PALI LEHOHLA | The architecture of the second liberation: from a vulture culture to a numerical conscience

In this article I use a compilation of 2,700 instruments constructed from my more than 3,000 weekly columns the maiden title of which was on September 28 2002.

The compilation of these have generated a Lehohla ledger— an analytical framework of governance foresight systems from the belly of the beast of Statistics for Transparency Accountability Results and Transformation (Start).

This construct made me look into global statistical systems as mental modes of practicalising what Morena Mohlomi referred to as responsible leadership.

Mark responsible leadership as completely different from the cap in hand “My leader or leadership” mantra we have come to know. On January 14, former president Thabo Mbeki in his inaugural lecture of the late King Moshoeshoe II makes reference to His Majesty’s call for a second liberation.

Adv Muzi Sikhakhane makes a similar call and emphasises the uselessness of governance by commissions.

Mohlomi confronted a young Lepoqo, who later became King Moshoeshoe I, the founder of the Basotho nation, with a question of what he desired in life. Young Lepoqo said: “I want medicine to be a strong and feared leader.” Mohlomi said only the heart is medicine.

Mbeki’s inaugural lecture culminating in a second liberation is about the heart Mohlomi referred to. The Lehohla ledger, constructed through privilege of proximity and immersion in data interpretation with weekly columns, presents a telescopic view of what should constitute a different future for South Africa.

And when I called for a postponement of an election, it was because the telescope was calling for a second liberation and not an election as an answer to our post-apartheid ills.

In December 1991, shortly after ascending to the presidency of a crumbling Soviet empire, Boris Yeltsin was asked for his outlook on the coming year. His response was chillingly prophetic: “Certainly, this year is better than next year.”

As South Africa navigates the early weeks of 2026, many of our citizens, trapped in the darkness of load-shedding and the stagnation of a 30-year-old promise, are beginning to echo that sentiment.

Privilege in business and politics provides a perspective of green grass where everything is barren.

We stand at a precipice. The first 30 years of our democracy have been a tale of two halves. The first 15 years, from 1994 to 2008, were characterised by what I call the “Shosholoza path” — a period of gathered pace, where growth breached 4.5%, investment surged to 21% of GDP and the multi-dimensional poverty index (MPI) began to recede. But the second 15 years have been a descent into what the Indlulamithi Scenarios accurately describe as a “Gwara-Gwara” state: a demoralised land of disorder, decay and institutional “vulture culture”.

To understand how we lost the relay race at the starting line, we must look at our “numerical conscience” — or the lack thereof.

In the Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.” The mission of the 1994 generation was to develop the productive forces of the nation and deploy them for the material benefit of the people.

Yet, as we look at the scorecard of 2026, it is clear that we have allowed a “data trust gap” to swallow our sovereignty. Former Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie’s abracadabra statistics seek to lull our nerves with a 10% unemployment. Meanwhile Gwede Mantashe’s theory of knocking at factory doors to find work has so insulted a nation that suffers deplorable unemployment.

Privilege in business and politics provides a perspective of green grass where everything is barren. To disabuse South Africa of its mantra of uniqueness and exceptionalism, we go to Bolivia. It has similar features, except that it sprinted away from poverty-inspired neoliberalism.

The Bolivian mirror

South Africa and Bolivia share equivalent backgrounds of settler colonialism that indigenised disadvantage. However, in 2006, our paths diverged. While South Africa remained tethered to the neoliberal “cookbook” of the Washington Consensus — relying on the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models of the National Treasury that treat the economy as a single, consistent entity — Bolivia under Evo Morales took a different turn.

Bolivia rejected the neoliberal menu. They increased taxation on the hydrocarbon industry, nationalised strategic assets and deployed the resulting surpluses to finance a national development path. They moved from a “feeder relationship” with the developed world to a state of “sovereign prosperity”.

While neoliberal apologists argued that a small open economy such as South Africa could not afford such autonomy, Bolivia proved them wrong. They achieved sustained economic growth, eradicated extreme poverty at a higher clip than we did, and bolstered their social spending without succumbing to the “debt trap” we so feared.

In South Africa, our “vulture culture” has done the opposite. We fight over smaller and smaller scavenges while the “fixed capital” of our soil — our platinum, our manganese and now our green hydrogen — bypasses the local fiscus entirely.

The crisis of productive forces

Nowhere is this betrayal of mission more evident than in our development of human resources. The Lehohla ledger, my technical response to this crisis, uses the Census 2011 and 2022 metadata as a “baseline of truth”. The data is devastating.

Of the 1.2-million children born in South Africa every year, only half will write matric. Of those, only a fraction will complete a degree. But the tragedy is racialised and structural. Between 1975 and 2016, for every black African completing a degree, the proportion of whites and Indians completing higher education soared to six times that rate. We are witnessing the “skills trap” in real-time.

