MALAIKA WA AZANIA | The youth vote debate is misdiagnosing the problem

Since President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the date of the local government elections, political parties and commentators have been speaking about the need to register young people to vote.

The discussion is not new as it happens in the run-up to every election.

It is an argument that has its basis in statistical reality.

Voter turnout has declined steadily since the early years of SA’s democracy.

In the 1994 general election, turnout was 86.87%.

By the most recent general election, in 2024, turnout had plummeted to 58.64%.

This represented an all-time low in the country’s democratic history, continuing a steady decline from the 89.3% peak in 1999 to the 66.05% recorded in 2019.

The numbers are even more bleak for local government elections.

In 2016, voter turnout was 57.94%, and by the next election, in 2021, it had declined drastically to just 45.86%.

This means that in the last local government election, less than half of total eligible voters did not cast a vote.

Across the board, the response to this problem has been that more voter registration campaigns should be held, targeting young people in particular.

To some degree, this is a reasonable conclusion. A report commissioned by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung on voter turnout in the 2021 local election shows that less than 20% of people aged between 18 and 35 registered to vote.

But young people are not staying away from the polls due to lack of information or knowledge about the voting process or its significance.

Consider that in SA, the 25-34 age group has the highest level of internet access and usage and has frequently been described as the dominant demographic in the country’s digital revolution.

People between the ages of 16 and 34 make up a significant portion of connected South Africans, while the 15-24 age group is highly active online, just behind the 25–34 cohort in terms of smartphone and social media usage.

With all political parties, think-tanks and the IEC having made use of social media over the past decade in an attempt to increase voter participation among the youth, logic would suggest that the most active internet and social media users would have been the ones to fill the voting stations.

Young people are not staying away from the polls due to being uninformed about voting or the need to register — they are doing so because they have lost faith in the democratic process.

When young people do not believe that their votes are of any significance, and that they will not result in any meaningful material change, they will not participate in the voting process regardless of how many youth-targeted campaigns political parties and other organisations run.

For young adults to participate in the democratic process, they must trust in it.

And the most practical way to demonstrate that the process has any meaning is for material conditions to change in a manner that inspires confidence that the country is functional and that their aspirations are achievable.

When young people cannot access higher education or must contend with the inefficiencies of NSFAS, or when they graduate and stay home because there are no jobs, or when the jobs that they can access are precarious, they do not have any reason to believe in the democratic project.

When they drive on roads filled with potholes and dysfunctional traffic lights, or have to use alternative power sources because of load-shedding, or when terms such as water-shedding become part of the vocabulary, and the cost-of-living crisis excludes millions from economic participation and the attainment of a decent life, then voting is not seen as important.

This is made worse when political parties resemble each other in how they govern, and when municipalities are rendered unstable by dysfunctional coalitions.

These are systemic issues that campaigns cannot fix.

If politicians want young people to vote, they must create conditions that make democratic participation worthwhile.

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