Tag: unemployment

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 2: Why South Africa Is Structurally Vulnerable to Influence Operations

Given SHINGANGE

Influence operations do not succeed because societies are careless or uninformed. They succeed because societies are structurally exposed. South Africa is one such society, not because it is uniquely weak, but because its historical, social, and institutional conditions create fertile ground for cognitive manipulation.

This vulnerability is not primarily technological. It cannot be explained by social media alone, nor solved through platform regulation or content moderation. It is rooted in long-standing fractures, unresolved grievances, and declining trust in authority. Until these structural conditions are acknowledged explicitly, responses to influence operations will remain superficial, reactive, and misdirected.

Understanding structural vulnerability is uncomfortable because it forces inward reflection rather than outward blame. But without this honesty, resilience remains rhetorical.

Influence follows fractures, not platforms

A common analytical error is to treat influence operations as a product of digital platforms. Platforms matter, but they do not determine what resonates. Influence operations follow fractures, not technologies.

In South Africa, several fractures are persistent and deeply embedded. Economic inequality remains extreme and highly visible. Unemployment, particularly among young people, is chronic. Service delivery failures are experienced daily and locally. Corruption has shifted from scandal to expectation. Political promises frequently collapse into administrative incapacity.

These conditions generate frustration, resentment, and mistrust. Influence operations do not invent grievances. They identify where emotional pressure already exists and apply narrative force.

Focusing too narrowly on platforms obscures the real drivers of vulnerability. Platforms amplify what societies already feel; they do not create those feelings from nothing.

Lived experience as a narrative battleground

In South Africa, political narratives intersect directly with lived experience. This is a critical distinction.

When electricity fails, water is unreliable, housing is inadequate, or safety deteriorates, people do not experience these as abstract governance challenges. They experience them as personal neglect. Narratives that frame these failures as intentional, inevitable, or evidence of systemic betrayal resonate quickly because they align with daily reality.

Influence operations exploit this alignment. They do not contradict lived experience; they reinterpret it. They shift the question from “why is this failing?” to “who is responsible and why should they be trusted?”

Once that shift occurs, the space for institutional explanation narrows sharply. Technical responses sound evasive. Structural complexity sounds like excuse. Emotionally satisfying narratives outperform accurate ones.

Inequality and the politics of comparison

South Africa’s inequality does more than produce hardship. It produces constant comparison.

People compare themselves to neighbours, communities, municipalities, provinces, and imagined alternatives. Digital platforms intensify this by placing unequal realities side by side without context. The result is not only frustration, but moral interpretation. Inequality becomes evidence of injustice, exclusion, or deliberate neglect.

Influence operations leverage this interpretive layer. Narratives frame inequality not simply as a policy failure, but as proof that the system benefits some at the expense of others. This framing deepens resentment and accelerates polarisation.

Once inequality is moralised in this way, compromise becomes difficult. Governance challenges are recast as existential conflicts.

Racism as a latent identity fracture

Racism remains one of South Africa’s most enduring and emotionally charged fractures, not always visible in daily discourse, but never absent from collective memory. It functions less as a constant explicit conflict and more as a latent identity fault line that can be activated under conditions of stress.

Importantly, racism in this context is not only about overt prejudice or individual attitudes. It is embedded in historical experience, spatial inequality, economic exclusion, and perceived patterns of advantage and disadvantage. These experiences are carried forward through narrative, memory, and identity.

Influence operations exploit this latent quality. Racial framing does not need to be explicit to be effective. It can be implied through language, imagery, selective emphasis, or comparison. Narratives that suggest group-based blame, intentional exclusion, or inherited injustice resonate quickly because they connect present frustration to historical explanation.

This makes racial narratives particularly powerful during elections. They compress complex structural problems into emotionally legible stories and discourage nuance, because challenging the narrative can feel like denying lived experience.

The strategic risk is not that racism suddenly “returns” during elections. It is that unresolved racial identity tensions provide a ready-made emotional infrastructure for influence.

Language, identity, and segmented influence

South Africa’s linguistic and cultural diversity is often celebrated as a strength. Strategically, it also enables segmented influence.

Narratives can be tailored by language, region, generation, class, and political identity. The same issue can be framed differently for different audiences, each version optimised for emotional resonance rather than shared understanding.

This segmentation fragments the information environment. Communities mobilise around parallel narratives that do not fully overlap. Disagreement becomes not only factual, but interpretive. Institutions struggle to communicate coherently across these divides.

Fragmentation weakens collective sense-making and lowers the threshold for manipulation.