Furthermore, the deployment of these productive forces has stalled. Black African and coloured youth are trapped at a low-voltage skill vortex, performing at a third of their white and Indian counterparts. This is not a failure of “implementation”; it is a failure of design thinking. We have reinforced apartheid spatial designs with urban sprawl, forcing the poor to spend their material life on long-distance commuting, further destroying the family unit.

The evidence incorporated into the Lehohla ledger for interactive analysis shows that only 31% of mothers claim to be married, a statistic that should haunt every policymaker because it is the font of our social dysfunction.

The Mohlomi protocol: a moral operating system

How do we reset? We must go back further than 1994. We must look to 18th-century Mosotho moral philosopher Chief Mohlomi. Mohlomi understood that “medicine for a village is a good heart” (motse ha o na sehlare; sehlare ke pelo). He taught that governance is an act of “Botho” (humaneness) and “Setho” (unmitigated truthfulness).

The “second liberation” that Mbeki called for in Maseru just days ago requires an “infrastructure of truth”. This is what the Lehohla ledger provides. It is a system of 2,754 instruments that act as the “sensory organs” of a virtual state (V-state) King Khumalo has been immersed in. It replaces “thumb-sucking” governance with an “institutional mirror”.

For instance in one of the minerally endowed districts where the Lehohla ledger was deployed, we have identified a “value leakage” of R604,750 per week in just one ward. This is wealth that belongs to the soil — to the “fixed capital” of the community — but which currently flows into the coffers of Tier-1 mining houses without a localised beneficiation “cut”.

The Mohlomi pillar of the ledger uses the “dialogue ledger” to mediate this conflict. It moves us away from “brandishing the spear” (violent protest or litigation) towards “thrashing the corn” (productive industrialisation). By issuing “sovereign invoices” based on a specialised algorithm, we can recover this leaked wealth and fund the creation of local micro-factories.

The master weaver: agency as sovereignty

But the ledger is not just a technical tool; it is a behavioural catalyst. As incorporation of Khumalo V-state architecture into the Lehohla ledger correctly asserts, “agency is life.” Training a pool of 320 youth in the district of concern to be “master weavers” sets a clear path to the future to claim the leakage from local government.

South Africa has enormous potentialities and political uncertainties. But as Robert Solow, who passed away recently, argued, we cannot rely on models that assume the economy is a ‘consistent dynasty’. We must acknowledge the ‘wicked problems’ of our time.

These are not “data-entry clerks,” they are data-literate governance officers. They take the “oath of the master weaver”, pledging to uphold the numerical conscience and to use the data mesh to ensure that even the “Motinyane” (the ordinary person) has a voice in the assembly. This is the “second liberation” in action — transforming the people from passive subjects of a “vulture nation” into active agents of their own sovereignty.

The path to 2024 and beyond

I have previously called for a postponement of the 2024 general elections. I did so not because I fear democracy, but because I fear the “impracticality” of a ballot box that offers no change in the underlying economic substructure. As Amilcar Cabral said, “The people are not fighting for ideas in anyone’s head ... they are fighting to win material benefits.”

If we head into an election without a “numerical conscience” — without a plan to decouple our economy from the neoliberal cookbook and move toward a Bolivian-style communitarian model — we are simply voting for the next group of vultures.

We need a “sovereign sprint”, a 24-week period where we:

• activate the 32-ward mesh: mapping every household’s multi-dimensional poverty index against the service delivery promises made in 1994;
• legalise the sovereign surcharge: reclaiming the leaked value of our minerals to fund local industrial nodes; and
• institutionalise the mirror: ensuring that every municipal manager and politician is subject to a “dipstick diagnosis” of their competence and integrity.

South Africa has enormous potentialities and political uncertainties. But as Robert Solow, who passed away recently, argued, we cannot rely on models that assume the economy is a “consistent dynasty”. We must acknowledge the “wicked problems” of our time — the structural racial distortions that the AsgiSA (accelerated and shared growth initiative for South Africa) years momentarily challenged but which the “Gwara Gwara” years have entrenched.

The Lehohla ledger is the “technical hammer” of the African Renaissance. It is the means by which we fulfil our generational mission. It empowers the state to be capable, capital to be responsible, and the people to be sovereign.

We must move beyond the “hadeda home” of simple survival and the “vulture nation” of scavenge. We must become a “weaver work” nation. We must build a society that is participatory, democratic, and, above all, evidence-based.

The first liberation gave us the right to vote. The second liberation must give us the right to the truth — the numerical conscience that ensures that “next year” is finally, and truly, better than “this year”. The moment of Start statistics is now. So let us start with the Lehohla ledger of 2,700 instruments.

Dr Pali Lehohla is the former statistician-general of South Africa and a director of the Pan African Institute for Evidence.