Ask most South Africans, and they will tell you they don’t need anyone telling them that the past decade has been, for most people, an extended period of misery.
Despite the gains of the 1990sand 2000s, the years since have seen the pace of progress running out off steam. We should have benefited from a demographic dividend, with a rising population of better-educated young people able to drive economic and social change. Instead, we are facing a situation where, in the second quarter of 2024, over seven million youth aren unemployed.
Faced with these challenges, the earnest promises of President Ramaphosa’s ‘new dawn’ have, at times, wilted in the face of the ongoing ructions of more than a decade of governance failures. The domestic and internationalised private sector, key to any country’s economic fortunes, has frequently remained shy of committing resources to an economy facing so many constraints.
Key amongst these have been those around energy, municipal services and logistics. If that has not been enough, we have a regulatory environment that appears more informed by the fantasies of bureaucrats and politicians than by the reality of doing business in a globalised world. Alongside this, millions of South Africans, hustling to make ends meet, have had their prospects curtailed by frighteningly high levels of crime and unpredictable environments resulting from local governments that are focused more on patronage than on the public good.
Yet despite this litany of challenges, the country’s people continue to express a desire for a better path.
Whilst tensions continue to simmer close to the surface, the experience of having turned away from then brink of civil war in the early 1990s is often cited by societal leaders and everyday citizens as providing a reservoir of capacity that we all need to tap into again.
The recent national and provincial elections, despite a disappointing voter turnout, have shown an electorate eager to seek new ideas and new sets of leaders.
What, then, might be some of the key watchwords that people from all walks of life can work with to help build a better future? I would like to off er three key areas that I feel need attention in the work that is to be done: purpose, partnerships and predictability.
A clear and achievable purpose appears to have ebbed out of our discourse as a country in recent years, falling victim to the cynical abuse of society’s trust that we have witnessed.
Whilst the Freedom Charter, and later the RDP, were widely asserted in the 1990s as the core focus around which South Africans needed to coalesce, the National Development Plan 2030 never came close to capturing the attention of the public, let alone informing the real decisions of government. The GNU
might well have settled on a somewhat contested narrow agenda in an effort to get people into the same room. Still, it remains clear that all too often, the ever-changing list of supposed priority
tasks falls considerably short of a more meaningful purpose. We do need to fix the judicial system, and roads need fewer potholes. However, these lists do not add up to a vision that can galvanise the majority of South Africans, especially younger people. This group of South Africans have seen the South African future they were promised ebb away in the venal hands of a generation of leaders who have struggled to see
beyond their noses. Any effort to build a new purpose, whether at the national or the community scale, needs to draw in youngsters to define the kind of future we all need to work towards. Secondly, I would like to highlight the issue of partnership. This might well be seen as an overused term in South Africa.
After all, political, business and community leaders use it all the time. It has been a hallmark of President
Ramaphosa’s leadership to make the case for partnerships to drive the recovery from the deep economic crisis. However, all too often attention is paid only to exclusive partnerships off the most powerful actors. The drive to generate partnerships that have much deeper and wider societal impacts often stumbles as actors at the regional and local scale, especially those with political and bureaucratic power, tend to treat these with disdain.
Think here of the struggle of non-profits running shelters for vulnerable groups that, despite their critical role, are often undermined by the absence of a genuine and sustained partnership. The lack of a genuinely supportive framework for citizens to partner with one another and with government must be attended to urgently to help mobilise the creativity and passion of all South Africans.
Predictability is often viewed in a pejorative light. But in reflecting on the challenges faced by us as South Africans, all too often, we have seen predictability pushed aside by short term populist agendas, whether they be at the national or the local scale. Indeed, government at all levels has, at times, engineered the absence of predictability as a way of allowing malfeasance to thrive in the ensuing chaos. This is not just an issue for businesses that need predictability in the supply of electricity or logistics services but also for citizens who depend on predictable access to government services.
For households facing extremes of uncertainty, severely aggravated by other risks, such as
those associated with climate change, more attention must be paid to how to support greater predictability in their lives. We all need this to make better decisions and to support one another as we attend to our collective needs as a country.
A South Africa that has a clear purpose that most of us can passionately support, a country built on trusted partnerships where we share the burdens of the pressures of complex change and a country where, waking up each day, we have a clearer sense about the things we can depend on. These are all features that could help secure us the future we are so desperate for. To help advance on these paths, we must give one another the space to contribute; we must share the agenda for change beyond the moribund institutions that have become so comfortable in monopolising the agenda.
The South Africa we need is one we must build together; it cannot be delivered in sound bites from above.
Glen Robbins is an academic who works primarily on economic development issues.
