R700 million for a conversation? Rather spend it on small business grants, classrooms, bursaries or clinics

Imagine getting up in a shack with no electricity and trekking five kilometres to a clinic, only to be told there’s no doctor on duty, and then trekking back home to boil water on a paraffin stove while hoping teachers at your child’s school might just make an appearance. Then envision this: your government says it’s going to spend R700 million asking how you feel about South Africa.

That is what the proposed National Dialogue feels like. A R700 million conversation around the country. It is presented to us as Codesa 2.0, a second chance to relaunch South Africa’s broken social contract. But that is the uncomfortable reality. The state is ruling through consultation. Instead of mending what is broken, they are asking us to talk about it. Again.

The government maintains it does want to know what people have to say. It is staging two national conventions and dozens of sectoral and provincial consultations. The process will be overseen by an Eminent Persons Group of judges, sports heroes and business people. All very grand-sounding. To many South Africans, though, it has a sense of déjà vu.

We’ve done this before. From izimbizo to developmental plans, white papers to commissions, South Africans have been sharing their stories, their grievances and their aspirations in forums year in and year out. We reported to the Zondo state capture commission about graft. We reported to the National Planning Commission about poverty. We reported to municipal public forums about poor housing and dysfunctional toilets. So what did we do differently?

An astounding 32.1% of South Africans are unemployed. The figure for young jobless people is 45%. Load-shedding lost us R1.2 trillion from 2007 and 2023. More than three million learners used pit latrines at schools. These are not new revelations. These are old sores that have been reopened in each forum that this state has held.

It is not that South Africans are not saying anything. The issue is that nobody is listening, or doing anything.

Dialogue is not a bad thing. Societies do need spaces to think, recover trust and construct common visions. But context matters. Dialogue is not neutral. If it is the state’s fallback response to a crisis, that is a warning sign.

There is a risk that the state is replacing action with performance. To have a conversation regarding youth unemployment doesn’t create jobs. It creates catering, venue, facilitation and transport contracts. That is where R700 million is being spent in a nation where protests about service delivery erupt almost every single week.

Imagine what would be accomplished if this R700 million was redistributed. It would fund 28,000 youth small business grants of R25,000 each. It would build hundreds of classrooms, bursaries or rural clinics to give them a stable electricity supply. We’re about to spend it debating something that already is. The damage has already been done. Trust is not regained through a microphone. South Africans do not require another process. They require consequences. They require a government that not only hears them but acts in a timely fashion and with regularity.

The Codesa 2.0 idea has to be unpacked too. The original Codesa was a negotiation among political parties coming out of a violent, polarised apartheid past. We are not building a democracy. We are seeing it slowly disintegrate. We are not engaging in a reconciliation dialogue. We are engaging in service delivery, accountability and popular displeasure. Framing it as a time of renewal risks sentimentalising a credibility crisis.

It is no longer good enough to say that the people should be consulted. Consultation is useless if it does not lead to something. We have sat in too many rooms, completed too many surveys, and read too many commitments in reports. What people require now is action. If there is a dialogue, then it must be measured in terms of its end product; not the number of voices but the number of changes on the ground.

The government must stop acting as if it is a facilitator and start acting like it is a leader.

If this National Dialogue is to produce the same outcomes that we have seen previously — reports to accumulate in heaps of dust, recommendations that go unheard and citizens who have been used and neglected — then it will be next on the list of expensive experiments in acts of political theatre.

People in this country don’t look for perfection. They look for honesty, for effort, for growth. If we can’t offer them that, then all this commotion is not going to do us any good. Speeches don’t run things. The time has arrived to stop outsourcing leadership to words and to lead as if lives depended upon it. Because they do.

Vhahangwele Tsotetsi is a political analyst, consultant, social entrepreneur and Project YouthSA chairperson.