SA’s young voters are not apathetic, they are auditing an unresponsive democracy

A generation has completed its first audit of democracy and returned a finding.

There is a lamppost near a taxi rank in almost every township in this country. This month, a new election poster is going up on it. Same party, sometimes the same face, five years older. The tap promised last time is still dry.

The young man putting up the poster has come of voting age beneath promises that have not. Nothing in the system has given him a way to record that fact where it counts. In November, he will be told that he is apathetic.

He is not. He has been keeping the book. He has watched one full cycle of promise and delivery, from poster to poster, and reached the conclusion any auditor would reach from a ledger with entries on only one side.

In June, the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) told us that more than 70% of eligible 18- and 19-year-olds were not on the voters’ roll. To its credit, the commission has used the tools available to a registration body. After the June registration weekend, it zero-rated its online portal so that registering costs no data, announced a second weekend for August and kept online registration open beyond it.

Young people had already begun responding. Four in five of the new voters added in June were under 30. Even so, at the end of July, on the eve of the second registration weekend, seven in 10 first-time voters were still missing from the roll.

Far from apathetic

The IEC itself has said that young people are far from apathetic. The charge comes from everyone else: the commentator, the party official, the minister with a sad face. Youth apathy, we are told again. The young do not care.

Apathy exists. I have seen it. But apathy is not what seven in 10 looks like.

What I have met far more often is a young person who is unconvinced, and the two conditions are not the same. An apathetic person wants nothing from you. An unconvinced person wants a great deal and has stopped expecting you to deliver it.

The evidence bears this out. The Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC’s) long-running social attitudes survey shows that the belief in voting as a civic duty has held: two in three South Africans still say it is a civic duty, including more than six in 10 among the youngest cohort.

What has collapsed is the belief that voting works.

In the late 2000s, six in 10 South Africans believed their vote made a difference. Today, fewer than three in 10 do. Among Gen Z, it is fewer than one in four. An IEC-commissioned HSRC study of young people considering abstention in 2024 reached the same conclusion: most still regarded voting as important. What kept them home was poor performance and promises not kept.

The researchers called the study Beyond Apathy. The title is the finding.

Young people have not stopped keeping the book. They have stopped believing that anyone on the other side is reading it.

That suspicion goes deeper than municipal performance. Young South Africans have long believed that the law keeps different accounts for different people: one for those who must obey it and another for those powerful enough to operate it.

The evidence heard by the Madlanga Commission has not proved every allegation placed before it. But it has put evidence behind that suspicion. Again and again, the public has heard claims of money, political access and criminal influence reaching places an ordinary citizen cannot. The ordinary person submits a complaint and waits. The connected person makes a call and the file can move, stall or disappear.

The problem is not that the state keeps no book. It is that young people increasingly suspect it knows exactly whose entries to honour. Against that background, the Electoral Commission has a slogan for November: Get Up. Show Up. Vote.

It is a good slogan. It is also a complete description of what the state asks of a young person, and of what it offers in return.

Get up. Show up. Vote.

Get up. Show up. Vote. Then go home, and do not return for five years.

Start with where a young person actually encounters the state. A president in an argument on television. A municipality is encountered underfoot: the road, the streetlight, the library with or without Wi-Fi, the refuse collected or left to rot, the field that has become a dumping site, the cost of reaching work.

The ward is the only level of government you can walk to. Councils do not create jobs, but they have a great deal to say about whether a job is reachable. The vote closest to the young man’s daily life is now the one he is unlikely to cast.

That is not a contradiction. It is a verdict.

Young South Africans know how a stokvel works. They know the rule that makes it possible: what goes in must be written down, what goes out must be accounted for, and every member must be able to see the page. Trust in a stokvel is not a feeling. It is a ledger anyone can inspect. Now inspect the book that local democracy keeps.

The law establishes one structure specifically to carry a neighbourhood’s concerns into the municipality between elections: the ward committee, made up of the councillor and up to 10 residents.

Three facts tell you how its book is kept. The councillor chairs the body that is supposed to hold the councillor accountable. The act requires it. The committee’s only inherent power is to make recommendations. Nobody is required to answer them. Researchers working across 12 municipalities found the same failure recurring: the report goes up, and nothing comes back.

And too often, when a committee changes after an election, its records do not change hands. The incoming committee begins without the reports, the list of outstanding matters or any account of what was promised on which street.

Old promises remain unpaid

The new book begins on a blank page while the old promises remain unpaid. This matters more than it did a generation ago, and not because young people have become impatient. They live inside systems that keep records. A bank confirms a transfer before the phone is back in the pocket. A parcel can be watched across the country. A complaint to a network receives a reference number and, eventually, a reply.

Yet the institution closest to a young person’s daily life can take his name and return nothing. He is not measuring that institution against 1994, and he should not be asked to. The queue in 1994 opened the book. Thirty-two years later, he is entitled to inspect what has been entered in it. So he is measuring it against everything else in his life that can receive an entry, preserve it and show him what happened next.

Now build a stokvel on the rules of a ward committee.

The treasurer chairs the meeting at which the accounts are checked. A member may raise a concern, but no reply is owed. When the committee changes, the old book is not handed over. 

Nobody would join it.

Yet we are surprised when a 19-year-old judges a democracy operating on similar terms and declines to register. The system keeps asking for his name while offering no reliable account of what the last vote delivered.

Do that to a volunteer for 18 months and you will lose the volunteer. Do it to a generation and you will manufacture, at public expense, exactly the unconvinced citizen you then blame for not registering.

When I criss-crossed KwaZulu-Natal doing voter education for the IEC, I told people that if you do not vote, you cannot complain. I was wrong about the order. The right to complain does not come from voting. It comes from being governed. Voting is not the price of admission to citizenship; it is one of the ways citizens decide who must answer them. That bargain holds only for as long as the answer comes.

Three reforms and one condition

So here is what I would ask of every party before 4 November, in front of the young people they are courting: three reforms and one condition.

First, take the chair away from the councillor. Let the committee elect its own chair so that the person being checked does not control the checking.

Second, require an answer. Every formal recommendation should receive a written response from the administration within a fixed period, published where every resident can inspect it.

Third, preserve the record. Every incoming committee should inherit the reports, outstanding matters and unfulfilled commitments of the committee before it.

The condition is basic: the committee must be able to function. 

It needs a place to meet, a way to communicate and expenses paid on time.

Changing the chair needs Parliament: Section 73 of the Municipal Structures Act requires the councillor to chair the committee. The other reforms can be made this year by councils using powers they already possess.

That is the test for every party: not what you promise nationally, but what you enter in the books of the councils you already govern.

I have worked inside the machinery that counts votes and inside the office that audits what is done with them. The lesson of both is the same. The ballot is an entry. On one side, the citizen records an act of trust: I have entrusted you with power.

Democracy becomes credible only when the government enters its account on the other side: here is what we did with it.

The poster on the lamppost will come down, as the last one did. The question is whether anything will be written down before it does.

Young South Africans may not know the clauses governing ward committees. They may never have seen a municipal report. But they know what an institution feels like when nothing comes back. They would not join a stokvel run on those terms, and they are increasingly unwilling to join a democracy run that way.

That is not apathy. That is an audit finding. Before you tell them to get up and show up, show them the book. DM