I have heard it said rather frequently that all South Africans agree on what the major issues are – crime, infrastructure, and jobs. This is fairly obvious, and a five-minute conversation with anybody would lend you to believe that everyone is in agreement on all major material issues.

So why then are we incapable of agreeing on a political solution? Well, mainly because of two things – policy, and elites.

Nobody can quite agree on what sort of policy will achieve jobs, good infrastructure and a low crime rate. Jobs are the biggest issue here.

The most popular position is that welfare must be expanded, minimum wage raised, and state employment schemes extended through infrastructure programs and the like. Education must be made free and more accessible. “Entrepreneurship” must be “championed”.

But most just push slightly tweaked versions of existing policies – they’re afraid of imposing harsh standards in schools that would force pupils to acquire the actual skills they are being graded on before being allowed to pass.

Nobody wants to cut a penny from any welfare or free-service department, calling it callous, and saying it kills old ladies and small children.

But welfare dependency, as most readers of this rag will know from their Thomas Sowell, and many more will know from first-hand experience, leads people to rely less on family and community for support, and be less inclined to seek work.

Those who do work will not declare it to the state, and prefer to collect welfare while working. Statistics on these questions are difficult to estimate, because it is by nature a secretive dimension of the economy. But speaking to anyone employing unskilled workers reveals this pattern through a consensus of firsthand experience.

“Entrepreneurship”, while often characterised by Clem Sunter and similar people as a teeming pot full of geniuses waiting to escape the shackles of the SA bureaucracy, is in fact mostly a network of rather small, undisciplined middleman trading organisations, many touting counterfeit products, drugs, muti and expired food among the ordinary, more legitimate services. Industrial-scientific geniuses are rare at the best of times.

Additionally, high wages and strong unions shut out many people from legitimate employment, while offering a means for industrial cartels and big unions to strike wage deals that price SMEs out of the market.

But if you suggest cutting this gordian knot, you will have the most influential oligarchs’ pet think tanks crawling down your throat. Anglo Gold’s Indlulamithi sets the worst possible outcome in their scenario planning as being one in which a centre-right coalition takes power and cracks down on crime and liberalises the economy, causing permanent devastation and racial recrimination.

This is obviously stupid.

But fear of change in current approaches is not unique – look at Brenthurst’s approach to road and rail – they believe that rail is outdated and done for, because of the loss of revenue to freight rail with the increase in road freight since the deregulation of the industry in 1977. “It is inevitable” they opine, best to lean into the trend.

Of course, this externalises the cost for infrastructure maintenance to the taxpayer by diverting heavy freight to roads, which suffer incredibly from the wear and tear, while taking away revenue from rail, which has much lower maintenance costs. Imposing a weight limit on road freight would quickly shift the incentives and financial burdens.

But this is broadly our problem – we cannot consider different approaches, yet we expect different outcomes.

Those who make policy are not ordinary people, and even if ordinary people could agree on the basic outcomes needed, and even on the policies they want to see, elites live in a different world. And in reality that gap is defined by the ability to parse policy frameworks.

Worse, even those who do think in terms of actual policy, however low-resolution, do not have the heart to consider a different path, and imagine a simple changing of the guard can make the selfsame policies magically work, or even demand acceleration of our worst policies.

Take Operation Dudula and the PutSAFirst crowd for example. They are far less hostile to white people than the Charterists (ANC, EFF), but they still believe in EWC, nationalisation of the economy, and mass welfare expansion.

We can’t afford this stuff.

The average person also votes for his co-ethnics, so the split between the minority-interest party bloc and the majority-interest party bloc is a wide gulf, with little significant movement between them.

Additionally, large swathes of civil society and the judiciary are radically opposed to the sort of strong-arm police tactics necessary to clear up violent crime, and generally regard criminals as poor dears who need a second chance. Those of us who take an interest in local crime will no doubt be aware of countless cases where rapists, burglars, hijackers and other pests are given little more than a slap on the wrist, even when caught red-handed.

Of course, there is the problem of prison overcrowding, but curing this problem may even require imprisoning up to 1-2% of the population, which would cause howls of outrage even if the space were available.

They tend to say crime will go away if you just fix all the other social issues, to which my response is that if building utopia were so easy, someone would have done it already. But the best response is just to point to El Salvador, and show that getting rid of the gangs by locking them all up has been shown to be the best solution offered anywhere so far, pulling the homicide rate down from the highest in the world to the lowest in the Americas. The burden of proof is on anyone who criticizes such an obvious success.

Our problem is that, as much as we agree on desired outcomes, nobody agrees on the path to get there, and voting patterns bond people to elites with widely differing roadmaps of the way forward.

The glib notion that we can “just solve” unemployment, illiteracy and violent crime, is putting the cart before the horse.

The question is how to get sane and honest people in charge in a country plagued by illusions and lies, gangster culture and self-serving, short-term sentimentality.

These things are not trivial, whatever people tell you. We are a divided country, and pretending otherwise is wishful thinking.