Women Fear Daily Violence While Leaders Offer Empty Promises on Safety

A woman walks home with fear as her constant companion, glancing over her shoulder with the learned caution of someone who has come to expect danger in the familiar. The President’s Women’s Day speech echoes in her memory, his words about freedom from violence and abuse hanging hollow against the reality of her bruised body and the threats that follow her. She has reported her husband to police. She has asked for protection. She has documented the stalking and intimidation. Yet the machinery of justice, magnificent on paper and sluggish in practice, offers her little shelter. The question that haunts her is simple and unanswerable: how much harm must she endure before the state decides her danger is dangerous enough?

This is the contradiction at the heart of South Africa’s annual Women’s Day observance. The nation gathers each August 9th to celebrate women while some of those very women remain trapped in cycles of violence, looking over their shoulders, waiting for help that does not arrive. A country cannot call that freedom.

Women’s Day 2026 has become something other than what it claims to be. It functions as political theatre, a convenient stage where unity is performed while the actual women who shape the country in countless ways remain largely unnoticed. The day divides more than it unites. It reduces women to symbols of struggle while overlooking the full spectrum of their contributions. Black, white, Indian, and coloured women in South Africa have filed patents that changed lives, built companies, led institutions, shaped policy and transformed communities. Yet their names rarely surface in national memory. A few icons are remembered. A few slogans are recycled. Then the moment passes.

South Africa has developed a habit of celebrating political nostalgia more readily than lived excellence. The nation is an accomplished custodian of yesterday, yet remarkably hesitant to honour the women shaping today. Much of the nation rests upon their shoulders. They lead in government, business, academia, civil society and communities, often without ceremony or applause. Journalist Ferial Haffajee continues to stand her ground in the difficult pursuit of truth, asking uncomfortable questions when silence would be safer. SABC journalist Suna Venter resisted editorial interference during the Hlaudi Motsoeneng era at considerable personal cost. Young innovator Gabriella Mogale worked on low-cost, fire-resistant materials for informal settlements, seeking answers to one of South Africa’s recurring tragedies. These are not merely women occupying prominent positions. They are women helping to hold the democratic centre together. Yet their names disappear from national memory because they do not fit neatly into the template. South Africa has become a master of selective remembrance.

The contradiction deepens when examined against recent events. A month before Women’s Day 2026, government meetings normalised the presence of March on March, an unsavoury lobby group associated with human rights violations and violence. Armed gangs associated with anti-migrant sentiment entered homes to threaten families, forcing mothers with newborns and small infants to flee South Africa. Yet in the same breath, the nation gathered to celebrate Women’s Day with polished speeches and hashtags. The question becomes unavoidable: are we honouring women, or are we performing honour while tolerating harm?

Perhaps the harder question is what exactly South Africa is celebrating on Women’s Day. On 9 August 1956, more than 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings against the extension of the pass laws. Seventy years later, their courage deserves neither historical amnesia nor ceremonial trivialisation. Those women confronted racism. They inconvenienced injustice. They placed themselves inside history rather than merely attending an event commemorating it. That is worth celebrating.

But if Women’s Day has become something more than remembrance, the nation must ask what it is celebrating every August 9th. Amid the speeches, marquees, television cameras and political choreography, there is often a forgotten figure: the woman who seldom reached the podium. The single mother who raised three children on one salary and somehow sent one to university. The woman who woke before everybody else because somebody had to prepare the children for school. The grandmother whose pension somehow acquired the elasticity of a national budget because unemployed children and grandchildren depended upon it. The woman who held a family together when everything around that family appeared determined to pull it apart.

These women deserved more than flowers. They deserved a nation that saw and noticed them.

Yet South Africa has become good at celebrating women symbolically while failing them practically. The nation applauded resilience when it should have been asking why such resilience was required in the first place. It called women “rocks”, yet even rocks fracture under sustained pressure.

The most respectful thing government could have done on Women’s Day was not only tell women how strong they were, but ask what could be removed from their shoulders: childcare burdens, economic exclusion, unsafe public transport, poor frail care, domestic and sexual violence, unemployment, failures in the criminal justice system, and the invisible weight of unpaid care. These are not sentimental issues. They are policy issues.

Government has created structures and plans. A National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide exists. The Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities carries a mandate for advocacy, monitoring, evaluation and socioeconomic transformation. Women’s Month 2026 opened with the EmpowerHer Market Trade Fair, linking women-owned businesses to markets, investors and development finance institutions. That was more than symbolic. Parliament itself acknowledged systemic gaps in July 2026 when the Portfolio Committee welcomed a joint inquiry by three Chapter 9 institutions into failures in the justice system’s response to gender-based violence and femicide, calling it long overdue.

Yet policy existence is not policy impact. A strategy document cannot console a battered woman. A framework cannot prosecute an offender. A podium cannot create a job. An annual theme cannot measure national progress. Women’s Day needed an impact pathway. If public money was spent commemorating women, citizens had to be able to ask what had changed between one Women’s Day and the next. How many women-owned businesses secured sustainable procurement? How many survivors received meaningful support? How many GBVF cases were successfully prosecuted? How many women entered employment? How many accessed finance? How many single mothers received tangible support that improved their children’s prospects? How many women became safer?

This analysis appears at https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2026-08-19-cancel-women-s-day-south-africa-s-annual-insult-to-women/ and reflects the growing argument that Women’s Day has lost its transformative purpose.

The women of 1956 did not march for nostalgia. They marched for change. The greatest tribute the nation could pay them was to recover the disruptive courage they embodied. They were not decorations in the liberation struggle. They were disruptors of an intolerable status quo. National Women’s Day has to carry that spirit forward.

So yes, go on celebrating. Buy the flowers. Take Granny to lunch. Honour the wife who carried a family through years no one else saw. Salute the single mother who worked overtime, stretched groceries, paid school fees, and watched her child graduate. But when the flowers fade and the cameras leave, only one question matters: What was different this August 9th? If there is no answer, the nation has confused commemoration with transformation. History deserves remembrance. Women deserve results.