A popular parable often told when introducing the concept of “dialogue” to a group is that of the blind men and an elephant.
It is the story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant looks like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal’s body, but only one part, such as the tail, a leg or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience, and their descriptions of the elephant differ from one another. Arguments ensue.
The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience while ignoring other people’s limited, subjective experiences, which may be equally true. All of the different parts, or perspectives, are needed to stitch the full picture together, providing a more holistic truth.
It is also a fitting metaphor for where South Africa is stuck. While most focus on their own part of the proverbial elephant, there seems to be little appetite to learn about the other parts, let alone understand the full systemic picture.
Our inability to critically and inclusively deliberate as citizens, politicians, leaders, and human beings in South Africa has left a vacuum.
This vacuum is being filled by political factions and agendas that capture the hearts and minds of disenfranchised people through populist rhetoric and click-bait phrases posed as solutions.
It pits people against one another while offering mythical solutions that divert attention away from the real complexity of our social issues and the collective levers required for change. These “divide and conquer” relics belong in museums alongside other apartheid and fascist playbooks, not in South Africa’s mainstream narrative.
In a country such as South Africa these tactics are not merely political stunts; they are fuel to the fire in a traumatised nation.
Our historical and ongoing injustices and inequalities have left deep psychological scars. Trauma disorients our sense of self, belonging, relationships, and worldview. It alters our emotions, cognition, and behaviour, ultimately changing how we make decisions, participate, lead, and vote.
Post-conflict and traumatised societies suffer from deep-seated fear, anger, and resentment, making them vulnerable to populist leaders who offer loyalty rather than competence. Collective trauma also has an intergenerational fluidity, explaining how signs of trauma can permeate civil society long after the events themselves have been forgotten.
As such, South African residents are particularly vulnerable to the manipulation and abuse of “leaders”.
How do we shift this?
As an antidote to manipulation and a strengthening of civic resilience, citizens need opportunity and safe structures for meaningful participation. Citizens need to be directly engaged in deliberation and decision-making and develop our capacity to meaningfully do so.
Our historical and ongoing injustices and inequalities have left deep psychological scars. Trauma disorients our sense of self, belonging, relationships, and worldview. It alters our emotions, cognition, and behaviour, ultimately changing how we make decisions, participate, lead, and vote.
This will grow our civic engagement repertoire far beyond protest, demonstration and electoral voting. We need to co-create a South African culture of systems thinking, generative dialogue, and rigorous deliberation, where we seek to understand diverse perspectives and co-create solutions from our collective intelligence. As we grow opportunity for meaningful citizen participation, we grow our capacity to solve complex social challenges and reposition citizens as partners of government instead of mere recipients.
Meaningful participation
There is an important distinction to be made between inclusive deliberative processes and the traditional stakeholder engagement and civil society activism we know well in South Africa.
Most civil society organisations champion a specific issue or interest. Rightly so, this requires a single-minded focus to raise awareness and ensure action. Issue-based activism is a necessary part of democracy, but it is not sufficient. Issues must also be understood in relation to one another, and ordinary citizens need to be directly involved if their voices are to be heard.
Stakeholder engagements, on the other hand, are often poorly facilitated and treated as a box-ticking exercise. Participants frequently leave feeling as though only the loudest or most powerful voices in the room were heard. The current system often treats citizen engagement as a procedural formality rather than a substantive partnership.
In reality, most citizens are not organised around a particular cause. They live within the complexity of everyday life and are often too busy or overwhelmed to care to organise themselves politically. Yet their voices desperately need to become a legitimate part of democratic processes — helping to set agendas, deliberate on important issues, define priorities, develop policy recommendations, and vote on them — rather than a mere vote on leadership or “representatives”.
This model supports meaningful participation by residents directly. It demands a thorough understanding of the issues at hand, rigorous deliberation that takes multiple perspectives into account, and collective decision-making that prioritises the common good rather than narrow interests. It empowers residents to weigh evidence, consider competing viewpoints, resolve societal conflicts, reach consensus, and shape policy for the public good. It brings political legitimacy to authentic public reasoning and deliberation beyond mere majority voting.
Participative and deliberative democracy is one direction in which democracy can evolve to better fit today’s diverse societies, help us create a culture of true dialogue and deliberation, and become a little less vulnerable to political interference, stakeholder intimidation, and interest-group lobbying.
Within this field, there are many different democratic innovations (with many different names) leading the way to involve everyday citizens in governance and increase opportunities for participation, deliberation and influence: citizens juries, citizens assemblies, mini-publics, mini-parliaments, open forums, citizens dialogues, national dialogues — to name a few and even more civic tech innovations leading in the online space.
Why now?
Overall South Africans are disillusioned and distrustful of political institutions. We have lost faith in a system where elected officials represent the people’s interests. According to Afrobarometer 2026, 51% of South Africans say MPs and local government councillors “never” try their best to listen to what ordinary people have to say, while another one-third say they listen “only sometimes”.
South Africa is signalling its readiness and desire for a more engaged society and pluralist political landscape: The government of national unity (GNU) presents an opportunity to role-model mature dialogue and political deliberation. The launch of the national dialogue (ND), notwithstanding its struggle to move out of its own shadow, signals an interest in a more participatory and deliberative democracy. However, the ‘potentials’ of both the GNU and ND will remain unrealised (stuck) until they become cognisant of their internal dialogue deficit. If these structures grow the internal capacity to implement their own practices for real generative dialogue, that steps into another’s shoes, that heals cleavages, that generates insight and new understanding, that moves beyond self-interest and singular perspectives, that can illuminating the whole elephant — they will begin to realise their potential.
