Each phrase does the same quiet work: it converts a decision into a weather event — something that happened to the economy, not something the economy's architects built into it.

Missing vs excluded

Start with "missing middle."

The phrase suggests township and social enterprises simply fell through a crack between microfinance and commercial credit — as if the credit ladder was assembled in good faith and a rung happened to go missing in transit.

Twenty years working inside South African townships tells a different story.

The middle isn't missing. It was never built, because building it would have required funders and financial institutions to recognise informal aggregation, cash-based transaction history, and communal savings — stokvels, burial societies — as legitimate collateral.

That recognition has a cost: it means sharing the infrastructure of who gets to lend, price risk, and extract margin.

"Missing" absolves everyone of that choice.

"Excluded" does not.

Red tape vs barrier

Then there is "red tape" — a phrase so soft it sounds almost affectionate, as though the barrier between a township entrepreneur and a market is an administrative inconvenience, a form nobody got round to simplifying.

Red tape does not explain why an untitled "mother erf" in Langa has sat unresolved for decades while title in the suburb next door was never in question.

Red tape does not explain why a spaza shop owner needs three years of audited financials to access a facility that a mashonisa client could repay from a till roll.

Call it what it is: a barrier engineered to keep the qualifying pool small enough that transformation targets can be hit without transformation actually occurring.

Diagnosis

Now to the diagnosis I want on record. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a disorder in which a caregiver induces or exaggerates illness in someone dependent on them, because the caregiver's identity, income, and standing depend on the dependent staying sick enough to need rescuing.

The caregiver is not indifferent to the patient — the caregiver is endlessly present, endlessly concerned, endlessly documenting the patient's condition for others to see. What the caregiver cannot tolerate is recovery, because recovery ends the role.

The metaphor is not incidental to South Africa. It is the country's founding economic relationship.

Apartheid did not simply exclude the Black adult from the market — it legally infantilised him and her.

"Boy" and "girl" were the operative words of the era, not a figure of speech. Perpetual minority status was the point: the Black adult was made a permanent dependent of a white guardian state, requiring a pass to move, permission to trade, a baas to vouch for competence the law refused to presume.

That guardianship has changed its name and its personnel many times since 1994 — pass office to compliance department, baas to fund manager — but the underlying architecture, an adult held one signature short of being trusted with their own capital, has been remarkably well preserved.

Township enterprise finance did not invent this dependency. It inherited it, and dressed it in the vocabulary of development.

Architecture of exclusion

And an entire architecture has grown up around that inherited dependency — guarantee funds, blended capital vehicles, enterprise development scorecards, and, yes, panel discussions.

This architecture is well-resourced, endlessly present, endlessly documenting the patient's condition for donors and boards to see. It does not require the patient to recover. It requires the patient to remain legibly, fundably a minor — present enough at the next tender, the next accelerator cohort, the next case study, to justify the next round of guardianship.

A township enterprise that achieves genuine independent capital access, real title, real market power, stops being a ward. It becomes an adult competitor. And the industry built to manage the missing middle has no Business model for that outcome.

The remedy is not sentiment, and it is certainly not another dashboard measuring how underserved the middle remains.

It is ownership — of title, of aggregation infrastructure, of the data that already proves creditworthiness in forms the industry has simply chosen not to read.

Until that changes, retire the euphemisms.

Say "excluded," not "missing."

Say "barrier," not "red tape."

And ask, plainly, of every instrument on offer: does this end the dependency, or does it need the dependency to survive?

* Vusi Vokwana is the Founding Director of Kasi Catalyst, a township innovation and advisory platform based in Cape Town, and Secretary General of NAFCOC (2008) at national level. She has over 20 years of direct practice in township and rural markets across South Africa, spanning private banking, fuel retail, and enterprise development, and has secured title deeds for 150 commercially zoned properties in Langa, Gugulethu, and Nyanga over the past decade.