Tag: Social Cohesion

Article 4: Governing the Cognitive Domain – Why South Africa Is Structurally Unprepared for Influence Operations

Given SHINGANGE

The first three articles in this series established three core points. Article 1 defined influence operations as a defining feature of contemporary conflict, operating primarily in the cognitive domain. Article 2 examined how digital platforms and fragmented media ecosystems enable influence at scale. Article 3 demonstrated why South Africa is particularly exposed, drawing on empirical indicators such as rising identity salience, declining intergroup trust, and widespread perceptions of institutional unfairness.

These indicators are not abstract social trends. They are measurable signals of cognitive vulnerability. Article 4 therefore turns to the institutional question: despite the visibility of these signals, is South Africa structurally capable of recognising and responding to influence operations as a governance and security challenge?

The short answer is no—not because of a lack of concern or policy language, but because South Africa’s governance architecture remains fundamentally misaligned with the nature of cognitive and information-layer threats.

The Category Error in South Africa’s Security Thinking

South Africa continues to treat influence, disinformation, and narrative contestation as peripheral issues—communication problems, political risks, or media ethics concerns—rather than as core national security challenges. This is a category error. Influence operations operate below the threshold of traditional security responses, yet they shape the conditions under which democratic governance, social cohesion, and institutional legitimacy function.

The country’s security architecture reflects an earlier era of threat perception. Cybersecurity is framed largely in technical terms: systems, networks, critical infrastructure, and cybercrime. Strategic communications are treated as a government messaging function. Social cohesion is addressed through social policy and symbolic nation-building initiatives. These domains operate in silos, despite the fact that influence operations exploit precisely the gaps between them.

As a result, no single institution is responsible for understanding or defending the cognitive domain as a system.

Policy Without Strategy, Strategy Without Structure

South Africa does not suffer from a complete absence of policy. The National Cybersecurity Policy Framework (NCPF), now a decade old, acknowledges information security and cyber threats in broad terms. However, it offers little conceptual clarity on influence operations, cognitive security, or narrative resilience. More importantly, it does not translate these concerns into institutional design, roles, or accountability.

This reflects a deeper structural problem: policy has not been followed by strategy, and strategy has not been followed by structure. Influence operations cut across cybersecurity, intelligence, communications, education, and social trust, yet no coordinating mechanism exists to integrate these domains. Responsibility is diffused, and accountability is absent.

In such an environment, responses to influence-related incidents are necessarily reactive, fragmented, and politicised.

The Absence of Cognitive Security as a Governance Concept

One of the most significant gaps in South Africa’s security discourse is the absence of cognitive security as an explicit governance concept. There is no shared framework for understanding how identity, trust, perception, and information interact as security variables. As a result, influence is either over-securitised—treated as a threat to be suppressed—or under-securitised—dismissed as free speech, politics, or noise.

This false binary paralyses response. Cognitive security does not require censorship or information control. It requires the capacity to anticipate how narratives form, spread, and harden, and how institutional behaviour either mitigates or accelerates those processes. Without this conceptual foundation, even well-intentioned interventions risk undermining legitimacy further.

Institutional Trust as a Strategic Variable

Article 3 showed that trust erosion is a central vulnerability in South Africa’s cognitive battlespace. Yet trust is rarely treated as a strategic variable in governance design. Institutions measure performance through compliance, outputs, or political alignment, not through their contribution to societal trust and interpretive stability.

This omission is consequential. Influence operations thrive where institutions are perceived as opaque, inconsistent, or self-interested. Every governance failure, communication misstep, or policy contradiction becomes material for narrative exploitation. In this sense, institutional behaviour itself becomes part of the information environment.

South Africa’s challenge is therefore not only defensive, but reflexive. Institutions must recognise their role as narrative actors, whether they intend to be or not.

Why Tactical Responses Will Continue to Fail

Calls for fact-checking initiatives, platform regulation, or counter-disinformation units are understandable, but insufficient. These are tactical responses to a strategic problem. Without an overarching framework for cognitive security, such measures risk becoming symbolic, selectively enforced, or politically contested—further eroding trust.

