Out with the old but have fresh ideas

With the candidates’ lists now out, South Africans are having a useful conversation about the lack of young public representatives in our legislatures. Although the EFF and the DA do have candidates under 50 years dominating their lists, the fact that the ANC – which currently holds more than 60% of the seats in the National Assembly – is dominated by people over 50 means that we may again end up with a house full of pensioners.

This at a time when South Africa has become younger. With the exception of a few countries, the world is also showing signs of choosing younger politicians.

Just last weekend, it was 36 year-old prime minister Jacinda Ardern who led New Zealand as it grappled with the white supremacist terror attack on a mosque in Christchurch.

So those South Africans calling for a decrease in a number of MPs who have long passed their pension date have a point. While we recognise that the right to vote and be voted for is universal and should not be limited by one’s age, South Africa does need a new breed of politicians to rescue it from its current political and economic impasse.

But age should not be the only criterion. We are concerned that the debate tends to focus on when the individual candidates were born rather than the quality and skills they would bring to the legislatures.

A quick glimpse at the lists of the three main political parties does not give us much confidence that the “young” candidates that are being put forward have any fresh ideas that would pull SA out of the unemployment crisis, for example. Many of the “young” candidates are career politicians themselves who have have no life experience outside of the bubble of political life. Many have never had to look for a job in their lives and would therefore have no idea what needs to change in state policies to help the majority of youth be “employable”. They have no clue of the hardships many young entrepreneurs have to go through in order to set up their business. It is no use to have young MPs if their mindset is still the same as that of the generation that came before them which values ideological fidelity over finding modern and practical solutions to problems facing society.