The Springboks are one of the best things South Africa has going for it. Maybe the team, and what it has done for the country, is the single best thing the country has to show for itself since 1994. It is brilliant at what it does, the best in the world. It has brought so much good press to the country, as well as global admiration. It has put a spring in the step of every South African who follows the game and united millions of people around a common point of pride. Why would you think to poison all of that, to poison the best of what we are as a country, and turn it into something bad, shameful, and a racial problem?

In June 1966, when Robert F Kennedy challenged students at Stellenbosch University on the religious justification for apartheid, a student responded that “our God has no colour”, neatly, if ironically, given where it came from, exposing the absurdity of assigning human worth according to skin colour.

Our country is strongest when, like that quip, and like the Springboks, we take to the field, in whatever endeavour that is, standing shoulder to shoulder, as one team, as South Africans, determined to win and be the best in the world.

South Africans subscribe to exactly that. They don’t go around, as the media seems to obsess, traumatised over the race of the players in Bafana Bafana, the Proteas, or the Springboks and then deciding on grounds of racial make-up which they will support and find pride in.

At this newspaper, we have seen scores of poll questions that establish exactly this. On any question, from whether whites should all leave, or whether it matters if the president is black, or whether the Americans should qualify for equity equivalents, or whether the firm building a school should be black or white, South Africans do not care much, except that whatever the answer is, it delivers the best success.

South Africa’s problem is not the race of players in national sports teams. The problem is that the investment rate is half of what it should be, which means that the rate of economic growth is only a quarter of what it should be, which means that the unemployment rate is over 30.0% and not under the 10.0% that it should be, which in turn means that millions of our people live in dire and terrible poverty. You fix that, and the whole country, via pragmatic reforms that attract investment, reforms that this newspaper has spelt out at length time and again, and reforms that the great majority of South Africans, black and white, African National Congress (ANC) and Democratic Alliance (DA), support.

This newspaper was created to fight in the public square for that ideal by countering the toxic, negative, destructive wedge issues that divide our country and advancing instead a fresh positive case built on the bridge issues, the common ground that is so vast and so wonderful between the great majority of South Africans, and that transcends every historical, political, ideological, racial, and socioeconomic division. To help South Africans come together so that we can work together; so that the whole country can be the best in the world.

Nice words. What does that now mean in its most practical application?

Currently, it would mean a political pact between the DA and the ANC. The DA brings the middle-class vote. The ANC brings the aspirant middle class on the urban fringe and the rural poor who live vicariously through their children and grandchildren who live in the cities. That is structurally the only deal that works because the interests of the established and aspirant middle classes are close enough to be identical, but the parties will not be competing for the same voters too much, so the pact may hold over time.

No other political formula works structurally to achieve all this: a political solution, an economic recovery, and the survival of the country’s democracy under the union. The reforms necessary to make a success of this pact are something we are precise about. They include scrapping capital taxes, refurbishing the coal fleet, going aggressively after oil and gas, placing port and rail infrastructure in private hands, doing the long-delayed trade pact with America, and taking advantage of China’s very generous offer of tariff-free access to its economy. Neither the DA nor the ANC are fully on board with all of that, and this must be changed by demonstrating the joint merits of it and the necessity of all of it. Reform is not a buffet from which either side can pick only the bits it likes. Get that agenda right, and the people are fully behind it, and our economy can again aspire to grow at the rates of our emerging market peers. Do that for 20 years, and the unemployment rate will be coming down to 10.0%. And South Africa will be as great as the Springboks proudly inspire us all to be.