MICHAEL MORRIS | Democracy thrives on imperfection and persistent argument - Business Day

Michael Morris

Political change is probably the most important indicator of any society’s freedom to choose to be different.

As we have just learnt from events on opposite sides of the Atlantic, if political freedom does not automatically confer freedom from error, it remains the best means of delivering what most people decide is the necessary correction.

It’s not very efficient, but efficiency is not the thing.

In an email just a few days ago I told a colleague that I believed “the virtue of democracy is precisely its imperfection”, and that we can all have a go at participating in preserving the imperfection as a guarantee against having to accept that one paramount ideal decided by someone, decides what’s best for everyone.

There is always an ideal, and we all routinely berate voters — other voters — for making what we might think are flawed, mistaken or even stupid choices. But they doubtless think the same of us and our choices.

Democracy’s primary advantage (the primary advantage of free societies) is that nobody is ever completely happy, and so the argument persists. And, as I said to my colleague, “if the argument persists, the freedom usually does too”.

(It often strikes me that participating is what’s most meaningful, in the sense that we take part without anticipating that we will automatically get our way and so jointly agree in advance to voluntarily surrendering a great deal of authority to whoever is actually chosen.)

I am sure that in Texas, for example — or anywhere else in the US — few voters needed to waste any time on figuring out what kind of change they wanted and chose it without much fuss.

That it’s not so clear for us is probably a measure of our long history of doubt and mistrust, though I’m not convinced mistrust is necessarily South Africa’s problem so much as scepticism or uncertainty on the part of so many of those who have not quite felt the realness of a “better life for all” in these 30 years of its rumoured proximity.

Even so, in a free society — in which steadily growing numbers have agency, demand and exercise choice (what to eat, where to live, what to read, what career to pursue, who to surrender authority to) and feel it’s worth working at their goals and expect nothing less of the office-bearers and public officials they elect or pay — it’s the possibility of the future, far more than any increasingly outdated historical soreness, that matters.

This is invariably overlooked, chiefly by those with the most to lose.

As my colleague Hermann Pretorius pointed out just the day before last week’s election (responding to criticism of polling by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and others by ANC national spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri), credible polling “offers the ANC something considerably more valuable than estimates of its electoral fortunes”. That is, “evidence of a widening distance between the policies pursued by the ANC and the priorities expressed by ordinary South Africans, including the party’s own supporters”.

IRR polling as far back as 2016 “found that 84% of black respondents preferred a political party promising faster economic growth and more jobs, against just 7% favouring one concentrating on land expropriation for redress”.

“Perhaps most revealingly,” Pretorius wrote, “these preferences extended into the ANC’s own remaining electoral base. Among self-identified ANC supporters 73% favoured merit-based appointments, 65% preferred value for money procurement and 79% opposed the Expropriation Act.”

As they once did for the National Party, free citizens will make the ANC appreciate the costs of overlooking their real interests.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-11-09-michael-morris-democracy-thrives-on-imperfection-and-persistent-argument/