Influence operations adapt faster than regulatory or bureaucratic processes. By the time a narrative is identified and countered, its cognitive effects may already be embedded. Resilience, not reaction, is therefore the appropriate objective.

Conclusion: Structure Follows Strategy, or Failure Persists

This article has argued that South Africa’s vulnerability to influence operations is not primarily a function of hostile actors or technological change. It is the result of structural misalignment: governance systems designed for a different era confronting threats they were never configured to address.

Influence operations exploit gaps between institutions, disciplines, and mandates. Until South Africa recognises the cognitive domain as a legitimate and shared security concern—and aligns policy, strategy, and structure accordingly—those gaps will remain exploitable.

The implication is not that South Africa needs more laws, louder messaging, or heavier regulation. It needs a coherent way of seeing. In the cognitive domain, perception is not merely the object of security; it is the terrain on which security is decided.

Article 3: Influence Operations in South Africa – Identity, Grievance, and the Cognitive Battlespace

Given SHINGANGE

Article 1 of this series established influence operations as a defining feature of contemporary conflict, operating primarily in the cognitive domain rather than through force. Article 2 examined how digital platforms, algorithms, and fragmented media ecosystems enable these operations at scale. This third article addresses a more fundamental question: why such operations are increasingly effective in South Africa, even in the absence of clear attribution or coordinated campaigns.

Influence operations do not begin with messages or platforms; they begin with people. Specifically, they exploit how individuals understand identity, trust others, and interpret grievance. These elements constitute the cognitive battlespace. In South Africa, this battlespace has been shifting in measurable ways over the past decade, creating conditions that lower resistance to influence, polarisation, and narrative manipulation.

This article does not claim to identify or attribute specific influence operations targeting South Africa. Nor does it argue that changes in public attitudes are the direct result of coordinated campaigns. Instead, it examines the structural and psychological conditions that make influence more efficient once narratives are introduced. Influence operations rarely manufacture division; they succeed by activating and amplifying perceptions that already exist.

Identity Salience and Cognitive Fragmentation

Afrobarometer’s 2024/2025 survey data provides a credible empirical lens into South Africa’s cognitive terrain. The findings show a pronounced shift away from national identity towards ethnic identity. While most citizens still report balancing the two, one-quarter of South Africans now identify more strongly with their ethnic group than with being South African, and only a small minority prioritise national identity alone. This represents a sharp reversal from the early 2010s, when national identification peaked following the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

From an influence-operations perspective, this shift matters because national identity functions as a stabilising cognitive frame. When it weakens, audiences become more receptive to narratives that interpret politics, economics, and governance through group-based lenses. Identity does not need to be weaponised aggressively; its mere salience reduces the effort required to frame issues as exclusionary or zero-sum.

Afrobarometer data further shows that perceptions of ethnic discrimination by the state are widespread and cross-cutting. Nearly half of respondents believe their ethnic group is treated unfairly by government. In influence terms, the factual accuracy of this perception is secondary. What matters is that grievance frames already exist, are emotionally resonant, and can be activated without the introduction of false information.

Trust Erosion and the Weakening of Informal Resilience

Identity salience becomes operationally significant when combined with declining trust. Fewer than one-third of South Africans report trusting members of other ethnic groups. Low horizontal trust weakens informal social resilience mechanisms such as peer correction, cross-group dialogue, and social sanction against extreme narratives. It also increases reliance on in-group validation, which digital platforms are particularly effective at reinforcing.

At the same time, tolerance in everyday interactions remains relatively high. Most South Africans report that they would not mind living next to someone from a different ethnic group, and interethnic marriage remains broadly accepted. This apparent contradiction is critical. It suggests that the primary risk is not immediate social breakdown, but cognitive hardening: physical coexistence alongside psychological distancing. Contemporary influence operations are optimised for this condition, prioritising long-term attitudinal shifts over mobilisation or violence.

