Slogans are catchy, but you can’t eat them

AFTER decades of being subjected to slogans, South Africans are susceptible to having a complex idea neatly boxed into a catchy acronym. We are suckers for a smart line that oversimplifies a complex issue or provides a sense of security, albeit a false one.

South Africa since 1994 has sought to neatly encapsulate economic policy in a way that is neither threatening nor exclusionary. Programmes like Gear (growth, employment and redistribution) were clear and simple policy statements that were unambiguous in their intent and execution. The acronym meant something tangible. The goal was growth and job creation. Two hardto-achieve goals, but Gear supposed that growth would provide the state with the mechanism for redistribution of wealth held by the few to the many in a way that would not prejudice the sustainability of the economy. The government’s current position is unclear.

Like so many post-1994 plans, Gear is gathering dust. The government’s most recent serious attempt came with the catchy moniker NDP — National Development Plan. It lacked proper buy-in at cabinet level and all but disappeared into file 13 with other smart ideas when its primary cheerleader, Trevor Manuel, left the public sector. It too is a noble plan, built on the principle that economic growth is pivotal if South Africa is to lift its poorest out of poverty. Execution of a plan is difficult, especially if it does not support the prevailing political mood.

And it’s not just governments that are guilty of concocting populist acronyms. Big companies like them too.

Take Vuca: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The acronym originated in the US military but was no doubt popularised in the boardroom of a big consultancy firm as a mantra for international clients.

It’s brilliant, but not particularly helpful. Vuca is a concept that could be used for everything from the Cold War and the 1970s oil crisis to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the more recent global financial crisis (GFC, of course).

The world is always volatile, uncertain, confusing and ambiguous. Every generation faces multiple Vuca moments and somehow muddles through.

Acronyms like this one become overused and ultimately tautological. Once you have heard one professional speaker latch onto the term, it’s no longer useful.

But we can be easily led by catchy slogans. Every Walmart executive meeting, be it face-to-face or a phone and video conference, begins with the shouting of a slogan that spells the company name (everyone does it from the CEO down to the lowliest member of support staff).

Walmart does it for the same reason political movements do it.

The politician who opens a political rally by shouting “Amandla!” is trying to get everyone focused. If the reflex response of “Awethu!” is muted, the speaker will simply repeat the slogan until they are satisfied with the response.

The slogans used to stir up emotions and distract attention from the real social, political and economic issues have been updated with such nonsensical terms as “WMC” for the vacuous “white monopoly capital” and “radical economic transformation”. These are not terms crafted to deliver what they purport to deliver. Indeed, on their own, it’s hard to define exactly what they mean, but they create sufficient political heat.

We need to move away from slogans. We need to vuka — it’s not an acronym, it’s an exclamation in several southern African languages that means “wake up!”

The sooner we can abandon the hot air and do some real work to get the economy on the up and up, the sooner we might be able to deliver the goals that the planners had in mind when they drafted acronyms and slogans that actually meant something.

Whitfield is a public speaker on the political economy and an awardwinning financial journalist and broadcaster