What happens to a democracy when its citizens come to believe life will be worse for their children than it is for them?
Until just more than a decade ago this question was no more than hypothetical in SA. The first 17 years of democracy treated most people better than the last 17 years of apartheid. Whether measured by the per capita income of each decile of earners, by widening access to formal housing, to health care, to electricity and waterborne sewerage, to the quotient of children finishing school, swathes of South Africans were doing better.
Those who experienced the first 17 years of democracy could reasonably expect that things would keep improving in future, just as they had in the recent past, and that their children would thus be better off than they were.
Today, in 2023, few people can reasonably hold the same expectations. Most South Africans are poorer now than they were in 2011. And there is little reason to expect the downward slope to level. What happens to a democracy when most people expect the future to be worse than the present?
Thus far there have been two well-rehearsed answers to this question. The first is that the country will explode and democracy will be torn apart, leaving SA with anarchy or a grim dictatorship and rapid economic decline. The second is that the electorate will throw the ANC out of power and the country will begin the hard work of starting anew.
There is a third possibility, not nearly as dramatic as the other two. It is embodied in the results of a survey conducted by the Social Research Foundation reported in this newspaper last week. According to the survey, 89% of South Africans who earn between R5,000 and R8,000 a month wish their children to live and work abroad. Among those who earn R20,000 a month or more, 68% want their children to live somewhere else.
While there are many unhappy implications here, what struck me more than anything was this: the poorer you are, the more intensely you wish that your children lived elsewhere.
We tend to think of the desire to emigrate as a middle-class thing, and even among the middle classes, as a racial-minority thing. But it seems that is just because middle-class people can up and leave. The desire of the poor to do so is invisible because it is just a desire; it cannot by acted upon. It becomes visible when a survey officer asks a question.
It is the saddest piece of information I have come across in a long time. In a country of 59-million people, four out of five of the adults walking the streets wish their children could emigrate. What does one do with a story like this? What are the implications?
One is that those two familiar scenarios — an explosion destroying democracy or a renewal and brand-new beginning — are not the most likely futures awaiting SA. Both require energy. Both require collective action. Both, each in their own way, mobilise hope. What these survey results suggest is a collective deflation, like a balloon losing its air; an entire country is checking out.
It’s hard for a country whose citizens have checked out to do constructive things. People who have checked out become cynical and unco-operative with one another, their thinking often short term. And when sadness is ambient, when it is collectively felt and thus everywhere, it feeds on itself, eroding imagination, eroding life itself.
If there is an upside to this bleak story it is that a country whose citizens have checked out has time, while a country about to explode does not. Time for things to turn around. Time for new forces to emerge and get work done. A despairing country does not wish to despair, after all. It wishes for a future in which its children will be OK. That wish will always be available to mobilise; it is a resource that never goes away.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University
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