Synthesis: From Cognitive Conditions to Influence Effects

Taken together, the data points to a coherent influence-operations pathway. Rising identity salience provides the targeting variable; perceived grievance supplies emotional resonance; declining trust reduces social friction against polarising narratives; and digital platforms amplify emotionally charged content at scale. The result is not persuasion in the classical sense, but gradual normalisation of suspicion, disengagement, and interpretive closure. Influence succeeds not by convincing people of new ideas, but by narrowing how they interpret existing ones.

This synthesis is important because it clarifies that influence effectiveness in South Africa does not depend on sophisticated disinformation or foreign orchestration. It depends on the interaction between social fragmentation and an information ecosystem that rewards outrage, affirmation, and repetition.

Platforms, Amplification, and Narrative Stickiness

As discussed in Article 2, digital platforms privilege engagement over accuracy. In South Africa, media-monitoring and misinformation-reporting initiatives consistently show that polarising, identity-laden, and emotionally charged content outperforms corrective or contextual information. These dynamics do not require malicious intent. Political rhetoric, economic stress, historical grievance, and sensationalist media all feed into the same amplification loops.

This marks a departure from earlier models of information warfare. The threat is less about falsehood insertion and more about narrative dominance. Influence operations in this environment are often decentralised, opportunistic, and endogenous. Narratives are laundered across communities, reframed by local actors, and legitimised through repetition rather than authority.

Influence Without Attribution

A persistent weakness in South African discourse is the assumption that influence operations must be foreign, centralised, and provable. This assumption obscures more pervasive dynamics. As argued in Article 1, influence can be diffuse and politically ambiguous while still producing strategic effects. In South Africa, these effects may include declining confidence in democratic processes, normalisation of institutional distrust, and increased receptivity to simplistic explanations for complex governance challenges.

None of these outcomes require a single adversary. They require only a permissive cognitive environment and an information ecosystem optimised for emotional engagement.

Policy and Governance Implications

South Africa’s current security and governance frameworks are poorly aligned to these realities. Cybersecurity policy remains focused on technical infrastructure, cybercrime, and system integrity, with minimal engagement with cognitive or information-layer threats. The National Cybersecurity Policy Framework, in particular, offers little guidance on influence, narrative resilience, or societal trust as security variables.

This creates a structural blind spot. Without recognising the cognitive battlespace, responses default to reactive communication, content takedowns, or politicised blame. None address the underlying conditions identified here. Building resilience requires institutional coordination across cybersecurity, communications, education, and social policy—areas that currently operate in silos.

Conclusion

Article 1 established influence operations as a defining feature of modern conflict. Article 2 explained how digital platforms enable them. This article has shown why South Africa is particularly exposed: not primarily because of hostile actors, but because of measurable shifts in identity, trust, and grievance that weaken cognitive resilience.

The most serious influence challenge facing South Africa may therefore be internal rather than external, structural rather than tactical. Until influence is understood as a function of societal conditions rather than isolated campaigns, policy responses will remain misaligned. Influence operations succeed not when societies are divided, but when they lack the institutional and social capacity to recognise how division is being exploited.

When Men Lose Their Place, Society Pays the Price

Given SHINGANGE

I arrived unannounced, as I often do. I took the street that passes the local shops ko Ramadan as we call them, partly out of habit, partly out of instinct. Some part of me suspected I might find him there. My father is one of those people who collect the different purses of those playing mochina. And there he was.

The street was alive with movement. Men and women standing and sitting in clusters, some by their usual spot there by the guy who fixes shoes. Conversations layered on top of each other. Waiting. Hoping. Calculating. Mochina is more than gambling. It is a ritual. Numbers are not random. They are stories. They represent events, dreams, memories, and losses. You read the morning, interpret life, and choose a number. You put money down not just on chance, but on meaning.

There was a time when mochina was played by old people in the community, and now, when I go there, I see that there are a lot of young people, I hasten to say young people, though, because maybe when I was young, the old people I am referring to were my age. Anyway, this spot in my community is busy, with a bottle store at the corner, a foreign-owned shop, which is why it is called Ramadan, and a spot where alcohol purchased from the liquor shop can be consumed. There is also Laphalapha, where they sell sphatlhos/kotas. Next to Laphalapha, there is a barber shop in one of the houses.

