‘World opinion’ echoes local business views
ONCE again, “world opinion” has supported those South Africans who believe the new order’s government is messing up SA. Which is not surprising when we learn that “world opinion” is, in reality, the view of those South Africans who think the new order’s government is messing up SA.
It is common in this country’s debate to quote “international studies” showing that we are among the worst in the world at just about everything.
One popular example is the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness survey, which has just ranked this country’s education system third-last out of 40 countries (last year it was last).
As journalist Ann Crotty pointed out last year, this particular survey always finds that “corporate stuff in SA is good, and government and labour stuff is bad”.
And so it, and others like it, are frequently used to show that the world agrees with those who believe that companies get everything right and the government and labour everything wrong.
But the World Economic Forum survey is not a measure of “world opinion” — its findings on this country are, Crotty discovered when she asked, the opinions of 58 South African “senior executives” who chose to complete a survey.
The forum does not ask people across the world to rate this country — nor does it ask South Africans who are not in business. And so, as the fact-checking organisation Africa Check pointed out, this survey, regularly touted as a sign of what foreign “experts” think, tells us only what some South African business people think.
An executive’s opinion of whether the school system works well is no more or less accurate than anyone else’s — it may be based on experience but may equally be a product of prejudice.
Measures of business sentiment are important as a guide to economic trends: they tell us nothing about the quality of education.
The survey may not even be an accurate measure of business opinion.
Crotty reports that it runs to 80 questions. This suggests that the only executives who filled it out were those with very strong opinions.
A person with strong negative feelings seems more likely to take the trouble to fill out a lengthy survey than one with strong positive sentiments — the desire to get grievances off our chests is usually stronger than the urge to praise. So the survey may be a measure simply of angry business people.
The World Economic Forum survey is not an isolated example — other international studies that purport to measure corruption or the effect of labour laws, for example, in reality report South African business sentiment.
This survey, and the reaction to it, also illustrate a common thread in this country’s debate — political ventriloquism. Just as a ventriloquist throws his/her voice to a doll, so South Africans who don’t like the government and the labour movement pretend that their voice is that of others.
It is not that they think majority rule is awful; rather, we are constantly told, it is “world opinion” or “foreign investors” (or ratings agencies). In a deeply divided society, it is obviously better to pin your prejudices on others than to own up to them yourself. But the foreigners they cite so readily are in reality simply repeating what they think.
Foreign investors or international institutions or rating agencies do not form their opinions on this country by running complicated scientific experiments. By far, their most important source of information is local business — who else are they likely to trust to give them a sense of where the economy is headed?
And so, the “foreign investor” opinion that is routinely cited is really the opinion of local business, just as rating-agency decisions are heavily influenced by local business sentiment.
So the next time you read a measure declaring SA very bad at everything good or very good at everything bad, you are probably, in reality, hearing the voice of a section of South African business.
What these surveys really show is that we are a society in which the people who many international agencies take seriously don’t like government or unions.
Their opinions may reflect concrete experience — they may equally well show the depth of prejudice among the connected. Understanding our problems requires a careful look at local realities, not surveys that measure local opinion and are treated as international expert judgment.
If the studies that are so regularly quoted measure anything at all, it is not the state of our society but the depth of our divisions.
Friedman is director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy.