In a few weeks’ time, parliament will rise and the focus will shift squarely to campaign season, where politicians will seek to convince voters that their commitment to fixing the country is worth backing at the ballot box.
The issues that affect citizens with a sense of acute proximity and high impact will be energy, employment and the social wage. Their acute proximity stems from everyone being affected by the curse of load-shedding, and wherever they find themselves on the social spectrum its persistence is at a minimum an annoying inconvenience and at worst a significant daily impediment to life.
For those whose employment and economic opportunities have been crippled by the load-shedding crisis, the need for solutions that will decisively address the crisis will be obvious. When it comes to employment, the alarming number of working-age citizens who are unable to land a job will naturally pay more interest to conversations that promise an economic turnaround that offers them a chance of getting a job.
A consequence of the economic regression of the past decade was the inevitable increase in the number of citizens primarily reliant on the social wage, which comprises direct cash grants and social protection measures. Despite the high investment in the social wage over the years, its reach and impact remain diluted by the effects of exogenous factors such as inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.
The sum of these issues has created a nation frustrated by the present reality and desperate to see a road map leading to comprehensive solutions. That sense of desperation also escalates the risk of half-baked solutions finding enough resonance among the disaffected to be elevated as solutions, even if practical implementation questions remain unresolved.
When manifestos promise to fix load-shedding overnight and invest more in the social wage, they refer to issues that tap into the pulse of many citizens and consequently carry heavy political weight. The idea that millions of jobs are just a tick away from being unleashed will similarly evoke hope in many corners of the country where the curse of unemployment and underemployment runs deep.
As various parties launch manifestos and promote a range of promises that sound sensible and urgent, it will also be important to continuously interrogate their substance to separate the chaff from the wheat.
In an age of misinformation and disinformation fuelled by social media platforms where an accountability vacuum reigns supreme, the ability to sift substance from nonsense and hyperbole will be important for voters.
Unfortunately for most of us, instruments to filter misinformation and disinformation are difficult to access. When promises are made about the allocation of public resources beyond the election date, data regarding the state of the public purse and the procedural bureaucracy associated with each ambitious promise should be readily available to citizens so they can deliberate from a point of informed awareness.
In the absence of reference points that are regarded as credible by the primary stakeholders – the voters – many political parties will get away with selling impractical ideas that will simply never see the light of day, especially when one considers how deep and intersectional the nation’s problems are.
The old buffer against the raging fire of untested political rhetoric – a trusted media sector – has regrettably fallen victim to the shifts in modern communications that has crippled its capabilities as it struggles to fund a business model appropriate to the changing times we live under.
When newsrooms are depleted in terms of capacity and institutional insights, the risk we face isn’t simply the one of empty rhetoric dominating the campaign season with no credible checks to rebut falsehoods, but the greater risk of a media sector that no longer has the capacity to filter it all, ending up spreading the messages simply because no-one has invested in the resources required to keep politicians in check.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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