There has been a lot of hand-wringing about Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, a former radio presenter and founder and leader of March and March, which is campaigning against illegal immigration. She, you would be made to believe, is the source of much the tension ahead of South Africa’s local government election. That’s wrong. South Africa, and specifically KwaZulu-Natal, is not a tinderbox because Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma made it so. The tinderbox arose because the unemployment rate is over 30%. And the unemployment rate is so high because the economy has not grown and it has not grown because of policies that elite society – the legacy media, civil society, academia, and big business – have supported.

Elite society tends to hold the view that the country is a mess because people don’t know how to vote properly. Where that is right it is only right to a point. The ANC did very well for poor people between 1994 and 2008 and that its support rose initially post-1994 showed that voters were making rational decisions. And since 2008 its support has been sinking – and it has now lost half of what it had, which means voters are again making at least one rational decision in dropping the ANC. And not all the difference has gone to the EFF and MKP. The DA now has more black than white supporters – and it leads by a long stretch in Gauteng. The idea therefore that the country is a mess because the voters made it so does not hold together. There is at least another half to the explanation (likely much more than a half), which is that the country faces a tinderbox risk because of the ideas and policies advocated by the rich and influential and the institutions they support.

For 30 years those institutions and much of the media have sought to denigrate, stigmatise, and undermine critics of government policy who said that cadre deployment, race-based affirmative action, preferential procurement, and BEE would sink the economy. The critics were accused of racism, apartheid denialism, and an indifference to the poor. To bring social justice to South Africa much of the media championed the idea that cadre deployment was virtuous, preferential procurement necessary and good, and BEE pragmatic. The effect was to create a climate of opinion in which the central importance of merit and competitiveness came to be downgraded at best, and treated with loathing at worst, as the idea took hold that it might even be virtuous to abandon merit where it came into conflict with social justice. The cost? Pricing billions of dollars of investment out of South Africa.

As that climate took hold the aggressive transformation of the civil service was defended to the hilt, even as capacity was lost. When critics flagged that early police commissioners were inept and corrupt, they were countered on the grounds that transformation and representivity would improve the quality of service to the public. When the critics countered how absurd it was to think that accidents of birth or melanin counts could have any relevance to service delivery they were written off and accused of wanting only to preserve an old order. The cost? Collapsed public services, policing, and local government.

The same thing happened across almost every area of government policy.

Labour laws that priced poor people out of work were defended on the grounds that such laws would bring social justice, even as the unemployment rate reached frightening levels, with the predicted consequence that this would fuel the very political instability South Africa now faces.

As it became clear that schools were collapsing, proposals to embrace charter schools and related privatisation efforts were opposed in the media and civil society on the grounds that these would commoditise and privatise education. Exactly. That is what the rich do with their own education. The cost? Millions of children being stunted in the public school system, even though South Africa spends enough on a per-capita basis to finance good schools, and just needed to place those resources under private management.

Climate threats were exaggerated, with much of the media buying into the deliberately alarmist idea of a “climate emergency” to steer public opinion towards fear, as a means of justifying resistance to coal and oil and gas investment. The cost of that? South Africa lost both the ability to reindustrialise its economy and to become a global top-20 oil and gas exporter.

But even now the completely false idea that by greening its economy South Africa might attract a lot of new investment from ESG-conscious firms continues to be parroted in elite society with the consequence of leading the state further down the greenery road, costing the country the option to reindustrialise its economy.

The media lied to you repeatedly about expropriation without compensation and suggested that its scope and effects are very limited when the actual effect, as every potential investor doing their due diligence on the country encounters, is that the state can seize any investor’s assets without market-related compensation.

The same has been done on NHI, which is a straight-up attempt to nationalise your healthcare savings. But the media has soft-soaped this by suggesting that it is unjust that some people spend their own money that they earned by hard work to buy better healthcare. That is not unjust – no more than that they use their money to buy a nice dinner, or send their children to a good school, or buy their own home. All that is unjust is that the policies that the government and the elites have advocated – from empowerment, to labour, to energy – keep millions of people so poor that they cannot earn an income through hard work and start building their own assets. By feeding the idea that NHI is just and might be workable, a climate of opinion was created that has encouraged the government to further double down on NHI even as medical professionals exit and the broader middle classes find another reason to reconsider the wisdom of a life in South Africa.

Media and the business elite took a leading role in promoting the idea that President Cyril Ramaphosa was a reformer when his track record was anything but that (and the business types knew this). The cost has been to buy him cover not to pursue reforms under the argument that some terribly clever long game was at play – when in fact nothing was at play other than a doubling down on the ideas that caused the mess.

That same elite did a related thing in promoting the idea that the Ramaphosa government was determined to combat state capture when it was arguably more corrupt than that of Zuma’s – and its efforts, from appointments to the prosecuting authority to the Madlanga Commission, were just a ruse to buy time in order not to act against corruption. Not one top-flight leader is in prison today when a junior-level state prosecutor could have secured scores of convictions with evidence that was publicly at hand. But still the story runs that he’s making progress.

As reform was stalled, every possible case of possible racial animosity was blown up in the media while sound poll evidence that race relations were actually really good, and South Africans respected each other and wanted to work together to build a great future, was either ignored or denigrated. It is hard to think that was not a deliberate effort at incitement. The effect? A concerted assault against the country’s future stability – which is about the most reckless action imaginable.

As hate and division was cultivated, so a parallel effort was pursued (often with apparent glee) to paint Helen Zille and her party as racist. Lies were told to the public that the Democratic Alliance (DA) was jettisoning its black leaders and the story was fed that Zille, the anchor of the DA, must be exorcised by the party if it were to grow – now her party leads the ANC in Johannesburg (where she is the DA’s mayoral candidate) because of her very toughness and tenacity, the character traits the media despised, and has won the respect of voters. A more heroic woman you will never meet – she dedicated her entire life to the service of South Africa’s people. What vindictiveness causes a newspaper to treat such a person with such wickedness – more so when that treatment will poison thousands of people against one of the key people trying, and needed, to fix the country? It is sick.

The media and civil society, the latter with handsome private backing, then promoted party-funding laws that were created almost exclusively to cut the DA off from the resources it would one day need if it was to supplant the ANC. And the media has of late run fake-news operations against Tony Leon to scare the DA off from using top external advice while trying to get the DA’s most talented leader in a generation, Mark Burke, tossed out of the party.

Turning abroad, the media championed the state’s hostility to the Trump administration, giving credibility to Pretoria’s efforts to refuse a trade pact with the Americans while rubbishing Washington’s very sound concerns on empowerment policy and property rights. South Africa’s ruinous ICJ case was likewise championed even as it shut doors to the investment South Africa needed to stage an economic recovery. But all the while the state was cheered to go further and further down that ruinous road.

The collective consequences of these ideas and policies and the climate of opinion that they created has been ruinous for South Africa, its economy, and the poor.

Now South Africa is told, again by the elite mainstream, that Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma is the problem, that she has occasioned the tinderbox. That is not correct and the elites in business and the media are just as culpable, if not more so, for what has happened.