Many Europeans will struggle to heat their homes and pay their bills this winter. South Africa’s trajectory is more troubling still. The costs of clinging to misplaced ideals can compound unaffordably.         

Ukraine’s leaders did not believe Putin’s massive troop build-up along their border was a prelude to an invasion. For decades, German leaders sought to defang Russia through creating commercial dependencies. The West’s approach toward China has long been similar. Nor was it immediately obvious that South Africans putting their faith in the ANC was woefully imprudent.

Hindsight shows that in each case large numbers of people adhered to misplaced beliefs, despite increasingly conspicuous warning signs. Once events finally triggered a realistic assessment, solutions had become far more elusive.

Conversely, at some junctures, the embrace of ideals can enable great progress. Had Germany not been committed to deep economic ties with the Soviet Union, it is far less likely that Gorbachev would have condoned the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. South Africa’s perilous political transition, which began in earnest several weeks later, similarly required faith in ideals.

Moscow’s current leadership would like nothing better than to re-establish the Soviet Union. Aside from satisfying a few egos, this would benefit no one, while requiring much violence and destruction.

Our ruling elites publicly decry South Africa’s rich-poor divide while being privately devoted to the ideal of self-enrichment. Their pursuit of personal wealth has come at the expense of much-needed economic growth. As a consequence, broad prosperity will remain out of reach for this generation of South African school leavers, and quite probably the next.

Updated dialogue

The true nature of our leaders’ and Russia’s intentions has become evident, yet neither nation’s citizenry has developed a sufficiently updated dialogue. Whereas free speech is a foreign concept in Russia, our challenges trace to ideals having been weaponised against us. 

The Mandela aura shielded the ANC’s reputation until, shortly after his death, journalists and scholars began to expose widespread corruption. The leaked Gupta emails were particularly incriminating. Yet the ANC continues to exploit inequality so successfully that we don’t even acknowledge that they are doing it.

Affluent countries with robust economies can afford policies which mitigate extreme dispersions in income and wealth. South Africa’s mixing pockets of affluence with rampant poverty produces similar income dispersion statistics but the situation is vastly different. Our income-inequality fixation equates to someone who could beat a life-threatening disease but chooses instead to focus on associated wardrobe challenges.

 Our economy is defined by perilously elevated unemployment and poverty. Solutions must begin with policies that will steadily improve productivity and competitiveness. Unemployment will then decline, followed by poverty and, lastly, inequality.

The ANC focuses on inequality not because this will inform solutions – it won’t – but rather because it provides political cover to justify the redistribution-focused policies which fund massive patronage while choking growth. None of our various leaders can offer workable solutions because they, along with everyone else, accept the ANC’s framing of the problem in terms of inequality.

While the Mandela aura no longer shields the ANC’s reputation, the dreams of achieving racial equality which animated the 1990s transition have survived. The ANC can still exploit them to frame our national debates.

Situational awareness

The big picture provides much needed situational awareness. Until as recently as two hundred years ago, over 90% of the global population had always been extremely poor. This applies to less than 10% today. Most of the gains have come in the past two generations.

The reason global poverty has plunged in recent decades is that poor regions have been integrated into the global economy. This still isn’t happening in Africa, as so many of this regions’ governments, such as ours, rely on patronage webs funded by commodity exports.

 Within a few years, Africa will account for nearly 90% of the world’s extreme poverty and, within a generation, this region will be home to over 40% of all young children. As other regions have begun to suffer from a dearth of young workers, the commercial incentives to integrate much of this region’s workforce into the global economy will motivate a formidable transition. For South Africa to be at the forefront of this transformation, misplaced ideals must be exorcised.

The painful irony is that while we have sophisticated political institutions and highly effective journalists, the ANC gets away with using inequality to deflect attention from direct policy-performance measures such as unemployment and poverty rates.

Youth unemployment

The most recent example is how we view our youth unemployment crisis. The ANC has framed it as a trade-off between fiscal constraints and a moral imperative to assist those least well off.

The Ukrainians had no choice but to accept that they had been invaded. The Germans and most European nations have largely accepted that Russia’s value as a trading partner is overwhelmed by its territorial ambitions. The West is struggling to come to terms with China’s challenges to the world order.

As we read in the coming months about Europeans shivering for having been so slow to accept how Russia’s leaders had been exploiting their ideals, we must pragmatically focus our economic debates on growing jobs and the economy. Otherwise, our ideals will continue to be used against us.