I parked. He walked over to my car. I asked for numbers while lodging a complaint that whenever I ask him for them, I never win. He starts telling me that it occurred to him that I might come home that day. As he tells me this, Bra Lucky passes by, and I ask him for a number. I think he mentioned 13. I don’t even know what it means, but I keep searching for loose change in the car, half embarrassed, half hopeful. I played along, knowing full well how this usually ends. “o mmone, Kenny?” my Dad asks if I have seen Kenny. Ntate Kenny is his best friend, and he points to the corner where the guy who fixes shoes is. I think my dad is old now because I haven’t driven past that spot yet. Anyway, I drive off and make sure to shout a greeting when I pass that spot.

He comes home, I ask if I had won, that time I don’t even remember my numbers, and he tells me that most people didn’t win and continues to explain how the mochina has played all of them, and that no one from his bag won. Even if his numbers don’t come up, but someone else does, there is a percentage that he gets, so you can imagine how it feels when even the other people do not win.

Later that day, after the formal greetings in the sitting room, I ask how he is, and he says he is ok. He had not been well, and I was travelling, so when I ask, I normally have a visual inspection of sorts to see if he is ok.

He then told me about an event they are going to that relates to the men’s forum. He has spoken about the forum before, and he normally tells me stories from there. Old men mostly. Pensioners. Men with time, memory, and regret. They sit together and talk about their lives. And often, they cry. This man’s forum is run by the local clinic.

It seems like this is something that they really look forward to as local men, not because they are weak. But because they finally have permission.

The stories are painfully similar. Men who were pushed out of their own homes. Men whose authority was steadily eroded until it disappeared. Men who watched their children grow up listening only to their mothers, not because the mothers were wrong, but because the fathers were sidelined, disempowered, or made irrelevant. Men who now look at their grown children and see struggle, confusion, anger, and failure. And they blame themselves. Mind you, these are men who, for the longest time they had to endure apartheid, being disrespected by young white men and women, calling them boy and all sorts of names.

This is where the conversation around men in our society becomes dishonest.

We talk endlessly about toxic masculinity. We talk very little about displaced masculinity. We speak loudly about men as problems, but quietly about men as casualties. In South Africa, especially, the dominant narrative paints men as irresponsible, violent, absent, or dangerous. Some men fit that description. Many do not. Yet all are judged by the same brush.

What happens when a man is told repeatedly that his role is unnecessary, suspect, or harmful?

He retreats.

He withdraws from decision-making. From discipline. From emotional investment. From responsibility. Sometimes he withdraws into alcohol. Sometimes into gambling. Sometimes into silence. Sometimes into forums where other broken men nod in recognition.

And then society acts surprised when children grow up without structure, without direction, without accountability. We talk about absent fathers without asking who pushed them out, who undermined them, or who taught them that their presence no longer mattered.

The men in these forums are not monsters. They are men who failed in environments that no longer knew what to do with them. Men who were never taught how to adapt their masculinity to changing social realities were only told that it was wrong. Men who were stripped of authority without being given a new role. Men who now carry the guilt of outcomes they had limited power to influence.

The pain cuts deeper when they speak about their children. Sons who drift. Daughters who struggle. Lives that never quite stabilise. The men internalise it as personal failure. The forum, meant to heal, often becomes a mirror reflecting everything they lost.

This is the uncomfortable truth. You cannot dismantle men’s role in society without consequences. You cannot weaken fathers and expect strong families. You cannot confuse masculinity and then blame men for being lost.

Being a man is not about domination. It is about responsibility. It is about presence. It is about guidance, protection, and sacrifice. When society attacks those foundations without offering alternatives, men do not become better. They become invisible.

And invisible men do not raise strong children.