Literacy, information processing, and cognitive load

Another often overlooked source of structural vulnerability is uneven literacy, not only in basic reading and writing, but in media literacy, digital literacy, and civic literacy.

South Africa’s information environment assumes levels of fluency that are not evenly distributed. Many citizens navigate political information across multiple languages, informal channels, and low-trust environments. Under these conditions, complex explanations struggle to compete with simplified narratives that rely on emotion, repetition, and familiar framing.

Influence operations exploit this asymmetry. They reduce complexity, personalise blame, and rely on emotionally intuitive cues rather than detailed argument. This is not a reflection of intelligence or engagement, but of cognitive load. When people are overwhelmed, they gravitate toward messages that are easier to process and emotionally coherent.

Uneven literacy also increases reliance on social trust networks. Information is evaluated not only on content, but on who shared it and how it feels. This makes segmented influence more effective and correction more difficult.

The result is not uniform misinformation, but uneven vulnerability.

Declining institutional trust as a force multiplier

Influence operations accelerate where trust is low. In South Africa, confidence in political parties, local government, law enforcement, and public institutions has eroded steadily.

As trust declines, authority shifts. People rely more on peer networks, community figures, and emotionally resonant narratives. Credibility is anchored in perceived authenticity rather than institutional role.

This is a force multiplier for influence operations. Narratives no longer require institutional validation to spread. In some cases, institutional denial reinforces belief by appearing defensive or disconnected.

Once trust collapses, correction becomes difficult. Evidence is discounted. Motives are assumed.

Algorithmic amplification and outrage economics

Digital platforms reward reaction. Content that provokes anger, fear, certainty, or moral judgement travels faster than content that explains complexity.

This creates an economy of outrage. Extreme positions gain visibility. Moderation struggles. Nuance is crowded out.

Influence operations do not need to dominate the information space. They need only to shape its emotional tone.

Why local government elections magnify vulnerability

Local government elections sit at the intersection of these dynamics.

They are emotionally proximate, tied to daily life, embedded in community identity, and less consistently scrutinised. Narratives spread through informal channels where verification is weak and trust is relational.

Influence operations can operate below national radar while producing immediate effects: protests, delegitimised councillors, contested outcomes, and community instability.

Local disruption does not need to scale nationally to be strategically effective.

Structural vulnerability is not public failure

It is tempting to interpret vulnerability as public ignorance or irresponsibility. This is inaccurate and counterproductive.

Structural vulnerability reflects historical inequality, socio-economic stress, governance failure, and information overload. Citizens responding emotionally to these conditions are not failing democracy. Democracy is failing to protect them from manipulation in a high-pressure environment.

Recognising vulnerability is not an insult. It is preparation.

Toward resilience grounded in realism

The solution is not censorship, surveillance, or panic. It is realism.

Resilience begins with acknowledging that South Africa’s exposure is structural. It requires institutions to treat cognitive risk as part of electoral integrity, political actors to compete without weaponising fracture irresponsibly, and public discourse that recognises emotion without surrendering to it.

Without this realism, technical interventions will fail. With it, preparation becomes possible.

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.

Don’t judge me V 2

 

Over the past few months we have seen many young graduates standing by the roadside with boxes written their qualifications in an effort to raise some awareness about their challenges of unemployment. In essence, they are saying:

Dear Society, 

I have done everything that you asked of me. I avoided drugs, teenage pregnancy, alcohol in school and even though at times I had to eat corn flakes for supper I made it here, even though at times I had to wear those high heels to go to Cubana and be relevant just so that I can feel human, I made it here. All those sleepless nights in the computer lab and library, I am here.

But what is this; you never prepared me for this? All you said, Society was that if I do all this, I will be fine. And really towards the end of my studies, I could taste it, I already looked at cars that I would buy first, I already saw that fridge that I was going to buy for my mother, the shoes I want to wear. This was a few months ago.Mind you, I also have my sibblings who have been waiting for me so that their lives could change. But it is tougher now, I knock and knock no one opens, I am now classified as an unemployed graduate, and only now I see that those that were ahead of me, are the same, if they are not employed in retail shops, they either walk around with their envelopes responding to any call for leanership, flip some are even registering companies now and calling themselves entrepreneurs even though they never imagined themselves being that. 

So, know that when I stand by the street corner, I have tried it all, and actually, my whole life has been about trying.

Yours in Unemployment

This is the reality we live in now, and no one seems to be coming up with the answers, and once again this shows how divided we are and how some legacies still persist in society.

Continue reading “Don’t judge me V 2”