South Africa is stuck in an economic and political rut; “there is no two ways about it” and “there can be no doubt about that”, as one of my bosses of many years past would say.

South Africa is in a rut at multiple levels. According to https://www.psychologytoday.com, citing Mastering the Art of Quitting, there are four key reasons why we fall into a rut, where we persist in doing things that do not bring the results we want – that is, of course, assuming that we know what we want. What does South Africa, or South Africans for that matter, want? What are their realistic expectations, not their hopes or dreams?

According to Mastering the Art of Quitting, the four key reasons for falling into a rut are the ‘sunk-cost fallacy’, where concentrating on what you have already invested, including time, money and effort, may keep you stuck; pipe dreams, where you think that winning the lottery may help you to feel better (but probably will not bring about real change); wishful thinking, where you think that putting in longer work hours may land you a promotion (but then again, this may not happen); intermittent reinforcement, where, when you are caught up in a negative situation, small positive cues may signal that things will improve eventually, when, in fact, they may not.

The foregoing aptly describes the situation in which South Africa finds itself economically and politically.

So, how can South Africa or its leadership (for lack of a better word) attempt to get out of the rut? Mastering the Art of Quitting offers five strategies: embrace regret, since, while regret may paralyse you from making progress, studies have shown that counterfactual thinking can actually motivate you to act; understand your comfort zone, because you need to understand what keeps you in your comfort zone; set attainable goals, because, sometimes, we can be overwhelmed by the amount of change required to get out of a rut, and that keeps us in it; use mental contrasting, which involves contemplating your ideal future, while thinking about the short-term factors that stand in the way of achieving it; use critical thinking to curb and eliminate wishful thinking and superstition. In this instance, Peg Streep contends that our thinking is not as deliberate as we might think and that we are all vulnerable to cognitive distortions, one of which is a combination of magical thinking and misattribution of cause and effect.

The misattribution of cause and effect is described by BF Skinner in his Superstition in the Pigeon. For his experiment, Skinner put extremely hungry pigeons in cages and served them food at random intervals. As the pigeons grew hungry again, 75% of them began repeating their actions when the food was last served, anticipating that their action would result in food being served again. In essence, they attributed cause and effect to their action resulting in the food’s appearance.

Evidently, there is a similar anticipation in South Africa, given the reluctance to plan. Just to eliminate any possible misunderstanding, a ‘plan’ is defined as a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something. The definition makes no mention of talking, not even talking about talking. At the ruling African National Congress’s recent fifth National Policy Conference, held from June 30 to July 5, a top party official was quoted as saying that the party “will come up with a comprehensive policy package to simultaneously boost growth, address racial inequality and tackle a 28% unemployment rate”. The obvious observation is that such a policy package still has to be formulated, while the unemployment rate is much higher than the stated figure, if a different measure is employed.

Considering the dire situation of the South African economy, it is unimaginable that no plan exists. It is nearly a month, at the time of writing, since Moody’s downgraded South Africa’s sovereign rating on June 9, maintaining a negative outlook. The downgrade was due to the deterioration of South Africa’s institutional strength, reduced growth prospects, reflecting policy uncertainty and slower progress in implementing structural reforms, and the continued erosion of fiscal strength, owing to rising public debt and contingent liabilities.

Which, if any, of the reasons for the downgrade are new to you? That is the thing – nothing is new. It is all nauseatingly repetitive.

Staying with the theme of repetition, on June 1, Fitch stated that South Africa’s credit rating continued to be weighed down by low potential economic growth, sizable contingent liabilities and the deterioration in the governance of State-owned enterprises (SoEs).

Are the issues policy issues or governance issues? If the answer is the latter, it would imply that what is required is transformation, and not the aforementioned. Isn’t it? This begs the question: If the reasons for South Africa’s woes are known, why are they not being addressed as a matter of urgency? Could it be that this is not acknowledged? It is said that, if one does not realise that one has a problem – also known by the technical term of ‘being in denial’ – then, by definition, there is no problem to remedy. As a case in point, on July 1, the National Treasury issued a statement on the recapitalisation of South Africa Airways (SAA), stating that government had decided to transfer funds from the National Revenue Fund to SAA to allow the airline to pay back its debt to Standard Chartered Bank, thereby avoiding a default. Interestingly, the media release made no mention of the fact that SAA is a SoE. It also did not mention the airline’s governance or apparent lack thereof.

Whenever will Benjamin Franklin’s words – “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” – be heeded in South Africa? Or is the favoured approach the Superstition in the Pigeon? If this is the policy and approach of preference, then cast your mind back to what you did after 2009 – during South Africa’s last economic recession. Time to do it again. If you are superstitious, that is.