If we are serious about fixing our social decay, crime, unemployment, and moral drift, we must stop having shallow conversations about men. We must stop reducing complex historical, economic, and cultural realities into slogans. We must create spaces where men are rebuilt, not shamed. Where fatherhood is reinforced, not questioned. Where masculinity is redefined with clarity, not contempt.

Those old men sitting in forums crying are not the end of the story. They are a warning.

Ignore them, and the next generation will sit in the same circles, with even less hope, even less structure, and even more resentment.

This is not about men versus women. It is about balance. About roles. About accountability. About restoring order in a society that has confused liberation with destruction.

When men lose their place, society does not become freer. It becomes weaker.

And we are already paying the price.

Hoba Monna (being a man) and the Quiet Weight Men Carry

Given SHINGANGE

Hoba Monna by Sannere featuring Selimo Thabang, Omali Themba, Flash Cortez, Wave Rhyder, Marcx Brass) 

I hesitated before writing and publishing this piece during the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children, a period rightly dedicated to confronting gender based violence and the harm it causes. I am conscious that speaking about men’s struggles at this time can easily be misread as deflection, minimisation, or even quiet support for violence, as if acknowledging the weight men carry somehow denies the suffering of women. That fear of misinterpretation is real, and it says something important about the moment we are in. Yet silence is not neutrality. Avoiding honest reflection because it may be misunderstood only narrows the conversation further. This article is not an attempt to excuse harm or shift blame. It is an attempt to understand the human conditions under which many men are living, because without that understanding, the very violence we seek to end will continue to reproduce itself in quieter, less visible ways.

Sometimes a song does what public debates, campaigns, and opinion pieces struggle to do. It names a feeling without dressing it up. Hoba Monna does exactly that. It speaks plainly about what it feels like to be a man carrying responsibility in silence, and in doing so, it exposes a reality many men live but rarely articulate.

The title itself is revealing. Hoba monna means “to be a man”. Not to perform masculinity. Not to dominate. Simply to exist as a man. Yet from the opening hook, the song makes it clear that this existence has become exhausting.

“Ke fihletse boemong ba ho tsofala hoba monna, ke fihletse boemong ba ho utloa hore ho thata hoba monna.”

This is not exaggeration. It is accumulation. The repetition signals long term emotional fatigue, the slow wearing down that comes from expectation layered on top of expectation. Being a man, in this telling, is not dramatic. It is heavy.

Strength Without Space to Falter

In the first verse, the artist captures a contradiction many men experience early in life.

“People keep judging me, when I go weak, they forget I’m human and I also breathe.”

Men are permitted strength, but not struggle. The moment vulnerability appears, humanity is withdrawn. Weakness is treated as failure rather than as a normal part of being human.

Yet responsibility remains non negotiable.

“I gotta confide, I gotta provide in the process so my family can eat.”

There is no rejection of duty here. The pain comes from being expected to provide and endure without acknowledgement of cost. Men are required to function regardless of their internal state. When they do not, judgment follows swiftly. Pressure becomes personal rather than contextual. The man is blamed, while the conditions surrounding him remain invisible.

Becoming a Man Without Guidance

One of the quietest lines in the song is also one of the most revealing.

“And I wish my father could’ve shown me a hint.”

This is not accusation. It is absence speaking. It reflects the experience of many men who are expected to know how to be responsible, disciplined, and emotionally regulated without ever having seen those qualities modelled consistently.

Manhood is treated as instinctive rather than learned. When men struggle, the struggle is moralised instead of understood. Many men are navigating adulthood without maps, mentors, or reference points, while still being held to rigid standards.

Culture and the Discipline of Silence

The second verse, delivered in Sesotho, speaks directly to cultural training.

“Society e re rutile ho nka ka sefuba, ene re nke ka senna.”

Society taught us to take everything on the chest and take it as a man

This is not mockery of culture. It is description. Emotional restraint has long been framed as strength. Endurance as virtue. But the song does not romanticise this conditioning. It shows where it leads.

“Ho fihlela moo e ka reng kea khathala.”

Until the point where one becomes exhausted.

