The inability of Black South Africans to shift from a grievance-based majority to a production-based majority is glaringly reflected in our profound crisis of leadership. When we observe the figures and movements the populace now elevates, from Operation Dudula to the perpetual factions of “march and march” politics, it becomes evident that the bar for leadership has plummeted.
Because our best and brightest have largely retreated from the public square, the worst among us have ascended to the helm. They lead a frustrated populace down a path of misdirected rage, offering the illusion of action without the substance of economic emancipation, relying on populist rhetoric and horizontal violence rather than strategic economic vision.
This phenomenon illustrates the tragedy Frantz Fanon outlined regarding the pitfalls of the educated class. The educated post-colonial elite abandoned their historic mission of nation-building and industrialisation in favour of self-enrichment and middleman politics, and so alienated themselves from the masses. This betrayal created a leadership vacuum at the grassroots, a void eagerly filled by uneducated demagogues who manipulate the genuine frustrations of the poor.
This vacuum is not an accident. It is the symptom of a deeper, more systemic dismantling of the intellectual rigour required to sustain leadership. We have constructed an architecture of mediocrity, primarily through an education system that functions less as a vehicle for economic mobility and more as a holding pattern for a generation suffering from delusions of grandeur. Consequently, when the private sector, driven by the uncompromising metrics of global competition, chooses to hire Zimbabwean, Kenyan or Nigerian nationals possessing rigorous O-levels and a hunger for excellence, our immediate reaction is shock and indignation.
When we examine the reality of Black South Africa more closely, the crisis of human capital is glaring. We have normalised the bare minimum. This includes institutionalising a 30% pass mark in our basic education system, where we have inadvertently communicated to the African child that excellence is neither expected nor required. We have cultivated a society that accepts substandard performance as a baseline, and in doing so we are committing generational economic suicide, leaving a society that can be convinced by Zulu nativists that violence resolves everything.
Our paralysis is also sustained by a dangerous psychological state: the complacency of the majority. Because we possess demographic majoritarianism, we have tricked ourselves into believing we are inherently wealthy and exceptional. We look at the towering skylines of Sandton, Umhlanga and Cape Town and feel a false sense of ownership.
The harsh reality is that the South African state is cushioned by inherited infrastructure and a resilient private sector heavily dominated by historical minority capital. The tax base that funds our social grants and public sector wages is overwhelmingly generated by a small, highly productive segment of the population. If that capital were to evaporate suddenly, we would not have the domestic value chains, industrial capacity or entrepreneurial density to prevent the nation from mirroring the collapse of other failed post-colonial states.
We suffer from the complacency of believing that political power is synonymous with economic security. We direct our profound sense of entitlement toward a Black-led government, demanding that the state conjure endless jobs, while wilfully ignoring the stark reality that it is the white minority who still holds and sustains the actual economy. This disconnect exposes a terrifying truth: as a society, we fundamentally do not comprehend where jobs come from. We treat employment as a constitutional right to be distributed by political decree, expecting politicians to mandate our prosperity. Yet the state itself produces nothing; it merely taxes a productive minority to cushion a dependent majority.
By imposing ourselves on this inherited economic structure instead of building our own industrial capacity, we fail to understand that jobs are the byproduct of capital creation, innovation and risk. Political power gives us the regulatory authority to administer an economy, but it does not generate the discipline required to build one.
Ultimately, until we shift our identity from a grievance-based majority to a production-based majority, our political freedom will remain hollow. We must stop fighting over who gets to work in the factory and start asking why we do not own the factory. We must stop blaming the continent for our poverty, and recognise that our economic salvation lies in our own capacity to create, build and produce.
* Phaphano Phasha is the chairperson of the Center for Alternative Political Thought.
** The views expressed do not mot necessarily reflect those if IOL