The poor will always be last: The mirage of unity and the necessity of disruption

IOL News

2 days ago

As South Africa once again contemplates a Government of National Unity (GNU), it is tempting to celebrate the idea of political stability, inter-party cooperation, and the so-called 'maturity' of our democracy.
But beneath this surface lies a more troubling pattern; one that reveals the persistent exclusion of the poor, the co-optation of transformation discourse, and the retreat of the state from its moral obligation to disrupt patterns of inherited inequality. History has repeatedly shown us that, when elites call for unity, it is often a euphemism for consolidating power and preserving privilege.
The original GNU of the post-1994 settlement, for all its symbolism, was a delicate compromise between political liberation and economic continuity. It preserved existing capital structures, deferred radical land reform, and entrenched a neoliberal macroeconomic framework that has since calcified into orthodoxy. It is no coincidence that Black poverty, youth unemployment, and rural underdevelopment remain defining features of our post-apartheid condition.
Today, more than 30 million people live below the upper-bound poverty line. Approximately 60% of youth are unemployed, while more than 3.7 million people remain on the housing backlog, waiting for the dignity of a stable roof. Black Africans remain the least likely to own land. As of 2022, only 8.8% of land in private hands was black-owned, and a significant portion of this is not productive or urban land. These figures are not just numbers; they represent a systematic denial of opportunity to the very people who were promised transformation.
Instead of material redress, millions of poor South Africans are locked in a downward spiral of dependency on social grants, a system which, while necessary for survival, is neither developmental nor liberatory. Over 18 million people depend on grants, and yet, every year, the promise of employment, industrial inclusion, and quality public services rings hollow. For over a decade, ambitious rhetoric about inclusive growth and social impact has failed to translate into measurable outcomes.
The burden of this failure is borne disproportionately by indigenous South Africans, Black people and Africans in particular, who continue to suffer the most in a democratic society that has yet to reckon with the economic architecture of apartheid. The poor are not an unfortunate side-effect of incomplete transformation; they are a structural outcome of a society designed to exclude them. South Africa's political economy remains profoundly racialised, extractive, and elite-driven. The so-called 'black middle class' and a newly-minted billionaire class are often paraded as evidence of progress. Yet they serve largely as buffers, intermediaries between the desperation of the majority and the opulence of the few, without redistributing power in any meaningful sense.
The emerging political consensus today, as represented by discussions of a GNU or coalition-based governance, is disturbingly void of any real commitment to economic justice. Instead, it pivots around the technocratic language of fiscal discipline, market confidence, and investor friendliness, language that insulates elite decision-making from democratic accountability. In this context, calls for unity function as a depoliticising mechanism. They silence dissent, dismiss radical alternatives, and pathologise the anger of the poor as destabilising or immature.
Authentic transformation is not a product of elite negotiations behind closed doors; it is the outcome of struggle, disruption, and radical reimagination. If we are to honour the constitutional promise of substantive equality, we must reject the cynical notion that consensus is always virtuous. In truth, some interests are irreconcilable. A society cannot simultaneously defend property rights and guarantee land justice. It cannot shield monopolistic capital while claiming to empower informal economies. And it cannot continue to pacify the masses with promises of reform while the instruments of wealth creation remain in the hands of a tiny, racially exclusive elite.
So what will it take to change the system? What will it take for Black South Africans, and Africans in particular, to participate fully in the economy and shape its architecture?
It begins with reclaiming the narrative. We must stop accepting incrementalism as a virtue. True transformation requires a redistributive economic model that acknowledges historical injustice and deliberately dismantles racialised capital concentration. We must ask: what will it take to accelerate the pace of progress to see Africans leading as the majority in the corporate sector within JSE-listed companies? As of 2023, Black African CEOs led less than 15% of JSE's top 100 companies. This is not a failure of skills; it is a failure of imagination and will. It reflects the enduring gatekeeping of corporate South Africa and the superficial commitments to transformation targets that are never enforced.
We must support Black businesses, not through token funding schemes or ceremonial procurement programmes, but through deliberate state-backed incubation, eased regulatory entry, access to markets, and ownership of infrastructure. SMMEs, particularly Black-owned enterprises, hold the key to mass employment, yet they face the highest barriers to financing, compliance, and market access.
We must also cultivate a new generation of Black industrialists, farmers, and tech entrepreneurs. This is not about romanticising the idea of 'start-ups' in a vacuum. It is about building the ecosystem for innovation, from broadband and logistics infrastructure to research funding and digital education, so that we are not merely consumers of global technology but producers of indigenous solutions. We must build our own Silicon Valley, a Southern African tech frontier that draws from our realities, not imported templates.
Finally, we must confront the painful truth that the current political elite, across party lines, is increasingly indistinguishable from the economic elite. Many of those who today speak the language of the poor have built careers by exploiting their pain. Their allegiance is not to justice, but to power. They wear the language of liberation like a mask while participating in the architecture of continued dispossession.
In the end, unity without justice is a betrayal. It is unity for the sake of comfort for billionaires to retain their portfolios, for technocrats to deliver stability, and for political parties to secure positions. But for the poor, it is merely another season of waiting. Another promise postponed. Another betrayal repackaged as progress. Let us not be seduced by elegant formulations of compromise. Let us instead ask: who benefits, who decides, and who pays the price for this so-called unity? Only then can we begin to imagine a politics that does not merely include the poor, but is led by them.