South Africa’s mix of insularity, ubiquitous patronage, and much magical thinking blocks economic growth by undermining merit and global integration.
A serious national dialogue initiative would unpack how cultural factors influence a country’s prospects. This is not a task that suits political parties.
In 1936 William Lyon Mackenzie King, the prime minister of Canada at the time, is reputed to have said, “If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography.” Just as Canada would be more cohesive if it were smaller, South Africa would be more united if we didn’t have so much history to process.
I’m grateful to the historians, sociologists, and other scholars who provide persuasive explanations of how events and choices at critical junctures have shaped our society. Yet the question I want answered is: What needs to happen for South Africa to become a broadly prosperous nation?
Cultural biases
Certain cultural biases clearly make this more difficult, yet our dominant political party is expected to use its national dialogue initiative to further perpetuate the lie that our nation’s economic ills still trace to apartheid. Such brainwashing imbues a sense of entitlement which leads to illegal immigrants routinely out-hustling locals in many informal and some formal sectors of our economy.
The ANC can be understood as a former liberation party that morphed into a ruling party reliant on patronage and racial populism. Their leaders can’t design a sensible growth strategy as they are so beholden to patronage politics.
But why are other groups and members of society unable to articulate a workable growth plan?
Culture was defined in 1973 by Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist, as: “The webs of significance that humans spin and in which they are suspended.” A cynic could interpret this to mean that a group culture reflects the lies that it chooses to believe.
I think Mike Spicer captured well the cultural disconnects common among those seeking solutions to South Africa’s challenges when he frequently spoke of “magical thinking.”
Drilling down from the broad to the specific, we live in an era where much news is packaged using headlines that are invitations not so much to become objectively better informed but rather to judge. This is commercially very effective as audiences are clustered among news organisations that then reliably validate their biases.
South Africa is particularly vulnerable to this form of addiction-induced media loyalty being replicated politically.
Profound
Clearly the most profound event in South Africa’s contemporary history was the 1990s political transition. This created an expectation that the majority who were oppressed would be validated through a democratically elected government.
Those who benefited from apartheid but voted for change, and committed to contributing to a new South Africa, also anticipated that their constructive expectations would be validated.
Such expectations were a special form of trust as they required a leap of faith. Exploiting such trust was easy. Patronage and nepotism were always the default option as human societies evolved from bands and clans.
The reason so many countries, perhaps starting with the ancient Chinese, chose to reject kinship-based political structures is that they risked being overwhelmed militarily or commercially by societies reliant on merit-based structures. As our neighbours don’t threaten us, we lack such incentives.
Indifference toward merit has proven extremely costly for South Africa as the “former-oppressor group” is substantially better educated while our post-1994 regime has proven to be horrific at economic stewardship and equally awful at achieving acceptable education outcomes. The only large group being validated consists of those well-placed within the ANC’s patronage network.
Magical thinking
The mother of all magical thinking is the belief that democratic forces will eventually reject the ANC and once their policies are reversed, we will be on track to achieve broad prosperity. This ignores our largest challenge, ultra-elevated youth unemployment.
Of the approximately one million South Africans who were born in 2000, 800,000 of them are black and a significant majority of them are poor, unemployed, or substantially underemployed. That is, they are permanently marginalised in that there are no plausible scenarios where a noticeable portion of them will be uplifted.
The magical thinking common among those opposed to ANC rule is that we just need to reverse ANC policies and then we can sustain high GDP growth and this will fix our economic predicament. Anyone who has ever spent a few minutes thinking about how economies are modeled will appreciate why this is woefully delusional.
There is nothing particular about the cohort of South Africans born in 2000. A significant majority of our young adults are permanently marginalised; yet the ANC emphasises localisation as this supports its patronage strategy. As the saying goes, “those things which can’t go on forever will eventually stop.” But then what?
Cancelling the ANC growth-retardant policies won’t unlock adequate growth as the productive capacity of our domestic economy is far too modest to generate healthy growth in consumer spending. We will remain locked into poor economic outcomes until we follow the lead of successful economies and integrate far more meaningfully into the global economy.
Useful gauge
A useful gauge of our preparedness is our response to US President Trump’s trade challenge. The best we seem to be able to do is to criticise him, instead of scrambling to up our game – as is common among so many other nations.
Psychiatrists don’t tell patients they are nuts. They provide a clinical diagnosis. I’m not qualified to provide a clinical diagnosis of what ails our society but I can offer some claims which a robust national dialogue should explore.
Our society was harshly divided and then, against long-odds, united. This created a unique sort of post-traumatic-stress-disorder which was exploited to the point that trust levels are severely strained.
In a world reliant on global trade for economic growth, we expect to remedy the world’s worst youth unemployment crisis by growing our domestic economy – despite this being, for all intents and purposes, impossible.
ANC leaders don’t mix well with either our business leaders or the leaders of democratic countries. We need a national dialogue initiative separate from the ANC’s version. If this resembles group therapy, so be it.
[Image: Grok]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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