Regular South Africans are the ultimate economic agents

The credibility of any economic consensus would be served by better alignment between our values and our economy.

I was privileged to sit on the judging panel of the PSG-ERSA ThinkBigSA competition, which solicited papers with proposals for achieving inclusive economic growth in SA. Contributors spanned all age groups, from late teens to those in their late 70s. University professors, technocrats, township entrepreneurs, high school students and everyone in between put ideas forward. Most contributions were interesting and many useful.

Reading through the entries was a joy and an adventure. I learnt something about potholes and honeybees. I was introduced to a simple idea that, if implemented, would make public procurement more effective and efficient. I discovered a few things about small scale urban agriculture, and I learnt a ton about township economies. And this was only a small subset of the ideas on offer. Evidently South Africans from all walks of life are putting their backs into making their families, communities and country work.

The papers that resonated with me the most were the ones that focused on political interventions to solve economic problems. These are not proposals about forming political parties but ones that explore the kind of political thinking that could inform better economic decision-making in SA. The submission that stays with me most was a paper by Qaqambile Mathentamo that proposed aligning our understanding and strategies for attaining inclusive growth with the values and cultural practices embedded in isintu/ubuntu.

This made sense to me insofar as it spoke to the dissonance I experience between my economic life and my values and self conseptualisation. I suspect I am not the only African who experiences this alienation, and it is not just an African phenomenon. Anyone raised in a culture that prioritises the collective over the individual would find resonance with this feeling.

Regular people are the ultimate economic agents. We make meaning and breathe life into our values by the economic decisions we make. I suspect the credibility of any economic consensus would be served by better alignment between our values and our economy. Qaqambile’s proposal that we infuse isintu into our conceptualisation of the economy and our understanding of inclusivity as an economic intervention was, to me, profound.

One of the winning entries, professor Johan Fourie’s paper, “Faster, Stronger Together”, emphasised the role of a shared narrative in building an economy that not only works but also works for most people. This narrative would also inform what success looked like and guide how societies dealt with the necessary trade-offs towards the attainment of better economic outcomes.

It is a trite observation that SA is not short of good economic ideas. What the country lacks, we hear, is the “political will” needed to implement those good ideas. Political will is a slippery concept, but I think of it as the ability and willingness to exert power to advance a goal or objective. I, like many South Africans, have been frustrated by the “lack of political will” characterisation of our economic malaise.

Politics do hold economics hostage, but researchers and thinkers seem to stop engaging with our economic problems at the point at which economic problems meet political realities. But politics is economics, so this seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. The papers that excited me were therefore the ones that saw politics and economics as one, and sought to intervene in the two simultaneously.

This year’s Nobel prize for economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity”. Their work links political inclusivity with economic sustainability and economic inclusivity.

When it comes to politics, we know the saying “it’s the economy, stupid”. When it comes to the economy, “it’s the politics stupid”. SA’s experience of stagnation for the past decade proves this saying. May we continue to dig for political interventions, big and small, that will move us into a different economic reality.