SA’s voters prioritise economic issues, particularly jobs. If a national dialogue project doesn’t identify solutions, it will merely be a political contest to attribute blame.
The A to Z of SA’s political economy spans apartheid to Zuma, while the Ramaphosa era has changed little. The Mandela era was transitional and spurred much domestic hope and international praise. Unfortunately, both were exploited to construct a patronage-focused culture.
How legitimate can our democracy be if most of our school leavers are condemned to perpetual poverty? Those who haven’t found employment within a few years of leaving school will remain stuck in an unemployment queue of more than 10-million people.
With more than 10-million funeral policies but far fewer over 60-year-olds, SA’s democratic era has clearly struggled to create jobs and wealth. This is despite the fastest plunge in global poverty having occurred in the 30 years after the end of apartheid.
Pragmatism
As epitomised by the government of national unity (GNU), recent developments sparked hope, followed by disappointments. Meanwhile, geopolitics have pivoted sharply from indulging idealism to adopt a transactional style focused on results.
If ANC leaders were promoting a national dialogue project to adapt to the new global reality that would be admirable. While this seems unlikely, there is no reason other segments of our society shouldn’t advance a more pragmatic, less idealistic, national discourse.
ANC elites stared into the abyss our declining economic prospects inevitably lead to and decided to prioritise the party’s internal cohesion. But the party is not going to produce a plan to noticeably reduce unemployment. Factions within the organisations are positioning themselves for the upcoming succession battle for the ANC leadership in 2027. The currency that will shape those alliances is not solutions to SA’s ills but rather old-fashioned patronage.
But what is stopping other segments of our society from advocating for powerful solutions? There are various voices advocating for much-needed changes. However, while we certainly need to reduce corruption and incompetence, that would hardly constitute a solution.
Deluding ourselves
There are two huge issues that our national dialogue needs to confront but that we are still deluding ourselves about. First, it is wildly unrealistic to think we can achieve normal workforce participation through domestic economic growth. Second, the globally embraced idealism that the end of apartheid helped to enthuse has been sharply downgraded, and for good reason: it was politically exploited at great cost to those it should have benefited.
Global poverty has plunged so dramatically since the early 1990s because countries with high poverty found ways for their poorly educated citizens to add value to exports. The ANC steadfastly rejects this path in favour of BEE and localisation policies, and this has caused the world’s most severe youth unemployment crisis. It is sad but true that ANC elites, including our president, can claim that the party’s culture is now too devoted to patronage for them to reject the policies that empower patronage.
The ANC used patronage to monetise its idealised global image and this has permanently marginalised a majority of the “born-free” black South Africans who have left school. BEE and localisation policies isolate SA from the global economy’s immense upliftment capacity. These policies are tariffs on our economy that have provoked extraordinary unemployment. For the most part though, elites whether black or white have been shielded from the resulting hardships.
Our political economy is fundamentally non-viable, but not in the ways capital markets’ focused dashboards can identify. Our politics are as fraught as our group differences were transcended by idealistic notions that were then exploited to enrich elites.
We desperately need a new national dialogue, but whereas ANC leaders want to use this process to further exploit faith in idealism, we need other members of society to demonstrate the benefits of pragmatic problem solving. The core problem to be solved is youth unemployment, and the path to achieving this is far more intense global integration.
• Hagedorn (@shawnhagedorn) is an independent strategy adviser.
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