South Africans have good reason to approach Wednesday’s local government elections with confidence in their country’s future. The political system is undergoing a profound transformation, public opinion is allied with the principles necessary for economic success, and ordinary South Africans are demonstrating an extraordinary capacity to build and sustain functioning institutions. These forces are considerably more important to the country’s long-term prospects than the short-term composition of any post-election coalition.

There may be numerous hung councils, difficult coalition negotiations, and unstable governing arrangements. This is how it must be, as the country is in the midst of a regime change, and that always has two parts. Part one, which has been substantially completed, is that the people lose confidence and belief in the old order. Part two is that they gain confidence and belief in a new order, and that has not yet happened. Wednesday will mark another stage in that process, rather than its conclusion.

The legacy media will predictably seize on this uncertainty to amplify its familiar narrative of national decline, racial antagonism, political hatred, and hopelessness. Every failed coalition negotiation, municipal dispute, and political confrontation will be presented as further evidence of failure. This relentless cultivation of anger, anxiety, and despair will continue to obscure the extraordinary strengths of the country and the remarkable degree of common ground that exists among its people, and what this means for where the ultimate regime change process may conclude.

Look for those strengths, the countervailing forces, and they may provide for you what they have for us, the foundational underpinning of The Common Sense, the conviction that the aspirations of ordinary South Africans remain a stronger and more durable force than the failures of the political and economic establishment.

Polling undertaken by the Social Research Foundation and The Common Sense has shown repeatedly that South Africans are united around sound conservative values and that this unity extends across every historical line of race, history, political affiliation, ideology, and economic status.

There is a commensurate determination among ordinary people to cooperate across all those lines. African National Congress and Democratic Alliance supporters want to work together, as do AfriForum and March and March supporters. Coming together to work together is still the most powerful political slogan in the country.

And South Africans agree, again across all those lines, on the key reforms needed to make the country a success: cutting taxes on capital, supplanting race with merit in government policy, lighting up the coal fleet, drilling for oil and gas, and letting private operators take over everything from ports to schools. Do those things, and the economy will be booming.

But South Africans are not sitting around waiting for Pretoria to deliver on that. Across every sector of society, private actors are assuming responsibilities once exercised by the state. From electricity and freight logistics to security, education, healthcare, and infrastructure maintenance - businesses, communities, and private organisations are demonstrating the capacity to deliver services on an expanding scale. The ensuing enclaves have great strategic importance, as they mean South Africa will retain much of its skills, capital, and employment base regardless of how hot the politics gets in the short and medium term, while offering a fantastic standard of living to the middle classes. And even if it stays that way, these will just become the new permanent condition of the country and the nuclei around which an essentially “privately managed federation” can get the whole territory right.

So read this election result with boldness and full of hope. The countervailing forces more than justify that. And it’s in your DNA - South Africa has been a hard corner of the world for more than 400 years. Without interruption, every generation has been shaped by conflicts, frontier wars, rebellions, political crises, and periods of extraordinary upheaval. That history has produced a tough, resourceful, and adaptable population, accustomed to overcoming formidable obstacles; and you are most likely one of those people.

It was precisely this conviction that led to the establishment of The Common Sense. Our stubborn optimism rests on the belief that the aspirations of ordinary South Africans are a stronger and more durable force than the failures of the political and economic establishment. The Common Sense exists to give those aspirations a voice, bring the country’s common ground to the fore, unite South Africans around the values they share, and thereby help build a great South Africa.