Letter: Ballot box is the place to start changing SA - Business Day

Given the depressed national mood, it was inevitable that Women’s Day would be a moment to decry the country’s failings. Sophie de Bruyn, the last surviving member of the 1956 Women’s March, eloquently referred to the “cruel suffocation of entrenched poverty, lack of clean drinking water, homelessness and systemic corruption” — a far cry, she noted, from the hopes invested in the democratic order (Women’s March leader Sophie de Bruyn calls for new mobilisation against gender-based violence, August 9).

This is correct. But this distressing state of affairs is in large part the consequence of choices made, not just by crooked politicians and opportunistic “business people” but by millions of ordinary people who exercised ― or failed to exercise ― the political agency that democracy makes possible.

Governance pathologies in evidence at the time of the transition were subsequently compounded by the open and deliberate politicisation of institutions meant to be nonpartisan, by a lacklustre approach to corruption and incompetence, and by a political culture that often romanticises violence and feeds off toxic division.

It’s hardly surprising that the South African economy chronically underperforms its potential and that annual economic growth of 1%-2% falls behind the 5%-plus other middle-income countries manage. Or that a third of South Africa’s workforce is unemployed, with the immiseration that implies.

Democracy guarantees neither good governance nor prosperity ― merely the possibility of making the appropriate choices and removing from office those who fail to do so. No amount of outrage or anguish or civic protest can compensate for this.

As long as a critical mass of the country’s voters refuse to punish this at the ballot box, South Africa’s woes are certain to continue.

Terence Corrigan

Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-08-14-letters-to-the-editor/