I had an illuminating conversation with my mentor this morning.

He had just come back from casting his vote in South Africa’s sixth municipal election and he was concerned about the potential low voter turnout.

We talked a little about the voter turnout levers and agreed that voter turnout is always proportionate to the degree to which voters believe their vote will be consequential.

After five municipal elections and seeing different political parties taking reigns with little or no improvement in the quality of governance, it should come as no surprise that a significant portion of the electorate is voter fatigued.

So my mentor asked what could be done. I responded by saying there is no short cut to any of our problems… we need to develop leaders.

If you think about this carefully, who is developing leaders in South Africa? As in systematically and intentionally building our leadership stock?

Our primary educational institutes focus on literacy not character, our tertiary institutions focus on conveying knowledge not developing thinking. Our religious institutions are more interested in developing doctrinal adherents not transformational leaders; ditto for the political parties.

Non-profit organisations often find themselves having budgets that lean more towards rescue or alleviation services than leadership development.

Only corporates have been intentionally and systematically investing in developing their leaders through corporate education institutions such as the one I am associated with.

However, corporate leaders will tell you that it’s extremely expensive and that few employees benefit from such opportunities. Given South Africa’s high unemployment rate, such leaders are only a tiny proportion of the populace and even fewer lend their skills to civic-building endeavours.

So our leadership quality prognosis is not looking good at all. What people often miss is that democracies only work under a set of very fundamental assumptions. One of these is a politically and economically literate electorate. Without this, democracies can easily turn into cults as we have seen in other parts of the world.

No amount of voting will change our leadership crisis. What we need right now are civic movements that prioritise leadership development.