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The 2016 local government elections could rescue South Africa, Part II

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Herman Mashaba is the leader of ActionSA. Mashaba is the former executive mayor of Johannesburg and founder of the People’s Dialogue.

The next weekend is your last opportunity to be a history maker. If you’ve not done so yet April 9 and 10 offer you the last opportunity to register to vote in this year’s local government elections. We can save our constitutional democracy if all eligible voters register to vote, and actually vote.

I want to build on my two previous Daily Maverick columns (here & here) in which I argued that the very soul of South Africa is on the line in these elections – and that the country suffers a major democratic deficit. In light of the Constitutional Court’s remarkable judgment on Nkandla last Thursday, never before has Chinua Achebe’s famous title that when “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” seemed more applicable to the South African story.

As I watched the judgment, I could not help but think of what Leon Jaworski, the Special Prosecutor during the Watergate Scandal, which spelled the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency, said of the American Constitution: “From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one – absolutely no one – is above the law.” Such a time is upon us in South Africa.

However, we can save our constitutional democracy if all eligible voters register to vote, and actually vote in this year’s local government elections. There is another reason why this is so. In a fluid and globalising world where power is being diffused from the old monolithic state “actors” to nimbler actors like city mayors – and other agile “platforms” – voters have the power to be the drivers of evidence-based policies and fresh solutions. If you want to metaphorically punch a hole in a system that you feel is loaded against you in 2016, voting in local government elections is the best method. It is also a civic responsibility because refraining is as consequential as participating.

Think of our inspirational peers in the global south, Argentina. Argentinians recently elected the former Mayor of Buenos Aries, Maucicio Macri, to La Casa Rosada on a policy platform not dissimilar to the DA’s policy offer. After the economic chaos and Zumaesque state capture of the Kirchner years, they voted for Macri’s policies to be enacted at the national level. We don’t have to wait until 2019. We can rewrite the South African story in 2016. The bleak alternative to rebuilding South Africa upwards from the local level in 2016 is more fragmentation, and a continued lack of national purpose.

Without wishing to cast aspersions on their fascinating policy platforms, the Corbynmania that brought Jeremy Corbyn to leadership in the UK, and Bernie Sanders’ extraordinary campaign in the U.S. Democrats’ primary election, have been driven by young people and others who feel alienated by the democratic process, and the perceived entrenched elitism in their respective societies. Tony Blair unabashedly says he is baffled by this phenomena. I don’t know why. These two men have not created a new fork in the road; they’ve taken the highway called ‘Discontent’ that has been opening up for over three decades.

As the DA mayoral candidate for Johannesburg and as an entrepreneur with a special passion for youth education, the last thing I find young people is ‘apathetic.’ I intuit why they feel as frustrated as their aforementioned American and British peers. Empirical evidence, in fact, shows that young people volunteer more, are more ‘switched on’, and are more social responsible than previous generations. It is more that the “born-frees” (voters aged 15-24) strongly agree with the statement that “people are giving up hope that the government will listen to them”, in the words of the recently published Good Governance Africa agency report.

In our young country, as I’ve recently observed in Daily Maverick, young people are the most disenfranchised from the democratic process. In January, 2016, the IEC revealed that over 7 million people under the age of 35 are currently not registered to vote. Simply put, they’re not using democracy’s ‘shock and awe’ weapon: the vote. Our winner-takes-all electoral system of strict proportional representation means that the ANC government, which only just secured one third of the potential electoral bloc in 2014, exercises 100% power at the national level. There are no runners up at the national and provincial level.

The beauty of local government is that voters literally have the power to change how their community and ward is governed. While our system does not have the American power of recallthe forced resignation of a ward councillor will result in a by-election. It also much easier to force a political party to turf out an underperforming PR councillor.

More profoundly, the country’s 243 local municipalities – including the 8 metros – means, potentially, we could have 243 different governments led by a party other than the ANC. If in 2016, you believe that South African politics needs to be turned upside down, then there can be no better way of achieving this than registering and voting in the LGE. This is a once in a generation opportunity for the voters’ to ‘recapture’ the country, and rescue the state from the ANC government.

DA-led Midvaal in Gauteng – historically a region that the ANC treated as its heartland – is, for example, the province’s best performing municipality. The Good Governance Africa agency also found that 15 of the top best-performing 20 municipalities are in the DA-run Western Cape. And of the ten best in South Africa, 9 have local DA governments and DA Mayors. The same report found that in a province the ANC governs, the Eastern Cape, “12 of the 20-worst-performing municipalities [are ANC].”

Simply put, excellent service delivery is punctuating the political system at the local government level, while the national government lurches from one crisis to another, and Jacob Zuma slides to the exit door.

The only way to save South Africa’s democratic compact is if you register to vote, and vote in this year’s local government elections. I reassert my conviction that for the first time in our history, democracy itself – as well as service delivery – is on the line.

We need the young people of South Africa – and everyone – to stand up and be counted. DM

Herman Mashaba is the Democratic Alliance mayoral candidate for Johannesburg.

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