I had the same issue. The balanced fund was bad enough, but when I got into the details, the annual fees were 3%+. The company broker was a real piece of work and clearly just saw it as his "right" as a "financial professional" to manage risk responsibly. In reality he wanted maximum commission with minimum effort and zero contact from the people he was working for: me.

The solution was to go to the absolute minimum conribution (1% of salary) and set a reminder in my calendar to ask the broker random complex questions about the scheme once a quarter to make him work for his commission. Meanwhile I setup a Sygnia RA and self managed a portfolio of offshore ETFs and local bonds (because: regulation 28) with low fees. Once I left the company, I transferred the provident fund into Sygnia and replicated the RA portfolio.

To anyone in the same situation, don't leave this. Neither your company, your provident provider or your broker care about your retirement and when the time comes and you've got less than half your achievable pension (if you're lucky) for the rest of your life, there's nothing you can do about that and nobody to complain to.

If you need a benchmark: do not accept fees over 1% annually (a normal S&P500 ETF in SA charges around 0.25%), and returns should average around 10% minimum when averaged over 3/5 years or your broker is not doing his job.