Don’t let us fall for the purveyors of ‘alternative facts’
As a subscriber to the doctrine of evidence-based politics, I have more than once fallen prey to the simple elegance of the “fact-based retort” when confronted with the lived experience of someone whose belief that they are being victimised in some specific way is not borne out by evidence.
In my experience, SA’s most pressing socioeconomic challenges tend to be observable in our daily understanding of life, as well as backed by rigorous data that confirms those intuitions.
Our burgeoning youth unemployment crisis, for example, is observed daily — in young people’s social-media appeals for jobs, or university graduates standing at the side of the road, holding up their degree certificates and asking for work.
But we have access to local and international studies, as well Stats SA’s quarterly labour force survey, to support what is observable about youth unemployment in South African daily life: in the past quarter alone, young people formed the biggest proportion of the 2.2-million people who lost their jobs during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Where intuition is unsupported — or even contradicted — by the facts, it follows that we should conclude that we were incorrect in our assumptions and move swiftly on, doesn’t it? Yet everything we know about populism, “alternative facts” and “fake news” has shown us that being confronted with conflicting evidence often does nothing to convince those who perceive their way of life as under attack that their assumptions are incorrect.
Groups of white South Africans living on farms are afraid for their lives because a combination of weak rural policing, spacial vulnerability and extensive media coverage of white people violently murdered by black perpetrators has led them to believe they are being singled out for postapartheid racial vengeance.
Yet the data and evidence do not bear out this narrative. According to the police’s 2018/2019 crime statistics, farm dwellers constituted 47 out of 21,022 murders last year. Women (2,771 murders) and children (1,014 murders) across all residential categories were far more at risk than farmers.
The nonpartisan fact-checking organisation, Africa Check, said the farm murder rate is impossible to calculate because little is known about the number of people living in rural parts of the country. Estimates vary between 2.3-million households and 11-million individuals.
Without a baseline for the size of the rural community (let alone for the percentage of those who are white), intuition is too often all that rural white South Africans have to guide their perceptions. That intuition is being crudely and transparently exploited by racist lobby groups with dubious agendas.
The proliferation of interest groups claiming that SA is in the grip of a “white genocide” is proof that SA is not immune to the balkanisation of politics and political discourse that has gripped the world over the past decade.
The story of populism in politics everywhere is the story of liars and “alternative fact” peddlers responding to the legitimate concerns of their constituents with half-baked theories and conspiracies that don’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny.
By inflaming legitimate and existing challenges in our society and creating racial victims and scapegoats in the process, such lobbyists and politicians are able to sow misinformation and convert it into the kind of discord that will bring them legions of supporters seeking their protection from the “evil other”.
But what is to be done?
The politics of “us vs them” is cheap and easy: it is formations of angry white men in old South
African Defence Force fatigues, facing off against angry young black men in Senekal on a hot Friday in October. It is the alt-right peddling conspiracy theories over the internet to radicalise young white South Africans into taking up arms against an imagined enemy.
It is also an efficient way to discern bad leaders, who lack the nuance and courage to tell the truth about what it will take to move SA towards the complexity and prosperity of a shared future.
SA needs the kind of political leadership that has the courage to acknowledge the fear and lived experience of the communities expressing their concerns about rural violence, without resorting to dog whistles, xenophobia and outright racism to address the source of their anxieties.
We also need a longer-term conversation about media and information literacy, one that will help us to move from a mindset in which data and information are a threat to our entrenched prejudices to one in which they can shed light on and help us find solutions to our most complex social and economic problems.
Our country must not become another cautionary tale of how crude populism, fake news and “alternative facts” propelled unscrupulous liars into critical leadership positions, enabling them to wreak havoc on a fragile and already divided society.