MICHAEL MORRIS | Voters weigh up survival and trust - Business Day

Michael Morris

One of the most casually held notions in South Africa has long been that without cleverer voters, the country cannot be governed better. By this weak reasoning, the majority of citizens are hapless victims of their own insufficiency.

Of course, voters generally know better than anyone where their interests probably lie and it is invariably a probabilistic calculation, a hunch, that matters.

In conditions in which unemployment runs at more than 30% (42% on the expanded definition and 35% for black people), with the sum of the jobless rising from 5.2-million in 2015 to 8.4-million in 2025 and ― Statistics South Africa tells us ― “the proportion of those in long-term unemployment increasing from 63.9% to 76.6% over the same period”, the majority will not lightly take probabilistic chances on the one mainstay that makes all the difference.

Though the numbers relate to an earlier period (2006-15), Statistics South Africa makes this telling point about what is likely a key feature of the average voter’s appraisal of interest: “the bottom 60% of households depend more on social grants and less on income from the labour market”.

In a 2020 report Statistics South Africa noted economically: “Since 2006 there has been a greater dependence on social grants and less reliance on income from the labour market in the bottom deciles.” It went on: “While labour market income is overwhelmingly the largest contributor to income inequality when compared to other income sources, social grants and remittances have played a crucial role in reducing the income inequality gap between the bottom and top deciles over the years in South Africa.”

The latest quality of life index from my colleagues at the Centre for Risk Analysis sheds further light on these dynamics. The index uses 10 weighted indicators (including having a degree, being employed, spending R10,000 or more a month, owning a house with a bond, having access to water, electricity, sanitation and refuse removal, and having medical insurance) to score South Africans’ quality of life, by province and by race, from 0 to 10.

When you don’t have much to lose, losing just a little is too much and, if there’s no convincing alternative, probably not very intelligent either.

If individual numbers shift marginally from year to year, the pattern has not changed much since 2017: this year, black people again score the lowest (4.6 if murder is excluded, since it is not recorded by race; 4.8 if it is included, but as an identical aggregate across all groups) and whites the highest (7.5 or 7.8), well above the national average (4.9 or 5.1).

Expecting the vast majority of South Africans to gamble on whatever wisdom, foresight or hope it might take to ditch a paternalistic model that pays grants in favour of an essentially unseen alternative whose proponents say is the wellspring of a far better life, of dynamism, risk, competition and prospects, is much less a question of cleverness than trust.

When you don’t have much to lose, losing just a little is too much and, if there’s no convincing alternative, probably not very intelligent either. Yet, as the people are not dumb, history is unresting.

As my senior colleague, Institute of Race Relations CEO John Endres, has pointed out, only 23% of registered voters actually voted for the ANC in the critical May 2024 election. Including people who could have registered to vote but didn’t means the number drops to only 16%. So, while 6.5-million South Africans voted for the ANC, 35-million potential voters did not.

If millions of voters are not choosing differently in a hurry, the scope for winning their confidence is significant. But that is the task.

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

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-04-13-michael-morris-voters-weigh-up-survival-and-trust/