/ 5 August 2016

Confessions of a former voting virgin: My journey from disillusionment to hope

The parties competing for governance of ward 20 in Mabopane Block C spoke to the Mail & Guadian about the significance of the youth vote.
The parties competing for governance of ward 20 in Mabopane Block C spoke to the Mail & Guadian about the significance of the youth vote.

It’s tough to admit to not voting. Anyone who’s skipped an election for which they’ve been eligible will probably nod their head in painful approval.

Whatever your reason for not heading to the polls – ideological, a sign of protest, apathy or just straight-up laziness – election season is the stuff of nightmares for a voting virgin. On the day itself you might as well be a leper. What you have to say doesn’t count for scratch because you’ve apparently lost your right to an opinion. Fiery eyes sear you and it seems that at any second they could give the order to banish you to a far-off island – or at the very least, Orania.

Throughout #ElectionDay, your friends, family and colleagues keep on at you about when you’re going to vote. It doesn’t even occur to them to ask are (you going to vote). As you state that you have not done the deed, disbelief courses across their faces, contorting them until they resemble something out of a Nightmare Before Christmas.

You have to run this gauntlet for the next day or so. Acquaintances, normally pleasant and innocuous, perv over your left thumb, verbal pistol loaded with a charged shot of condemnation, ready to unload the clip into you if a mark is lacking. This induces a sense of paranoia so acute that the no-voters instinctively clinch up their thumbs when the family cat gets a little bit too close.

“Do have any idea how many people died for your right to vote in a democracy!?”

Such phrases are flung with indignation at you and the intent is to do serious damage – pierce an apathetic conscience and reconfigure a wonky moral compass.

And rightly so.

I cast my first vote on Wednesday. Now I can begin to reconcile my past attitude to not voting come to terms with the fact that I made a mistake in not voting in the last election – the first for which I was eligible.

While I shake my head disapprovingly at younger me, my reasons for abstaining from voting in the 2014 national elections were rooted in what I thought was perfectly solid logic. So no apathy there.

At the crux of it was my distrust of democracy. You could fill up a book with the sheer amount of criticisms for the system – and many have. One such critique I would recite was Plato’s Ship of State metaphor from his magnum opus, the Republic. Essentially, it involves a ship captain whose senses have begun to ail and thus needs to pass on control of his vessel. The sailors fight, bicker and deceive one another in an attempt to be his successor. Ultimately, the captain will probably end up choosing the most scaly of the lot – the one who played the game the best. Meanwhile, the ship’s navigator, and most qualified sailor, is overlooked. In the modern global political climate, where rhetoric is king, it’s not hard to see how this metaphor relates.

What made things worse for me, and I imagine for many others, was the disillusionment South Africa’s politics infected me with. For far too many young people, there simply is no party that inspires confidence or stands head and shoulders above the rest.

We Millennials know about the great liberation feats of the ANC but our generation is not imbued with the nostalgia that creates the allegiance in the way it might for other generations. Instead, we’re offered nonstop media offerings that decry the corruption scandals the party’s bigwigs are involved in.

While many have found solace in the blue embrace, others are less impressed with the Democratic Alliance. The party has arguably not done enough to prove it can be a significant upgrade to those presently in power, notwithstanding their “Western Cape is the land of milk and honey” hyperbole. Not to mention recent racism scandals, which do little for their image.

Considering these are South Africa’s two major parties, the impartial voter could be forgiven for wishing, for simplicity’s sake, that our system is a more polarised one – such as in the United States. There the standard tussle is usually between a douchey conservative and a slighty-less douchey liberal. It’s far easier to identify with a camp and pitch your tent.

But, despite the disillusionment, despite the hollow metaphors, we all have a responsibility to vote. I see that now. Simply put: we’ve come too damn far. We millennials can’t really appreciate the horror of apartheid in the way that older generations can, but living in today’s South Africa is enough to make us appreciate how we all need to get involved in nation-building.

I still don’t think democracy is perfect. Maybe one day we’ll move on to a new system. Maybe we won’t. But for now this is all we have. So let’s make the most of it.

So my message to the younger of us, who are still debating whether voting in the next elections is as important as who sits on the iron throne in Westeros, is: just do it. There is nothing to lose – and possibly everything to gain. And, at the risk of sounding soppy, you get to be part of something great. Heck, if for nothing else do it to avoid fomo or the selfie opportunity.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got many thumbnails to inspect and condescending judgments to pass on.