Beware the might of non voters
Majority of SA voters decided not to vote
The great Mfundi Vundla could not have plotted the looting soapie that played out in our streets and spilled into our living rooms in July. Nor could the award-winning Mbongeni Ngema have scripted and predicted the damp squib that was the local government elections 2021. Damp squib they were, but insignificant there were not. In the latter sense, these elections were an instructive non-event.
They speak to a complicated and poignant moment in the history of our republic. The most visible and the most sensational symptoms of this moment are out there for all to see: murdered councillor candidates, low voter turnout, the high number of the eligible who did not register to vote, hung councils and councils lost and found.
We are now saddled with several precarious coalitions. With some of these coalitions, where no shared principles are discernable, the question is not if but when they will collapse. In many of these coalitions, each participant political party may try to extract as much of what is in it for them, as quickly as possible, before the coalition collapses. I shudder to think how the auditor-general’s report on municipalities will read, one year from now.
And yet, in trying to understand this moment, effects must not be confused with their causes. We should be wary of the many interpretative clichés, which are in circulation. Central to many are those that simply blame the ANC, while regurgitating worn out theories about the life spans of liberation movements. But the moment we are going through is about much more than the ANC. It is perhaps a measure of how dominant the ANC is, in the minds of many South
Africans, at least, that most interpretations of the recent elections are unable to see beyond the ANC. As if the ANC is the only party that lost support.
Indeed, the very obsession that some of the opportunistic coalitions have with shutting the ANC out, demonstrates not merely how much they hate the ANC but also how much they fear the (power of the) ANC. And yet the reasons why the ANC failed to reach 50% this time around must be sought not so much among the 12.5 million who voted but among the 27 million who did not vote. Theoretically therefore, a 40%
increase in voter turnout would have most likely delivered the ANC again.
This means, that in the main, voters did not turn against (as in voting for someone else) their parties by not turning up and not registering to vote, they turned away from their parties and the electoral system as a whole. While the effect appears to be the same, there is to my mind, a world of difference between turning against and turning away. The one who turns against still cares but chances are that the one who turns away has stopped caring.
South Africans may be engaged in a massive disengagement from the 1994 political project. If the 12.5 million have already used their voting power, who knows how the 27 million will choose to use their new-found power of abstention – now that they might not feel beholden to municipal governments?
Should my reading be correct, the “insurrection” or “economic sabotage” that we witnessed in July may become like the proverbial Sunday school picnic.
In an earlier article I suggested that the real thuma mina task now belongs to those who will go and activate the 27 millions voters who turned away from the elections. But I wish to amend that. The 27 million are indeed waiting for better service delivery. They are also waiting for an end to corruption, but they are not necessarily waiting to be reactivated back into becoming anybody’s “voting cows”.
In my view, it is the 27 million who have checked out of our electoral system that are redefining our political landscape, not the 12.5 million who voted. This reality is of massive significance if we are to appreciate the meaning of the moment we are traversing as a country.
A new political reality is being born. I am not convinced that South African political parties appreciate this reality deeply enough. Ours is a time of profound disenchantment and disillusionment with the 1994 political and electoral system. Slowly South Africans are reaching consensus about the political reality they do not want, but they are yet to define the reality they want.