Around the globe democracy has been ‘in crisis’ for years and has made way for a surge in democracy innovations known as a “deliberative wave” circling the globe. Ordinary citizens are educating themselves, becoming informed, and organising around how to engage with some of the most complex and pressing issues of our time.
Citizens’ assemblies
Looking at the growth of citizens assemblies alone: since 2004, more than 1,000 citizens’ assemblies have been documented across the world, with some suggesting the real figure to be 7,000, and many more operating under the radar. When designed well and legitimised by government structures, citizens’ assemblies produce great results. It has proven to produce better policy outcomes because deliberation results in considered public judgment rather than uninformed opinion. It creates greater legitimacy for difficult decisions by enabling citizens to collectively develop informed recommendations. It enhances public trust in government and democratic institutions through meaningful participation. It empowers citizens by strengthening their sense of political efficacy. It results in more inclusive governance through random selection and stratified sampling that brings in typically excluded groups. It strengthens integrity and reduces opportunities for corruption by limiting undue influence from powerful interests. It counters polarisation and disinformation by creating conditions where people engage constructively across differences. It cuts through groupthink and helps overcome ethnic, religious, or ideological divisions between groups that have historically strengthened their identity in rejecting that of the other.
Post-conflict societies in particular, show that deliberative processes reduce polarisation, bridge divides, foster social cohesion, and neutralise misinformation. When designed to acknowledge and process collective trauma, they become vehicles for national healing. These methodologies and processes already exist and are being employed in different contexts and countries every day. One participative and deliberative democratic practice that has been gaining significant traction is the citizens’ assembly.
How does it work?
The basic structure of a citizens’ assembly can be summarised in five steps:
- Sortition (Selection) - A representative group, often between 50 and 150 participants, is randomly selected through a civic lottery while ensuring key demographic characteristics mirror the wider population.
- Learning phase - Members receive balanced and comprehensive information from experts, stakeholders, and advocates representing opposing viewpoints. They are encouraged to question witnesses, fact-check information, and strengthen their critical thinking skills and check their biases.
- Dialogue and deliberation - Participants discuss evidence, needs, future scenarios and desired outcomes in small, independently facilitated groups. This phase focuses on weighing trade-offs, finding common ground, and ensuring all voices are heard.
- Decision-making - The assembly consolidates its discussions and draws up its agreed-upon recommendations.
- Reporting and action - Recommendations are compiled into a report and presented to policymakers or the public to influence decision-making (depending on what has been pre-negotiated with government structures).
A citizens’ assembly is not a process for bargaining competing interests, nor is it simply the aggregation of private preferences. It is a process of public reasoning through which collective reason informs public decisions. As such, creating equality between participants is critically important. Much care and detail are applied to the process design to ensure inclusivity and equality participation, as well as quality and rigour in the deliberation and outcomes. As such, multiple and diverse learning methods and knowledge sources are included, participants are trained in critical thinking, personal biases, dialogue and deliberation skills and principles, independent professional facilitators guide every step of the way to ensure inclusive and psychologically safe participation, implementation pathways with the particular branch of government is negotiated and confirmed up front.
Cape Town taking the leap
A group of passionate and dedicated practitioners and researchers are currently leading the effort to establish Cape Town’s, and South Africa’s, first citizens’ assembly. The topic is transport within the broader context of climate action: “How can Cape Town build a transport system that gives every resident an equitable, reliable, and affordable way to get around while reducing the pollution and emissions that are harming our environment?”
The Cape Town Assembly will convene between August and October 2026 across six Saturdays. The assembly will consist of a random and stratified selection of residents drawn from across the city of Cape Town, resulting in a demographically representative group of 60–100 participants. Over the six full-day sessions, participants will experience a facilitated process through which they learn, dialogue, deliberate and develop actionable recommendations to assist policymakers in strengthening the resilience and future adaptability of Cape Town’s transport system.
The facilitators have been trained in an inclusive, trauma-informed, and power-aware approach designed to foster psychological safety, contextual equality, and fairness in all deliberations. To maximise inclusion, participants will receive transport support, meals, a daily per diem, and other forms of assistance. Residents of Cape Town are currently invited to register their interest to be part of the pool from which the randomised stratified selection will be drawn.
Empowering ourselves as citizens for a fairer and more equitable democracy
Building the social capital to become a nation of true dialogue and deliberation needs to happen now. Without it, movements based on populist rhetoric will proliferate, soundbites with no accountability will lead, corruption will perpetuate, social unrest will grow, and citizens will remain powerless.
Meaningful participation and mature deliberation is not a luxury to ‘afford’ once we have solved our complex social challenges, it is the only way we can solve them. Facilitated dialogue and deliberation taps into our collective intelligence, transforms systems, shifts power-dynamic, tears up redundant scripts, and rewrite future realities. In South Africa’s case it can also support the healing of our collective trauma.
Participative and deliberative democracy offers a pathway from disempowerment to partnership. It is not merely a governance tool but a strategy for societal transformation, unlocking social capital and collective healing that extends far beyond any single assembly.
REGISTRATION
Registration is open until 12 AUGUST 2026. Cape Town residents aged 18 or older can sign up at capetownassembly.co.za. Organisers are urging people not only to register themselves but also to share the invitation widely.
The convening of South Africa’s first citizens’ assembly is a joint project of the Centre for Research on Democracy (CREDO) at Stellenbosch University and the Politics and Urban Governance Research Group (PUG Research) at the University of the Western Cape, with the Western Cape Government’s Climate Change Directorate, and nniDialogue Institute as organising partners.
- Naudé is the director of the nni Dialogue Institute and chair of the no-name initiative movement driving inclusive transformation through systemic dialogue
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