Despite the myriad of challenges facing the country, voters can fix South Africa if they exercise their power at the polls. That is according to political analyst Tessa Dooms, who believes the status quo would have been worse without the unity of communities.
Looking at statistics, she said, South Africa would likely have been in a worse position had it not been for community organisations and individuals. However, she explained voters can fix South Africa if only they showed up and voted wisely during elections.
“We don’t have a shortage of people who are showing up for themselves, for their families [and] for their communities. Many people who we say are unemployed are actually getting up every day and trying to seek a living – whether they are hawkers on the street or whether people are just braiding hair,” she said.
Dooms said this meant people were engaging in good causes for the country, whether by seeking employment or by organising protest marches. However, she said they fell short of enacting regime change through elections.
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Political apathy
“People are actually staying plugged in at the level of society and at the level of community to keep things moving. The problem is that we have distanced ourselves from the centre of power; we’ve distanced ourselves from the politics of the country,” she said.
Dooms, who firmly believes voters can fix South Africa, said her work at civil society group Rivonia Circle had shown her the extent to which people distanced themselves. She said this was done with the hope businesses would come to the country’s rescue, but this would be ineffective because “we have a political problem”.
“It’s our power that’s being misused and we’re not doing anything to reclaim that power. We have power, but we’re not using it to fight the big battle of how do we reclaim state power and how do we make sure that we use all of the resources that we are collectively putting together in the State for all of our benefits,” she said.
Dooms was of the opinion that it was not mindless voters who were keeping the country in a rut, but instead eligible voters who chose to withhold their votes.
“There are more people who are withholding their vote completely than people who are just mindlessly voting,” she said, reflecting on the 2021 municipal elections in which two-thirds of those eligible to vote did not.
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Voter education
Dooms said the apathy laid bare in the last municipal elections called for the electorate to be empowered. She stated that people needed to know why they should vote, what they were voting against and what their choices meant for the country.
According to Dooms, people withholding their vote with the intention of punishing political parties were in fact allowing the opposite to take effect.
“People think that by holding their vote they’re making it more difficult for political parties, [but] it’s untrue [because] the fewer people vote, the better for political parties because that means only the people that will vote for them show up.”
She said this should emphasise the urgent need for conversations about voting. Just knowing about the right to vote was not enough.
“We must know that we have to raise our voices and we have to participate, but more importantly we need to start having conversations amongst each other about how we are making our voting choices and what are the issues that we are voting for.”
Furthermore, Dooms stated it was necessary for the electorate to declare the issues they wished to be addressed before political parties begin campaigning for the 2024 elections. She said it wasn’t up to parties to decide what was important to the public.
“We wait for them to come and convince us. Instead, we must start working on convincing each other to vote, we must start working now and coming up with a collective demand that we have of the politicians,” she said, adding that the electorate needed to develop “what we’re calling a Peoples’ Manifesto, where the people of the country determine and decide what the issues for the 2024 election must be.
Essentially, this would mean “we must decide what the quality of leadership is that any political party who wants our vote must meet the quality of leadership”.
