We Need To Get The Basics Right

South Africa does not need another grand vision; it needs food, water, jobs, safety, and electricity.

Photo by Luis Tosta on Unsplash

South Africa does not need another grand vision; it needs food, water, jobs, safety, and electricity.

This sounds almost insultingly obvious. Yet much of our political class behaves as if the ordinary concerns of ordinary people are beneath them. While millions of South Africans worry about feeding their children, finding work, getting home safely, keeping the lights on, and turning on a tap without anxiety, politicians obsess over transformation targets, renaming campaigns, racial bean-counting, symbolic gestures, ideological crusades, and grandiose projects that sound impressive in speeches but rarely survive contact with reality.

There is a disturbing disconnect between what South Africans need and what politicians want to talk about.

The Institute of Race Relations polling has shown this repeatedly. South Africans are not sitting around waiting for the next round of racial engineering. They are not primarily begging for more ideological speeches. They want jobs. They want crime addressed. They want corruption dealt with. They want the country to function. This should be the starting point of policy making for everyone across the political spectrum.

Instead, South Africa’s political conversation is too often hijacked by those who see the country not as a society of living people with immediate needs, but as a stage for ideological performance.

The ANC remains addicted to transformation rhetoric, even after three decades of state power and failure. Other parties, particularly on the populist left, compete to see who can promise more confiscation, more state control, more racial grievance, and more theatrical hostility towards business, property owners, farmers, employers, and anyone still capable of producing value.

Meanwhile, the basics are neglected and left to rot.

Nutrition is basic. No child should be too hungry to learn. No parent should have to watch food prices rise while politicians pretend that yet another summit, plan, task team, or transformation charter will fill the fridge. Not to mention additional taxes on fuel, money printing to push inflation, and VAT hikes to make that food even more expensive.

Hunger is not solved by slogans; it is solved by income, growth, functioning logistics, productive farming, competitive retail, safe transport routes, lower barriers to enterprise, and schools and clinics that are not hollowed out by corruption and incompetence.

Water is basic. A government that cannot reliably provide clean water has no moral authority to lecture citizens about sophisticated social engineering. There is nothing progressive about dry taps, sewage spills, failing wastewater systems, or communities forced to queue for water in a country with taxes, departments, municipalities, and public entities supposedly dedicated to providing this most fundamental service.

Jobs are basic. They are not a luxury. They are not a secondary issue to be considered after the latest ideological project has been funded. Work is dignity in practice. It is how people feed families, build independence, gain skills, form households, accumulate savings, and participate in society as more than passive recipients of political promises.

Yet South Africa has spent decades making it harder to hire, harder to invest, harder to build, harder to expand, and harder to take risks. The political class then expresses shock that unemployment remains catastrophic.

If you punish employers, demonise profit, threaten property rights, empower bureaucrats, centralise decision-making, and treat the private sector as a beast to be milked and beaten, you should not be surprised when jobs disappear or fail to materialise.

Safety is basic. A society in which people are afraid to walk, work, trade, commute, farm, run a shop, or sleep in their homes is not free in any meaningful sense. Crime is not merely one issue among many - it is the daily destruction of liberty. It determines where people live, how they travel, whether they can work late, whether businesses can operate, whether children can play outside, and whether entire communities can function.

The poor suffer most from this. Wealthier South Africans can buy walls, alarms, armed response, private security, tracking devices, insurance, and gated access. Poor South Africans are left exposed to the consequences of a state that cannot perform one of its oldest and most basic functions: protecting peaceful people from violence and theft.

Energy is basic. No modern economy can run on excuses. Electricity is not a luxury. It is the foundation of industry, refrigeration, communication, safety, education, healthcare, and ordinary household life. Load-shedding may have eased, but the lesson should not be forgotten. South Africa’s energy crisis was not a natural disaster. It was a political and institutional failure, produced by monopoly, corruption, cadre deployment, ideological hostility to private generation, and years of denial.

These five basics are not separate issues - they reinforce each other.

Without electricity, businesses struggle, food spoils, water systems fail, clinics suffer, and jobs vanish. Without safety, investment retreats, shops close early, workers cannot travel, and communities decay. Without water, no settlement, school, hospital, farm, or factory can function. Without jobs, hunger deepens, dependence expands, and social order weakens. Without nutrition, children are robbed before they even begin.

This is what politics should be about.

Not because these issues are glamorous - they are not. There is no great ideological thrill in fixing a substation, securing a street, repairing a pipe, prosecuting a criminal, issuing a title deed, approving a building plan, or making it easier for a small business to hire its first employee.

But that is precisely the point. Good government is often boring. It is not the art of turning every speech into a historical epic; it is the daily work of making civilisation possible.

The ANC’s great failure is that it mistook control for governance. Instead of building a prosperous and secure society, it built a state incapable of performing the basics while still demanding the right to control more.

Transformation became a substitute for competence. Representation became a substitute for results. Rhetoric became a substitute for delivery. Ideology became a substitute for growth. And when this failed, the answer was always more targets, more plans, more interference, and more promises that the same machinery that broke the country would somehow repair it.

But South Africans are not as foolish as their politicians seem to believe. The IRR’s polling reflects something deeply sensible in the electorate. Most people do not wake up thinking like activists, cadres, consultants, or political theorists. They wake up thinking like parents, workers, jobseekers, commuters, shopkeepers, students, pensioners, and neighbours.

They want a country that works.

They want employment more than empowerment theatre. They want safety more than slogans. They want functioning services more than renamed streets. They want the chance to build lives, not to be managed as demographic units in someone else’s ideological spreadsheet.

South Africa does not need a politics of permanent grievance; it needs a politics of competence.

That starts with humility. Government should stop pretending it can transform society from above while failing to maintain the floor beneath everyone’s feet. It should focus on the basics that allow citizens to improve their own lives: secure property rights, reliable policing, stable electricity, clean water, functioning infrastructure, honest administration, better schools, and an economy open enough to absorb the millions desperate for work.

The measure of a government is not how often it says the correct ideological words. It is whether people can eat, work, travel safely, keep the lights on, and trust the water from their taps.

By that measure, South Africa’s political class has failed.

The way forward is difficult, but not complicated. Get the basics right. Let people work. Protect them from criminals. Keep the lights on. Fix the water. Stop punishing enterprise. Stop using transformation as an excuse for failure.

A country is not built by renaming what is broken - it is built by making ordinary life possible again.

Nicholas Woode-Smith is the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a senior associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.