Political analysy Tessa Dooms believes young South Africans need to play a more active role in the country’s political space, outside of just voting and the founder of the Ground Work Collective, Mbali Ntuli, is on the same wavelength.
JOHANNESBURG - As South Africa approaches the 2024 general elections, and with an estimated 13 million eligible voters still unregistered to vote, various civil organisations and some political parties are adopting innovative strategies to engage and mobilise the youth to participate in the elections. Some of these strategies include using free concerts and cell phone apps as platforms to entice young South Africans to register.
She also emphasises that a significant factor contributing to the low voter engagement among young South Africans is their limited exposure to information about elections. "If you are a young person in this country right now, if you are 30 right now, you have grown up entirely under democracy. Yet, 70% of those people are unemployed and the majority of people are not getting quality services delivered to them. At least six million of them are living in households that are informal, and kind of on the periphery of society. And they were sold the dream of democracy and it's not delivering on its dividends," she said.
"But power concedes nothing without the demand. And I think young people must demand to lead and the way that they can do that before an election, during the election and after the election, is by consolidating power in numbers... voting has been made into an individual exercise and for people to think of themselves as individual voters. But we are not individuals.