Our sense of stubborn positivity that South Africa has what it takes to come right as a country draws much of its energy from the good sense of ordinary people – a sense that came to the fore again around the simple question of building a school.

In September and October, the Social Research Foundation put the following question to respondents: “Which of the following is most important when building a school? That the best construction company is chosen to build the best possible school regardless of who owns it. Or that the need for the school is seen as an opportunity to promote a black-owned construction company, even if it is not the best at building schools.”

The answers are set out on the chart below.

At this newspaper we must have seen data like this 100 times over. Year in and year out, polls show the same thing. South Africans are not madly obsessed with race and foaming at the mouth at the thought of merit supplanting race as the basis of government policy.

The opposite is true, and that government policy does not change to reflect this is a function of the government holding the country back from reform, not the people.

Can a merit-based society exist in parallel with empowerment policies? Of course it can. All this requires is that empowerment policy is recalibrated to focus on the things that allow a competitive economy to thrive. At this newspaper we have made the argument for how to do this at regular intervals since our inception. In black economic empowerment (BEE) terms, simply stop taxing capital on arrival. Instead refocus the BEE scorecard to reward firms for job creation and maintenance, fixed investment contributed to South Africa, tax paid, and exports. Under the current empowerment regime none of that counts as empowerment. How crazy.  That will remove the extent to which BEE acts as a barrier to investment and job creation and align investor interests with the best interests of South Africa’s people.

Beyond that, award additional points for contributions to voluntary social upliftment programmes such as financing charter school vouchers and bursaries for top school performers from poor communities to study at the world’s best universities. Elon Musk’s Starlink schools offer would be an example, albeit one made under licensing duress. Who will the beneficiaries be? They’ll mostly be black of course, but they will benefit not because they are black but because they are poor and that is very much the crux of the thing. And quite different to the current state of affairs, where, to a great extent, the beneficiaries are rich politicians and their associates.

What if a firm refuses to participate in any of these programmes? Just leave it alone: it is still employing people, making things, paying tax, and investing capital. What is wrong with that? Nothing at all, it’s great and just what the country needs. South Africa’s dim-witted state and empowerment lobby would answer that it should be shut down. Because that will aid empowerment? Just daft.

Perhaps our favourite empowerment policy idea is on land reform. Allow aspirant black producers with bankable business plans to borrow from commercial banks at a great discount to the market rate, underwritten by the state. That will give them the same key advantage that white farmers enjoyed for decades before 1994. Whites can continue to borrow at market rates. The magic comes in by allowing black-white partnerships to borrow at a relative discount to the market rate. Every serious white producer will stampede to bring in black partners, rural South Africa will see a vast surge in investment and job creation, and agricultural output will lift sharply. In as far as society believes that the racial transformation of agriculture is important, that will occur at great pace.

We have yet to hear a coherent argument in opposition to this and yet the business community, the banks, and AgriSA, South Africa’s largest agriculture union, remain lined up behind the state’s failed land reform policy. Privately even the state concedes this would work very well.

It is so easy ultimately to fix South Africa and get it back on a path towards growth and success, and it is a misnomer that the government and business cannot move on sensible reforms because the people would rebel. The people are already there, far ahead of the government and business, waiting in the hope that the men and few women who run the country catch up.