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Does South Africa's remarkable shift from pessimism to collective optimism herald a switch in futures?

Jon Cherry
By Jon Cherry
21 Oct 2024
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In November last year there was a tangible mood shift across the country many have been discussing ever since. The change was officially anointed with the crowning of the Springboks as Rugby World Cup champions in a sports stadium in France, but that singular moment of glory wasn’t the source of this switch.

Something feels different about the country right now.

In November last year there was a tangible mood shift across the country that many have been discussing ever since. 

The change was officially anointed with the crowning of the Springboks as Rugby World Cup champions in a sports stadium in France, but that singular moment of glory wasn’t the source of this switch. 

That probably came just prior thanks to a series of back-to-back one-point Springbok wins over some of the competition’s strongest teams. Witnessing this over the course of the tournament was of course riveting and felt as if every week we were collectively taken to the brink of heartbreaking failure, only for grit and guts and sheer dogged determination to eventually haul the team over the line in the dying moments of each game. The emotional chasm — a rollercoaster ride between utter demise and teary triumph — that we all experienced during that time felt strangely familiar, but this time it seemed to ignite something quite new. 

Here was clear proof that South Africans working together can indeed realise a dream by enduring and overcoming unlikely odds in collaboration with each other. Emerging from the gloomy haze of our decades-long fog of fear and uncertainty rose a striking beam of hope, backed up by a demonstration of a new unrealised strength: ubuntu in action. 

In another unthinkable positive development, the supply of electricity stabilised this year. 

Since 2008 (let me remind you) we have endured the misery and angst associated with load shedding. For fifteen years this phenomenon lingered. It had become such a part of our lived reality that even for the experts it was almost impossible to imagine a time to come where the lack of power wasn’t a debilitating constraint on the country. 

Until it was unexpectedly resolved on 26 March 2024 thanks to a committed joint effort between the government, big business, renewable energy innovators and Eskom.  

Source of joy  


Our source of joy since isn’t so much that there is now a more predictable supply of electricity, it’s far more attributable to the fact that what we had come to blindly expect was darkness, and instead we have light. 

Hands up if you assumed the worst leading into the national government elections in June. A coalition government was pitched back then as a scenario the country would prefer to avoid. 

Now after more than 100 days of the so-called Government of National Unity there is an energy of action and performance that we have never seen before. By all accounts what we have today is a functioning national government that even the most optimistic forecasts at the beginning of the year could never have accurately described.  

The feeling that has resulted can be labelled as “hope” and a collective “sense of optimism”; sure, but this doesn’t fully capture the true impact of what appears to have changed.

You don’t have to look too far these days to see how emotion can affect the futures of countries. Significantly, important decisions are often made by seemingly well educated citizens, not guided by logical and critical analysis of the presented facts, but thanks to knee-jerk judgements clouded by irrational fears, uncertainty and emotionally charged bias. This shouldn’t be a big surprise, an entire new academic discipline called behavioural economics attempts to understand the illogical workings of the human mind. Far from being just a warm and fuzzy thing that those who are serious about progress ignore and label “soft stuff”, emotion is a powerful enabler, or disabler, of futures. 

When people feel hopeful and optimistic about the future they behave and act very differently than when they are fearful and anticipate only negative experiences as the present moment of suffering flows into endless repetitions of more of the same. Hopeful people take bets on the future; they eagerly invest their money and energy in anticipation for a better tomorrow. Fearful people try to protect what they already have from an inevitable future demise. 

For those whose job it is to pay attention to these things, a discernible shift from pessimism to optimism can be an early indication of a switch of futures.

A futures path divergence might sound like a radical declaration, but the state of an individual’s, or community’s, futures consciousness also functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates over time. Sports teams are said to be on a winning streak when the confidence in their ability to win is high. Many sports scientists will tell you that at a high-performance level, the difference between elite athletes physiologically is marginal. What really sets the winners apart, results wise, is how they think and the stability of the emotional condition they can sustain in the heat of competition. 

Winners win because they completely believe that no matter how far behind they might find themselves on the scoreboard during a game, they will always have the capability to play their way back to winning the game at the end. 

Winning becomes a habit


Winning becomes a habit… so too does losing.

As a country, to a greater or lesser degree, we have all had personal experiences of tragedy and despair. We’ve got too many terrible stories to look back on with a sense of shame, but just enough to remind us that from terrible odds, together we have the remarkable ability to turn around and take a forward step. 

Far more than just a sense of hope, what this “eventual success through wild swings of fortune” offers, is proof that South Africans working together towards a common goal have the temperament, character and strengths to come back from insurmountable odds to create a different future to the one that was almost certainly destined to have played out. 

When people sit back and say things like “Ag this country’s just going one way”, there is now some very credible, recent evidence to show that South Africa has got a wicked sidestep. Our ability to change futures is breathtaking. 

We’ve always somehow known that we were capable of remarkable things, but over the past year we have come to better understand what it is that enables us to win. At the bottom of the South African Coat of Arms are the words: !ke e: /xarra //ke (diverse people unite). Moving forward together is the secret hiding in plain sight that enables greatness to be achieved. 

Nothing to fear


We should have nothing to fear in attempting to resolve all the other critical challenges that we face, and at the same time collectively creating a future that we want. 

Just a few months ago, during the opening of Parliament, President Cyril Ramaphosa painted the picture of a future South Africa that he portrayed as “a society working together like Kalahari sociable weaver birds”. It certainly feels like we are on that preferrable weaver bird collaborative track, but might we suggest that the president revisit that scenario and share more details as to what those weaver birds are so busy building. I think we are now in the right frame of mind to hear more. DM

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