It is easy to make the case that free speech is under threat in some leading democracies, particularly the UK. Our free speech risks being made impotent by a delusion-riven national conversation.
Justice Malala, who writes a popular column for South Africa’s leading business newspaper, recently asserted: “The employment numbers are horrendous, but can be fixed.” He went on to suggest that a little less bureaucracy, corruption and crime and a little more investment “would see this country begin to thrive”. While his article attracted a few comments, no one challenged his overindulged optimism.
Malala’s views, in this case and generally, seem to broadly align with those of the paper’s audience. Many among the well-educated and relatively affluent tend to think that righting the ANC’s wrongs will put us on a solid trajectory. Such thinking ignores much.
A majority of our current crop of young adults will never be meaningfully employed. Even under the rosiest of realistic scenarios there will be a surplus of school leavers seeking work for many years. Few of those who populate our huge bulge of unemployed young adults will ever thrive. Most will scrape through life being poor or very poor.
Although various top economists can imagine South Africa averaging three percent annual growth, far fewer think four percent can be sustained. The larger consideration, which is routinely overlooked, is that the growth rates of our GDP and jobs have an irresolute relationship.
There is a deep class-based disconnect which our national dialogue shirks. Given the choice between high GDP growth-high unemployment versus low GDP growth-low unemployment, the affluent among us would favour the former whereas most South Africans would choose the latter. We need to explicitly acknowledge that high unemployment is vastly more socially and politically destabilising than low GDP growth.
As a majority of eligible voters are poor, unemployed or both, it is unsurprising that surveys preceding the recent elections identified jobs as voters’ top priority. While jobs cannot be expanded in a contracting economy, it does not follow that the only way to increase jobs is to increase GDP.
We cannot meaningfully reduce our obscene level of unemployment without resetting, or at least recalibrating, the composition of our economy. Why is this not openly discussed? Three considerations spring to mind.
Immediate interests
Firstly, it is not in the immediate interests of political or big business incumbents to reshape the status quo. Secondly, our most prominent economic voices are capital market economists. How many commercial-minded development economists can you name? Thirdly, we are very isolated geographically and geo-politically. The ANC disdains alignment with the countries, predominantly Western, that have shown genuine interest in importing value-added goods or services from South Africa. If we weren’t so isolated, we wouldn’t need experts to explain how our economy is woefully out of sync with globally determined growth drivers.
A fourth consideration does not spring to mind, but lurks in the background: our political economic conversations resemble those of an old couple obsessed with what might have been.
If we could relive the 1970s and 1980s, the injustices suffered by blacks could be mitigated by a predominantly black government and the skills of whites might be better appreciated. Differences defined by race and income could beassuaged through mixing broad prosperity with empathetic validation. The appeal of “what might have been” messaging should not be discounted. Nor should the risks of seeking “what ought to be” outcomes through legislative coercion indifferent to commercial concepts like productivity.
If the only economists we ever heard from were commercially grounded development economists, there would be a broad understanding that the very strong GDP growth we experienced from 2001 to 2008 was never sustainable and it lacked the fundamental components necessary for South Africa to pummel poverty and become a broadly middle class nation.
Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence, we don’t acknowledge that we aren’t noticeably closer to harnessing commodity wealth to achieve widespread prosperity than we were pre-1994. We now live in a digitally driven global economy which is very conducive to upliftment but only for countries that integrate into the global economy through adding value to goods and services.
Political opportunists
Malala wisely cautioned against complacency generally and the specific threat of an ANC-EFF-MK coalition. Radical economic transformation rhetoric seeks electoral support from the young and marginalised while threatening property owners’ interests. Such political opportunists are not friends of free speech or other crucial constitutional protections, such as legitimate elections.
For this country to begin to thrive we need a productive workforce. The paths to making a young workforce highly productive continue to rapidly evolve. Instead of openly discussing how our politics and economics are at odds with global success determinants, we allow our national discussions to be framed by our past − not our possibilities.
That is not a good use of something as valuable as free speech.