A week ago, The Common Sense published an interview with the American ambassador to South Africa. One of the themes that emerged from that interview was the generous offer by Elon Musk to provide free Starlink access to over two million pupils in failing South African schools. Last week, TimesLIVE attacked The Common Sense and Mr Musk over that offer, arguing it should be rejected.

Where is South Africa’s outrage at that?

What has gone wrong that much of the legacy media, which should be a force for good in South Africa, would use its considerable influence to lobby for something that would harm the country and deny a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to those two million children? Surely it should be up to the children, their parents, and their teachers to decide whether to take up Mr Musk’s offer?

But in South Africa, elite legacy institutions in the media, politics, business, and civil society think it is up to them to decide on behalf of the country’s people. Hence the confidence with which they dismiss Mr Musk and his offer.

They have done the same with South Africa’s oil and gas industry, denying the country the opportunity to become one of the world’s biggest oil and gas exporters, along with all the jobs, investment, and tax revenue that would follow.

They have lobbied to turn off the coal-fired power stations, with all the economic damage and lost investment that will follow.

They have advanced the fiction that the state is serious about fighting corruption by playing up the various commissions established to investigate cases that might easily have been prosecuted. Those commissions were designed all along by the politicians behind them to create the illusion that something was being done, so that they could avoid actually prosecuting the scores of corrupt politicians who should by now have been in prison.

They advanced the merits of the party funding laws and sought to convince South Africans that these were in their best interests, when in fact those laws were crafted to stunt serious financial support for serious opposition parties.

Elite legacy institutions have worked frenetically to advance the idea that black economic empowerment (BEE) measures are just, good, and in the best interests of the country, when those measures have been central to undermining the investment and growth that would have created the jobs and opportunities South Africans so desperately need.

The legacy media has worked so hard to convince South Africans that the government has done the right thing by resisting an American trade deal, and that this has somehow bolstered South Africa’s moral stature. That’s nuts. This newspaper travels the world and no one serious in the outside world, West or East, thinks that. They think South Africa is a failing state led by a failing party. The United States is the world’s biggest economy. American investment in South Africa would take hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty and set them on a course into the middle classes.

It is plainly common sense that South Africa must embrace Starlink and Mr Musk; it is an extraordinary product and opportunity, and he is an extraordinary man. Of course, oil and gas development is in the best interests of all South Africans, it will bring vast industrial investment to South Africa. The coal fields can light up the country with wonderful and cheap electricity that will make hundreds of thousands of jobs possible. South Africans should be as free to fund any party as they are to support it: it is their freedom to choose. And BEE, that handed a trillion rand in deals to a few politically connected people, is obviously not the way to help millions of poor people get into the middle classes. And American investment, which will create jobs, and infrastructure, and tax, can only be a good thing.

And as for the amount of toxic racial incitement and hate and division piped into the public mind by the broader media, it is pure poison to our prospects of building a great country and quite at odds with the truth that South Africans are good people who want to work together across historical divides to build a wonderful country.

Does anyone really think those two million children would rise up in opposition to Starlink and trash the school terminals because they do not approve of Elon Musk? Would they write letters to TimesLIVE thanking its editors for having saved them from using Starlink? It’s absurd. It would be the happiest day of their lives when that Starlink terminal was connected. Would poor, rural people refuse to take up work at a new American-financed business because they don’t like Donald Trump? They would be so happy to have found good-paying work with which to look after their families. How can the media lobby to deny them that opportunity? It’s a human rights abuse.

What elite legacy institutions have done in lobbying against all this is a cruelty committed against all the people of our country; an attack on their happiness and their ability to progress in life. It is so terrible, you couldn’t do anything worse. Every poor household, every unemployed person, every night someone goes to bed without electricity, every child whose development has been stunted. All of this arises, to some degree, from the ideas that South Africa’s elite legacy institutions advance.

South Africans must know they can be outraged by that. The people who have broken South Africa are not just a handful of corrupt politicians. They are often quite the opposite: people who retain respectable positions at the top of society. They need to stop doing that for the country to make progress.

Why do South Africans put up with this abuse? Steve Biko gave the answer when he said that “there is nothing more powerful in the hands of the oppressor than the mind of the oppressed”.

This is why The Common Sense was established: South Africa is such a great place with such amazing people and massive potential. We simply could not live with the knowledge of what was going on and how much unnecessary harm and suffering that was causing to millions of poor people. How can you live, let alone enjoy, your life in South Africa when, wherever you are, you know that there are millions of people nearby who do not have work or safety or dignity?

So, the decision, born of our stubborn positivity that South Africa can succeed as a prosperous multi-racial society, was taken to launch The Common Sense to provide a fresh, constructive, and positive media alternative for the millions of South Africans who sense the same thing and who want to come together to work together around sensible ideas that will make South Africa a lovely place to live for all its people.

Pierneef was one of South Africa's greatest artists, known for his paintings of South African vistas. This column named after him aims to do something similar — sketch the broad vistas of South Africa's domestic landscape.