Yippee. Once again, South Africa features strongly in the annals of Accolades You Don’t Really Want.
In the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, we are No 1 on the list of countries where government is far less trusted than business. To be precise, 22% of South Africans surveyed trust our government to do what is right, compared with 62% who trust business.
There are a few ways we can spin this sad statistic. Being South Africans the primary one, naturally, is to go on the attack. Who are these idiots who trust their governments? Have they learnt nothing from the 21st century?
In Singapore, Helen Zille’s spirit country, 76% of them are deluded into trusting their government. In Saudi Arabia, it’s 83%, and one can only assume this is because citizens silently mouth the words, “if by right you mean kill journalists” after the question “please indicate how much you trust [the government] to do what is right”.
In China, 89% of respondents trust their government, and 84% trust business.
Huh. Must be nice.
Another response, also quintessentially South African, is to say: “So what. We don’t care.” Except, we need to care. As a section heading in the report puts it, “distrust breeds polarisation”.
Of the 28 countries surveyed, six are categorised as severely polarised. They are Argentina, Colombia, the US, Spain, Sweden and South Africa.
The questions asked were, “please indicate how divided on key societal issues you believe your country is today”, and “how likely or unlikely do you think it is that your country will be able to work through or overcome its ideological divisions and lack of agreement on key issues and challenges?”
It gets more depressing. The more polarised a country is, the more citizens fear the consequences. And the top five consequences, in order of ranking, are: “Worsening prejudice and discrimination, slower economic development, violence in the streets, inability to address societal challenges, and ‘I will suffer financially’.”
Or Monday in South Africa, as we like to call it.
In South Africa, 62% trust NGOs, slightly above the global average of 59%, and down two percentage points (pp) from 2022. For the sake of comparison: our 22% trust in government is down 4pp, and considerably below the average of 51%. Trust in the media is holding steady at 41%, against the global average of 50%.
The only category where South Africa is in tune with the global zeitgeist is in trusting our employers: 76% to the global 77%.
Let’s not make this all about us, though (another South African trait). The global view of the results isn’t much rosier than our country-specific ones. Just four in 10 respondents predicted that they and their families will be “better off” in five years, which is a hefty, scary 10-point reduction from 2022. And not one developed nation has more than 36% of its people confident that their family will be better off in five years. Of the 28 countries surveyed, 24 have dropped to new lows in optimism.
Overall, trust in the public sector is declining, with 62% of respondents saying they trust business against 51% saying they trust government institutions. According to the Edelman press release, business increased its ethics score for the third straight year, rising 20 points since 2020. Frighteningly, “it is the only institution viewed as both competent and ethical”.
In fact, “business now holds a staggering 53-point lead over government in competence and is 30 points ahead on ethics. Its treatment of workers during the pandemic and return to work, along with the swift and decisive action of more than 1,000 businesses to exit Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, helped fuel a 20-point jump on ethics over the past three years. Business ... remains the most and only trusted institution globally.”
I use the word “frighteningly” advisedly. For every dodgy tender in South Africa, there appears to be a corrupt business attached to the end of the teat, greedily sucking the country dry. So the idea that we are to turn to business to be our saviour is counterintuitive to say the least.
Yet CEO Richard Edelman tells us: “The increased perception of business as ethical brings with it higher than ever expectations of CEOs to be a leading voice on societal issues. By a six-to-one margin, on average, respondents want more societal involvement by business on issues such as climate change, economic inequality and workforce reskilling.”
So as incredible as it sounds, the world — well, the 28 countries surveyed — is looking to business to save our skin. The caveat that Edelman attaches to this, though, is that “business must tread carefully, [as] more than half (52%) of our respondents do not believe business can avoid being politicised when it addresses contentious societal issues”.
In a country where the EFF marches to liberate fast-food restaurants and the ANC charges R1.2m to sit next to President Cyril Ramaphosa at dinner and cut his steak for him, this warning will probably resonate with South Africans.
As an aside, it’s family-owned businesses that are the most trusted, at 67%, with privately held businesses at 58%, publicly traded ones at 55%, and state-owned companies coming in last, at 50%. These are global results, of course. I would imagine that if they’d excluded the South African number, which isn’t noted but I think we can all assume was somewhere around zero, the average for state-owned companies would have looked a lot better.
If you’re wondering whether my antipathy to trusting the business sector to solve our societal problems is unfair, here’s a little morality tale from The Guardian. “Even as Edelman promotes its brand and pursues clients with stern warnings about the importance of trust, critics charge that the company appears reluctant to follow its own advice. The firm’s clients have ranged from ExxonMobil to the Saudi government and members of the Sackler family, the former owners of the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma.”
Yes, the business providing us with the information that business is increasingly trusted is itself potentially untrustworthy.
As Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center, is quoted as saying: “They’re ... trust specialists because trust is the finish line for a PR campaign.”
Trust can become a way to turn a profit, rather than to do good for altruistic reasons.
On this, The Guardian quotes Alison Taylor, a professor of corporate responsibility and ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business: “All of this is a form of PR, that trust is something you can accumulate like money. What is being called ‘trust’ here is not ‘trust’ in any kind of academic understanding. This is reputation.”
Ah well. So apparently you can’t trust anyone.
I like to end my columns with a call to action, or at least some sort of optimistic homily. This week, I decided to join the throng and outsource that to artificial intelligence — so I asked ChatGPT to write a haiku about South Africans, trust and our government. It isn’t the 5-7-5 format (we’ll learn not to argue with AI), but here’s its plaintive effort:
Corruption reigns
Trust in government now frail
Hope for change, small.
Yes, little robot. Hope for change is indeed small.