A fire doesn’t care whether it is burning through Constantia or Khayelitsha, but the consequences can be very different. Someone who loses an insured home may have savings and support structures to help them recover. In many underserved communities, those buffers simply don’t exist.
The value of the property may be lower on a spreadsheet, but the human cost can be considerably higher. Losing a home can derail a livelihood and set an entire family back years.
We can calculate the value of the property that wasn’t destroyed. It is far harder to calculate the livelihoods that weren’t disrupted, the communities that weren’t displaced and the years of recovery that never became necessary.
That is what makes the ambition to extend the QRF further into underserved communities so important. It shifts the idea from protecting insured property to protecting the wider communities in which we all live.
Because fire doesn’t distinguish between policyholders and everyone else.
Another thing that struck me was the trust built into the system.
Many of these pilots have spent years, sometimes decades, flying in the same areas. They understand the terrain, the weather and the way fires behave in those landscapes. Over time, that experience develops into something difficult to quantify but incredibly valuable: intuition.
The QRF creates space for that intuition to be used. Rather than burying decisions beneath layers of approval, it trusts the judgement of the people closest to the problem.
The helicopters launch because experienced professionals believe they should.
It feels like a lesson that extends well beyond firefighting. One of the greatest rewards of experience should be earning the trust to act on it. Not every decision can be reduced to a process or a spreadsheet.
Perhaps the QRF also points towards something bigger.
We are living through a time in which natural disasters appear to be becoming more frequent and more severe, while the institutions we traditionally rely on often seem less capable of responding quickly enough.
So who steps in when the existing systems can’t?
Perhaps part of the answer lies in businesses, organisations and communities recognising that their responsibility extends beyond their own immediate interests.
There is a business term for this: shared value. The idea that commercial value and social value don’t have to exist in opposition. By helping to solve a societal problem, businesses can strengthen themselves at the same time.
The best systems work like that. Doing good and doing well become the same thing.
It is almost a return to the village mindset: an understanding that individual wellbeing and collective wellbeing cannot be neatly separated. We have to begin looking after one another because, ultimately, we all have a stake in the places around us.
For all our frustrations, South Africa is full of people, organisations and communities refusing to wait for perfect systems. Neighbourhood watches. Volunteer rescue organisations. Community initiatives. The QRF.
The country works because people step into the gaps. The irony is that we rarely hear about them. We notice the fires that destroy homes. We don’t notice the ones that were stopped in time.
Success, it turns out, leaves very little evidence behind.
