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Foundation: Unnerving insights

It’s not easy giving an opinion, especially when you know it’s not one that everyone will agree with. Last week, BizNews published a few posts from our regular columnists and Thought Leaders on the statue furore that swept across our nation. Included in these posts was one by Cees Bruggemans. In the post below, Bruggemans discusses how his comments on the statue saga and SA’s history received some mixed reactions (and a few lost Twitter followers). But that’s what opinion is about, isn’t it? To generate reaction and get people thinking. Opinion is part and parcel of democracy – and rather we have written and spoken debates than violent acts. – Tracey Ruff

By Cees Bruggemans

My Sunday Comment “Foundations” unleashed a flood of reactions, indicative of an underlying restlessness. There is indeed reason to be concerned.

Besides losing a few Twitter followers as a consequence, always indicative of hitting raw nerves and inviting wholesale rejection, the responses were nearly uniform supportive, or otherwise zeroed in on what has gone terribly wrong in this country, and this already for a long time.

A few samples will suffice.

There is the bewilderment about being described (stigmatized) as “foreign”, yet being born here or otherwise having been here for so long as having gained permanent residence and making a full contribution.

This is apparently not a foolproof litmus test for the country’s majority. Instead, are you one of us, or aren’t you? It is known as tribalism, and it remains very much alive, certainly among the less educated, but also even underneath some of the veneer of modernity.

It suggests a deep intolerance that may prevent rainbow equality.

Then there is the observation that many poorly educated South Africans don’t have a clear sense of the country’s history and their place in it, or the many contributions made by incoming migration infusions shaping our modernity, often painful but still giving us a foundation today on which a better future for all can be built.

Instead, there is this simple concept of us and them.

There doesn’t seem to be a recognition among many that the hard work of creating our modernity these past 150 years has been highly successful, but that the country has often been taken on detours that have prevented its full potential from being much further advanced. Indeed, the 1990s consensual agreement was supposed to create that common basis on which society and economy could finally move on and show their full potential.

Instead, more detours?

Then there is the observation that already for many years our political leaders, and the elites they have created and led, have not done enough to strengthen and perpetuate the historic understandings made in the 1990s.

Instead, they have stood by while others went on the reinterpretation rampage, or worse, fed these processes with their own versions, of either interpretations or self-serving helpings.

The upshot of these various observations is a debilitating unease for many. For each one of us as regards their place in this country and its future.

For myself, I always try to follow through the implications for the economy. Business confidence being at such a low ebb for already too many years (dating at least from 2008) is not only caused by a less accommodative world and too many internal supply-side failures.

The rot, the questioning, goes much deeper. As do the consequences for new fixed investment and employment creation. Our slowly unraveling national consensus feeds unease, and makes it easier to go slow on making yet greater risky commitments, as compared to seeking low-hanging fruit in overseas destinations with better growth prospects and a more welcoming business environment.

This complexity needs to be taken more seriously, and be addressed much more vigorously, rather than let it rot some more, or worse, fan the flames of discord. Economically it is clear what is required, but not all seem to be singing from the same song sheet.

And thus we drift, ever aimlessly, waiting for better guidance & direction.

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