On Tuesday, author and former founding editor of Vrye Weekblad Max du Preez, wrote an article sharing his ideas on what’s wrong with the country, and what he thought should be done to fix it.

Du Preez says: “Unemployment is the biggest problem facing South Africa,” and states that entrepreneurialism is the “closest we’ll ever get to a silver bullet for all our ills”.

The flaw here, is that he hasn’t taken the inherent structural inequality in South Africa into account. This hamstrings his ability to both discern what the country’s key issues are, and to fashion a useful response to these ills.

South Africa knows the system is broken. People live this reality every day. The millions of unprivileged people who cohabit South Africa with persons of privilege know what’s not working. They know because every day they must get out of bed and send their kids to schools that are dysfunctional; they must ride trains that are over-crowded and unsafe; they must use toilets that rob them of their very dignity. These are the people who face life without work, or have one or more family members who are unemployed.

Du Preez makes unemployment enemy number one, and posits this solution: “Entrepreneurship is the obvious key: thousands of new business start-ups every year, with some of them growing to medium enterprises employing more than just a handful of people and a few growing really big.”

A somewhat controversial section follows: “We Afrikaners always believed we were not natural entrepreneurs. For five decades we had a government looking after us, employing most of us in the civil service or State-owned companies.”

He then states that [white] Afrikaners rebooted by transforming from bureaucrats and employees, into business owners or entrepreneurs. Du Preez questions why most black South Africans don’t do the same. “I have a feeling most black South Africans also secretly believe they’re not natural entrepreneurs,” he declares, speaking for an entire population group.

By saying this, du Preez summarily insults black entrepreneurs – the traders, the taxi owners the retailers, the wholesalers – the Herman Mashabas, the Nkhensani Nkosis, and the Ndaba Ntseles. People like Ludwick Marishane who started his first business as a teenager in Limpopo and who is now a top inventor, business owner, and was named by Google as one of the world’s top brains.

Du Preez’s comparison of [white] Afrikaners as ‘ek is ‘n boer met a plan’ [I am a can-do Afrikaner] and blacks as reluctant entrepreneurs indicates that he is ignorant of ‘white privilege’. White Afrikaners in South Africa, like white English speaking people, among other privileges, had the privilege of excellent primary, secondary and in some instances, tertiary education.

Today white Afrikaans-speaking children are moreover found in private education or in former Model C schools where they enjoy the privilege of excellent facilities. In stark contrast most South African black people must contend with schools that don’t adhere to the same standards, and that deliver appalling educational outcomes which affect the fates of the children who go to them.

The divided South African public schooling system delivers such poor outcomes that it traps people in cycles of poverty and unemployment. The Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at UCT has a research paper called, “The Policies for Reducing Income Inequality and Poverty in South Africa”. In it the authors draw a direct correlation between education and poverty.

There are 25 000 public schools in SA, but 20 000 of these are ‘dysfunctional’. Africa Check has verified that 80% of SA schools are ‘dysfunctional’, and offers an in-depth insight on this. Most of these dysfunctional schools are situated in black townships and in rural areas.

So SA’s biggest problem isn’t unemployment, but that which causes unemployment – a system that primes some people for economic success, but most others for economic dependency.

By the time SA’s education system has failed a child it is very late in the day. Instead of creating an entrepreneur who contributes to the SA economy, the state has created a vulnerable human who needs social support. Our education system might be useful for buoying a tyranny, but not for staging an entrepreneurial revolution.

This is borne out by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor [GEM] that shows: “SA has an alarmingly low level of entrepreneurial activity in spite of high unemployment”. More disturbingly, GEM reports that in 2014, local entrepreneurial activity fell by a staggering 34%. One of the biggest constraints to entrepreneurship cited by GEM – an “inadequately educated workforce”.

What’s to be done?

I would suggest we follow the example set by the ‘useful revolutionaries’ in the trenches of SA’s education system who are trying to solve this crisis. They include the likes of Equal Education, Olico Youth, and Partners For Possibility. Each of these civics show that by understanding systemic problems – and by using smart thinking – we can create real, sustainable solutions to profound problems.

Other areas where SA needs useful revolutionaries are the Information Communications Technology sector and the passenger rail sector, both of which could open better access to the economy and entrepreneurialism with effective activism.

SA is awash in a cacophony of thoughtless verbiage. Everyone’s got an opinion, and every media brand has a platform to propagate this noise into SA’s public discourse. But we don’t need more noise do we? What SA desperately needs is signal.

The signal we need most is common sense. Our best opportunity for making the South African experiment work is through commonalities and collaborations, rather than through divisions and antagonisms. Realpolitik is very good at pronouncing our divisions. But we need to be a lot smarter than the elected who are stealing our money while we’re busy fighting each other, now don’t we?

What this country needs is clear-thinking ‘revolutionaries’ who appreciate SA’s structural deficiencies and who can come together in a broad coalition of the useful to fix what most hurts our common good.