While it’s broadly presumed we must fix our politics to fix the economy, that path will remain perilous if we don’t upgrade the fidelity of our national dialogue. Only then can we overcome our divisive politics to tackle widespread poverty and raging youth unemployment.
Knowledge has long reinforced economic and political power. In recent decades the direction of travel largely reversed. Much power accrued to top knowledge curators. This coincided with ideological diversity dipping ominously at many of the West’s leading universities and media houses as polarisation flourished.
When news resources are overwhelmed by the volume of individuals accused of corruption or violent crimes, scrutiny of government performance suffers. Exercises such as the Zondo and Madlanga commissions further overwhelm this country’s modest supply of investigative journalists.
Whatever circumstances contributed to the deaths of George Floyd and Jason Arday, it shouldn’t be so easy to politically exploit controversial events. Yet central to the playbooks that have made information curators more powerful has been their downgrading of informing to induce judgmental reactions.
Business publications are atypical in that their subscribers want to make better-informed decisions. Conversely, whether they rely on legacy news outlets or social media, most people now routinely conflate news and entertainment.
What made Floyd, and now Arday, so valuable to media organisations is that they could depict their deaths to incite the biases they know are common among their different audiences. Inciting audiences tends to be more commercially valuable than informing them — and this can reinforce the advocacy biases shared by a news outlet and its audience. This fuels polarisation, whereas political contestations should encourage prudent trade-offs among diverse groups.
Headlines serve as lures leading to narratives that provoke powerful emotions. Audiences diverge, roughly speaking, between those that prioritise individualism and values versus those who see a world of oppressors and the oppressed. This is costly as societies today must be well-informed to navigate amid formidable local and international challenges. South Africa remains particularly vulnerable.
Our policymakers have mangled our economy and international relations, leaving more than half of the electorate poor, unemployed or both. While hope is not a strategy, the electoral support of the poor should be solicited with a strategy that offers them genuine hope. Most black South Africans born at the turn of the century are unemployed and poor. They rightly intuit that they will never achieve formal employment or a middle-class lifestyle.
Audiences diverge, roughly speaking, between those that prioritise individualism and values versus those who see a world of oppressors and the oppressed. This is costly as societies today must be well-informed to navigate amid formidable local and international challenges. South Africa remains particularly vulnerable.
Historical injustices and ongoing inequality have made it easy for our dominant political party to justify the redistribution-focused policies that have predominantly benefited political elites and their cronies. Countering that by blaming high unemployment on horrific education outcomes is not a winning electoral message. The world-changing rise of Asia was not conditioned on improving education standards.
ANC leaders have sought to position South Africa’s National Dialogue as a citizen-led effort to form a new social compact. Yet it has inspired little enthusiasm as it looks like an attempt to distract attention from the lack of a plan to spur high-volume job creation.
The insight that remains foreign to our national dialogue is that domestic consumption cannot possibly provoke adequate job creation. Not acknowledging this is central to why unemployment continues to ratchet higher.
As the ANC’s internal cohesion relies upon pervasive patronage, its leaders would sooner risk the party’s demise than pivot toward policies prioritising commercial principles and international competitiveness. Their hope is that commodity exports will surge, leading to higher tax receipts that could fund grants and other electorally pleasing policies.
But such thinking is unrelated to genuine upliftment — which requires creating millions of jobs whereby employers invest in their employees.
ANC leaders are right to say we need a new national dialogue. But talk of social compacts is mostly just talk. We rather need a robust plan to increase job-creating exports.
To identify paths that might provoke high-volume job creation, our national discourse must focus less on politically exploitable injustices.
• Hagedorn is an independent strategy adviser.
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