When pain has no outlet, it does not disappear. It accumulates. Silence does not build resilience indefinitely. It eventually produces numbness, withdrawal, or collapse.

Responsibility Without Support

One of the most important moments in Hoba Monna comes through a question that reveals imbalance.

“Ba re o hlokomele bana ba heno, empa nna ke hlokomelewa ke mang?”

They tell me to take care of my siblings, but who takes care of me?

This reflects a familiar reality in many African households. Men are expected to support siblings and extended family, to be stable, to be reliable, to carry others.

The follow up question sharpens the point.

“Ba re o ba loanele bana ba heno, empa nna ke loanela ke mang?”

They tell me to fight for my siblings, but who fights for me?

This is not self pity. It is recognition of imbalance. Responsibility flows outward. Care rarely flows back.

Smiling While Breaking

The final verse captures a reality many men live daily.

“Ke tlameha ke tsoe ke phande ke smile le batho kantle, ke robegile ka hare.”

I have to go outside hustle and smile with people, while I am broken inside.

This is not performance for praise. It is survival. In a society that responds harshly to male vulnerability, composure becomes armour. Smiling becomes a way to remain functional even while internally unraveling.

Why Hoba Monna Matters

Hoba Monna matters because it humanises men without excusing harm. It does not deny violence, irresponsibility, or failure. It asks a deeper question. What conditions produce men who are emotionally exhausted, silent, and disengaged?

Men carry pressures that are rarely named, let alone addressed. Economic strain. Cultural silence. Extended responsibility. Emotional isolation. None of these excuse destructive behaviour. Ignoring them guarantees its repetition.

Strength should not require emotional erasure. Responsibility should not require loneliness. Being a man should not mean carrying unbearable weight alone.

Hoba Monna is not asking for sympathy. It is asking for recognition. Recognition that men are human, that endurance has limits, and that silence is not the same as strength.

Sometimes music tells the truth long before society is ready to hear it.

What Does It Mean to Be a Modern Man in South Africa?

There is a quiet crisis unfolding in South African society, and it is not being spoken about honestly. It sits beneath the headlines, beneath the slogans, beneath the well funded campaigns and carefully worded statements. It is the crisis of what it means to be a man, and whether society still knows how to speak to men without turning them into symbols of everything that is wrong.

To be clear from the outset, this is not an attempt to deny the reality of violence, abuse, or harm committed by men. Those realities are undeniable and must be confronted directly. But confronting harm is not the same thing as condemning an entire group into silence, shame, and disengagement. Somewhere along the way, South Africa has begun to confuse accountability with collective guilt. That confusion is costing us more than we are willing to admit.

A generation of men is growing up hearing what they must not be. Do not be dominant. Do not be assertive. Do not be too strong. Do not lead in the wrong way. Do not speak incorrectly. Do not exist incorrectly. Yet there is far less clarity about what men should be. And when a society only knows how to criticise, but not how to guide, it should not be surprised when the result is confusion rather than change.

Historically, manhood in South Africa was not a vague or abstract idea. Across cultures and communities, despite their differences, there were shared expectations. A man was expected to take responsibility. He was expected to protect, to provide where possible, to discipline himself before disciplining others, and to anchor a family and a community. These roles were not always fulfilled perfectly, and they were often distorted by patriarchy, violence, and power. But they provided a moral structure. They gave men something to grow into.

That structure has largely collapsed, not because it was consciously dismantled with care, but because it was attacked without being replaced. Economic exclusion has made the provider role unreachable for millions. Unemployment has stripped men of dignity long before any social campaign ever did. Fatherlessness has removed mentorship at scale. Historical trauma has gone unprocessed. Into this vacuum, society has inserted a single dominant message, men are the problem.

Public discourse increasingly frames men primarily through statistics of violence, abuse, and crime. Media narratives repeat these images until they become identity. Campaigns, often well intentioned, speak about men as risks to be managed rather than people to be developed. Masculinity itself is treated as something that must be softened, neutralised, or apologised for, rather than disciplined and directed.

