In June 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the National Dialogue, a citizen-led initiative aimed at rebuilding national unity and forging a new social compact for South Africa by addressing the country’s most pressing challenges.
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the National Dialogue in June 2025. What are the key objectives of this initiative?
The National Dialogue aims to rebuild national unity, strengthen our democracy and forge a new social compact by directly addressing South Africa’s most pressing social, economic and political challenges. It is envisioned as a citizen-led, government-supported process to create a shared vision and actionable commitments for the country’s future.
How will the National Dialogue process unfold, and what is the timeline?
The process is structured as a 24-month journey. Following the August 2025 Convention, Phase 1 involves rolling out citizen-initiated and ward-based dialogues. Phase 2 expands ward-based dialogues nationally, culminating in cross-cutting thematic and district dialogues. The process aims to conclude with a second National Convention to ratify a ‘People’s Compact’.
How can the methodological design of the National Dialogue be strengthened to ensure it captures the nuanced, unfiltered aspirations and challenges of all South Africans?
The current roadmap’s in-person dialogues are vital, but we must complement them with a robust, independent digital process to ensure true inclusivity. We propose integrating a hybrid human-AI framework using the SenseMaker® tool. This allows citizens to share and interpret their own stories anonymously via mobile apps, USSD, or voice notes, capturing rich, contextual data without the pressure of group settings. This creates a parallel, citizen-owned dataset that provides a genuine evidence base for the in-person deliberations, ensuring the final compact is rooted in the lived reality of all 64 million South Africans.
What are some of the challenges and objections to the dialogue? And how have these been addressed?
Key objections have centred on concerns over government dominance of the steering structures, a lack of transparency in the process and the potential for “participation-washing”. In response, the roadmap emphasises citizen leadership. To truly address these, we propose concrete safeguards: an independent Citizen Data Trust to host all narrative data, a public real-time dashboard for radical transparency and binding feedback loops that trigger renegotiation if policy proposals contradict overwhelming public sentiment. There are ongoing challenges in forming the national committee and sectoral committees. When elected, these committees will be handed over by the Convention Steering Committee to the Eminent Persons Group and The Presidency, who will take the process forward and initiate Phase 1.
The first National Convention was a two-day event held in Pretoria. How will the public across the country be able to participate in the National Dialogue?
The public can participate through several channels: attending or hosting citizen-initiated dialogues in their respective sectors or communities; participating in ward-based dialogues; and engaging through digital platforms, such as the National Dialogue app, WhatsApp and radio shows. To bridge the digital divide, we propose supplementing this with a national corps of ‘Citizen Journalists’ who would be trained and remunerated to collect narratives in every community, ensuring even the most marginalised voices are captured.
Researchers at SAIIA have proposed that the National Dialogue embrace ‘participatory futures’. What does this mean, and how could it be incorporated into the National Dialogue process?
Participatory futures is an approach that moves beyond elite forecasting to actively involve diverse citizens in imagining and shaping the future. It means the future isn’t something that happens to us, but something we co-create. These narratives become the raw material for “policy stress-testing”, where proposed solutions are simulated against this citizen data to foresee impacts and build consensus before resources are committed.
What indicators or metrics should be used to assess whether the National Dialogue is achieving genuine co-creation versus ‘participation-washing’?
Success should be measured by tangible, evidence-based metrics, not just activity. Key indicators include:
- Scale and inclusivity: The number of self-signified narratives collected (targeting millions), with demographic spread mirroring the national population.
- Influence: The percentage of final compact clauses directly traceable to patterns in the citizen narrative data.
- Accountability: The activation of binding feedback loops when public sentiment is ignored.
- Trust: Pre- and post-dialogue surveys measuring citizen trust in the process itself.
- Action: The number of community-led, “safe-to-fail” experiments prototyping solutions that emerge from the dialogue data and the tracking of successful innovations that help shape flourishing communities.
How can companies and nonprofits get involved in the National Dialogue?
Companies and nonprofits should see this not as a corporate social responsibility exercise but as a strategic investment in national stability and a future operating environment. They can get involved by:
- Hosting sector dialogues: Convening conversations within their industries and supply chains.
- Funding independent infrastructure: Partnering with academic and civil society consortia to fund the critical technological backbone, along with a research team which will guarantee the process’s independence and rigour.
- Mobilising participation: Encouraging employees and beneficiaries to contribute their narratives.
This article first appeared in the Business in Society Handbook 2025 from Trialogue.
