It’s been a long hard London week for Ciaran Gray, but now, at last, it’s Friday afternoon and time to ease off with two English mates and a pint of Guinness before jetting back to South Africa at the weekend. To get himself in the mood he has taken his friends to the Bok Bar near Leicester Square, a popular watering hole for South Africans working near the West End.
Ciaran, a 29-year-old chartered accountant, is well into his second year in London and is considering making a permanent move. With his joint Irish and South African citizenship he can stay as long as he likes, but he hasn’t quite decided how long that will be. ”I’m about to fly back to Johannesburg for a couple of months,” he says, ”and then I’ll come back to London and, actually, I’m seriously considering moving to Britain permanently.”
He is registered as a voter in South Africa, but expects to return to Britain in April, when the South African general election is anticipated. He voted in 1994 and 1999 and he’d like to cast his vote again — if necessary, at the South African High Commission in Trafalgar Square. ”I think it’s important but, to be honest, I suppose I’d be more likely to get around to it if I got a bit more information about where to start.”
The catch for sometime South Africans like Ciaran is that this year’s election won’t be anything like 1994, when anyone with a South African passport could go to their embassy to vote, even if they’d been out of the country for decades. To the government, that should have been a once-off exception that heralded the birth of a democratic South Africa, and last year they finally got round to changing the rules.
The current Electoral Act restricts South Africans voting overseas to those on ”government service” (embassy staff and their households) and ”those voters who are temporarily absent from the RSA for purposes of a holiday, a business trip, attendance of a tertiary institution or an educational visit or participation in a sports event”.
Added hurdles are that they must be registered to vote in South Africa, must inform the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) within 15 days of the announcement of the election date and must have both a South African passport and a ”green bar-coded ID”.
In 1994 there were 200 polling stations in more than 60 countries, with an estimated half a million potential voters, each with the right to choose their South African region of origin. In Britain alone there were 30 polling booths catering for up to 70 000 South African voters. For April 2004, however, the plans are rather more modest — just one British booth, in the High Commission.
The intervening decade has seen the number of South Africans in Britain, including tourists, rising to between half a million and 800 000, although no one knows the precise figure. High Commission spokesperson Malusi Mahlulo says they also don’t yet have any idea how many voters will turn up on the day. ”We’ll only get an idea once the IEC lets us know how many people have informed them of their intention to vote here, but I’m sure it won’t be anything like 1994 or 1999, because there’s no wholesale voting like then — it’s only selected categories.”
He stresses, however, that these restrictions are ”the same as most other countries” — the obvious logic being that only people living in a country should have a say in its future government and those who leave should lose the right.
Ten years ago all the major South African political parties, and particularly the African National Congress, National Party and the old Democratic Party, went on British voting drives, with plenty of advertising, public meetings and media appearances. This year, however, it appears that it is mainly the Democratic Alliance that is taking this vote seriously.
The DA has a special interest group, advertised on their website, called South Africans Abroad and is already planning what party strategist Nick Clelland-Stokes calls a ”mini-campaign” in the United Kingdom, starting in March and running through until the expected election date of April 14.
”We’ll start with an advertising campaign with print ads in papers like the SA Times and we’re also considering running spots on a local radio station,” he says. ”Then Douglas Gibson and Joe Seremane will go to London in March to address a public meeting and meet with potential voters and we’re also thinking of putting up election posters in dense areas like Wimbledon and Southfields.”
He acknowledges, however, that each British-South African vote will require far more work than capturing a vote at home. ”It’s obviously much more difficult than in 1994 because it depends on people temporarily in Britain actually being registered to vote in South Africa and then getting around to informing the IEC in time and there’s an added complication that we’re still waiting for clarification from the IEC on whether people on two-year working visas will be eligible,” he says. ”And finally it boils down to how many of these potential voters get around to going to the High Commission on election day. But we’ll certainly do our very best to get them to make the effort.”
The Bok Bar in London’s West End, and the Springbok Bar and Springbok CafÃ