The idea of toxic masculinity is a good example. At its best, it was meant to describe specific harmful behaviours. At its worst, it has become a blunt instrument, used to suggest that masculinity itself is suspect. The problem is not that men are strong, assertive, or capable of leadership. The problem is what they do with those traits, and whether they are guided by moral responsibility. But this distinction is often lost. When masculinity is framed primarily as a danger, many men stop engaging altogether.

The psychological cost of this matters. When men are constantly told that their instincts are wrong, their presence is threatening, and their history is shameful, many respond not with reform, but with withdrawal. Silence replaces participation. Apathy replaces leadership. Some retreat into resentment. Others simply opt out of society altogether. None of these outcomes serve women, children, or communities.

There is also a deep contradiction at play. Society still expects men to show up in moments of crisis. To protect. To intervene. To take responsibility when things go wrong. Yet at the same time, it strips them of confidence, moral authority, and legitimacy. You cannot ask men to lead while constantly telling them they are unfit to do so. You cannot expect responsibility from people who are treated as permanent suspects.

This contradiction is especially stark in the South African context. Men are expected to navigate extreme inequality, unemployment, and social instability, while being held to moral standards that assume access to resources, opportunity, and support. A young man in a township is told to be responsible, but denied work. Told to be present, but raised without a father. Told to respect women, but shown daily through lived experience that power is exercised without fairness or justice. This does not excuse harmful behaviour, but it does explain why simplistic narratives fail.

What is missing from the conversation is a serious discussion about male development. Not punishment. Not slogans. Development. Men are not born knowing how to be disciplined, restrained, or ethical. These are learned behaviours, shaped through mentorship, expectation, and consequence. When society abandons this work, and replaces it with condemnation, it forfeits the very change it claims to want.

Accountability is essential. But accountability without dignity is ineffective. Men respond to standards when those standards are clear, consistent, and rooted in respect. Historically, rites of passage, work, fatherhood, and community roles provided these standards. Today, many men drift without markers, without recognition, without a sense of earned identity. In that vacuum, some seek belonging in destructive ways.

It is also worth asking who benefits from a society where men are disengaged. A passive man does not build. A confused man does not lead. A resentful man does not cooperate. The weakening of men does not strengthen women. It weakens families. Children do not benefit from absent fathers, whether that absence is physical or emotional. Communities do not thrive when half their population is treated as a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be cultivated.

This is not a call to return to outdated or abusive models of masculinity. Dominance, entitlement, and violence have no place in a healthy society. But neither does moral erasure. A constructive model of modern manhood must be rooted in responsibility, self mastery, service, and courage. Not the courage of aggression, but the courage of restraint. Not dominance over others, but mastery over oneself.

A modern South African man should be held to high standards. He should be expected to protect without controlling, to lead without abusing, to provide where possible and to contribute where he cannot. He should be challenged to confront his own behaviour honestly. But he should also be spoken to as someone capable of growth, not as an inherent threat.

The current narrative often fails this test. It speaks about men, not to them. It diagnoses without mentoring. It condemns without constructing. In doing so, it undermines its own goals. Social change does not happen through humiliation. It happens through clarity, expectation, and inclusion.

If South Africa is serious about addressing violence, inequality, and social breakdown, it must re learn how to speak to men with both firmness and respect. Men must be included as part of the solution, not positioned permanently as the source of the problem. This requires courage, because it means resisting easy narratives and simplistic villains.

A society that wants better men must be willing to invest in making them. That means mentorship. That means work opportunities. That means fathers who are supported, not mocked. That means cultural conversations that distinguish between harmful behaviour and male identity. That means acknowledging historical and economic realities without using them as excuses or weapons.

Being a modern man in South Africa should mean choosing responsibility in a context that often denies recognition. It should mean discipline in a culture that rewards excess. It should mean standing up, not because you are told you are dangerous, but because you are reminded that you matter.

Until we can have that conversation honestly, we will continue to talk past each other. And in that silence, the quiet crisis of men will deepen, with consequences that society will eventually be forced to confront.