GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
09 August 2026
*Note to Editor: This speech was delivered during the Women’s Day debate
I want to talk about a lie we tell ourselves in this country and in this province. We say South Africa is being rebuilt. We say communities are being held together. We say families are surviving, adapting, enduring.
And every single time, we are talking about women, and we are refusing to say their name.
Because who is up at four in the morning organising the neighbourhood watch WhatsApp group when the streetlights have stopped working for the 5th time that month?
Who is walking the little ones to school past the same corner where the drug house operates in broad daylight, because there are no other routes and no other choices?
Who is queuing for hours for a grant, caring for a sick grandparent, raising somebody else’s children because their mother had to leave to find work in another province?
Women. It is always women.
This is not community spirit. This is not resilience. This is unpaid, unrecognised, uncounted labour, propping up a state that has failed to show up.
Every pothole this government doesn’t fix, every clinic that runs out of medicine, every police station that doesn’t respond, a woman fills that gap with her own body, her own time, her own exhaustion.
And then we call her strong. We put her on a poster in August and thank her for her sacrifice, and in September we hand her nothing, no budget line, no policy, no plan, to make that sacrifice unnecessary.
I am angry about this. I am angry that safety in our streets, dignity in our homes, and growth in our economy all quietly run on the backs of women who were never asked, never paid, and never thanked properly.
This government needs to finally do its job, so that a woman’s love for her community stops being the only safety net this country has.