Last year, around June, I wrote about the asset we have called attention capital. The question that has been on my mind frequently is: “Where and how is South Africa investing its attention capital lately?” Furthermore what is the investment return on this attention capital?

Attention capital is a resource, on which society, businesses, celebrities and politicians depend. What makes attention capital valuable is its scarcity, which is linked to time. What is clear is wherever our attention is invested there is energy that is unleashed, which yields a return.

The media has great power in filtering what we invest our attention capital in by virtue of what they publish. This is why the media is an influential medium.

Lets look at black economic empowerment (BEE) and see where attention is invested and the return it has yielded. Most companies have focused on the ownership element because it is easier to implement compared with the other elements and because government departments and public sector entities, through the old preferential procurement framework regulations, focused heavily on it.

The media channelled a lot of attention on the deals that were done. This signalled to the companies that if they concluded BEE ownership deals they would get favourable attention, which could be monetised by the business in getting more contracts from clients. This worked for a while because the markets were buoyant.

The fundamental flaw with ownership is that it is moving shares from white owners to black owners. Inherently, there are no jobs or tangible value created by this mechanism, and because successful ownership deals are loaded with debt and obligation, it gets difficult for black shareholders to capture meaningful value. So what has been the return? Not much, at least not the anticipated amounts and pervasive impact that was intended.

Preferential procurement and enterprise development do not make headlines and people’s attention capital was not heavily invested in the companies. Therefore, we need to be explicit about what kind of economic transformation we want to achieve in order to invest our attention capital in that vision.

When I look at recent headlines, there has been a considerable amount of attention invested in Julius Malema. His comments have generated impassioned responses from everyone. These reactions feed more attention to Malema to the point where he is foremost in people’s minds, not only locally but internationally.

Malema is a politician whose political capital is increased when he can inspire or inflame people to react to his message. What Malema did was to take a dead issue, such as the nationalisation of mines, and frame it in a way that gets a reaction.

The core of the problem is that economic transformation is not filtering fast enough to the people at grassroots, who have no financial capital but lots of attention capital. These are the people who have no jobs and, therefore, not many people engage with them. As such, Malema has a receptive audience who will invest their attention capital in him, in order to gain financial capital at some point.

This initial attention investment from the people at grassroots creates momentum that begets more attention that the media cannot ignore.

Whether you like or hate Malema he has mastered the ability to solicit your attention capital. It does not matter whether your thoughts about him are positive or negative, the point is that most people are talking and thinking about him.

The reality is we cannot complain about the rising star of Malema because we have all willingly or unwittingly invested our attention capital in him. He has no option but to lap it up and milk it for all that it is worth in order to increase his political capital, which is what all politicians do.

So if you don’t want to see Malema’s appeal rise then you have to stop investing so much attention capital in him and find counterbalancing causes and candidates to invest in. We are collectively responsible for whatever type of return on the attention capital that we get from Malema.