Voter apathy is real - and the reason probably is that many feel their vote is ineffective and doesn't make a difference.
Elections 2026
A voter casts her vote at a voting station in Pretoria East, 2 November 2026, during special voting before South Africa heads to the polls on Wednesday to elect councils for all district, metropolitan and local municipalities in each of the country’s nine provinces. Picture: Michel Bega/The Citizen
Given that politics is all about repetitive clichés and optimistic sales pitches, we would like to give you this old chestnut to sum up the voting in South Africa’s unfolding local government elections tomorrow: It is the first day of the rest of your life.
And, if you have already gone to the trouble to register yourself as a voter, you have a civic duty to get to a polling station tomorrow and make your mark.
We don’t care where you make your mark, because if you don’t, you surrender all moral rights to whinge about what happens to your city or town.
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View MapIn the 2021 local government polls, the horrifying reality was that just three in 10 South Africans who were eligible bothered to vote.
That, effectively, is turning the collective back of society on politicians.
And, as most of us have found out through painful experience, turning your back on a politician leaves you in danger of getting a knife in it, or of being robbed blind.
Voter apathy is real – and the reason probably is that many feel their vote is ineffective and doesn’t make a difference.
Think about it: in whose interest is it that you have no voice?
The politicians… you see where we’re going with this?
If we look at what is likely to happen from tomorrow onwards, then, assuming voting turnout mirrors the roughly 50% it did in 2021, we will end up with a still unrepresentative slice of society trying to make changes.
As few as 35% of those South Africans able to vote will actually do so.
This means more than six out of 10 of us would rather braai and dop tomorrow…
South Africans are past masters at blaming everything and everyone but themselves for their predicament.
Casting a vote helps change that.
