Scaling non-linearly in your mind
 
Why do young people think that South Africa is struggling?

Why do young people think that South Africa is struggling?

The hashtag #WhySAIsStruggling became quite popular For a few days last week. I collected 1,704 tweets that contained the hashtag over a couple of days. Here are the hourly tweet volumes to give you an idea of how the hashtag was picked up:

Hourly tweets volumes for #WhySAIsStruggling

I thought that this dataset would give us some insight into the kinds of issues that the (Twitter) public consider to be holding us back as a country. Here then are the most retweeted tweets using that hashtag:

So what do we take from that? There are no real surprises here (except perhaps for the absence of a ‘white monopoly capital’ narrative, but that is more the purview of another specific community on Twitter).

A clearly partisan thread runs through these tweets. It demonstrates that much of the frustration is aimed at the ANC and President Zuma in particular, while the EFF’s Julius Malema and former president Thabo Mbeki are lauded as better alternatives.

In more general terms though, runaway capitalism leading to a lack of equality and empowerment is similarly blamed for the current situation.

This is at least how one section of South Africa sees the issues with our country. Do you agree?

Suggested posts:

One comment

  1. Jeremy Acton

    I think that, from these sampled tweets, the young people don’t really have a clue about the real financial and policy controllers behind our government.

    They also have no idea about the pending economic collapse that SA is falling into, and what the causes will be. Think collapse of agriculture (and food shortages/high prices) and excessive energy costs (fuel and electricity) which is killing businesses.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *