'National Dialogue will not solve our problems'

An independent political analyst says South Africa’s critical problems cannot be solved by dialogue as failure of politics and government are the main culprits.

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with the dialogue as a solution, he said he wouldn't know. “I imagine they misdiagnosed the problem.”

But political analyst Levy Ndou argued in favour.

“The idea of a dialogue is to acknowledge that there are challenges that require all of us to come in and resolve. What they have done is to identify some of these challenges and try to make everyone aware of them, and then ask all of us to come together to provide a roadmap on how to resolve them.

“The idea is you don’t need to be a member of any political party, but you need to be a patriot to participate in providing a solution. It [the dialogue] might not be able to provide short-term solutions in the sense that some [suggested solutions] will require planning.

“But also, there are issues that, whether we discuss thoroughly or not thoroughly, they require our buy-in. If we talk about gender-based violence... That requires a guy to say, 'I will not abuse any woman'.