Make the right choice when voting

• Randfontein resident Louanne Daffue writes:

I would like to write this letter on behalf of every voter in every constituency.

I hope that the infomation that I am going to write below will open the eyes of every voter in this country and hope that the voter will make the right choices when it comes to the day where they have to vote for a political party that can make the difference in this country and also for the person of that political party who made a difference in his ward.

Everytime there is a by-election (only happens in a specific ward if something happened to the previous councilor of that ward), municipal election or a national election, we suddenly see all these activists from different political parties coming out or phoning voters to find out if they will be voting for them.

However, after the elections, the political party or councilor is nowhere to be seen.

The only time we then hear about political parties is on the news but in real life, they have disappeared and the best part is, the municipality is paying them a big salary for doing nothing in the wards or for their voters.

Well, lets start at the beginning when it comes to elections time, we are talking about municipal elections where we vote for our ward councilors and we also get an extra bonus of councilors, we call them Public Representative (PR) councilors.

Each political party has its own procedures how candidates are chosen and they go through a process of interviews and finally suitable candidate for each ward are decided on and sent away for approval at their Provincial office .

The same applies for the PR councilors which are rated from number one to the last one on the list.

Please note that you must be a fully paid up member belonging to a political party for a certain time (months) that can only apply.

Unfortunately, it happens that the favourites lands at the top of the list and the least favorite at the bottom.

In most cases, the top ones that come in are the ones we call the “ghost” Councilors because they are just there for the salary and nothing more.

Then on the day of the elections, the voters goes out to their voting stations where they have registered to vote to make an X next to the party you support, and on your arrival you see different political parties, with their tables, gazebo’s and activists anxiously grabbing you by the hand at your car, dragging you to their table to check if you are registered at the correct voting station and getting your info like your address and telephone number for their database to contact you in five years time for the next election in.

Then the elections is over.

Depending on how many wards a political party have won, extra seats are given to the party which they put in the PR councilors.

Theses PR councilors are placed in the wards that the opposing political party has won, and does exactly the same as the ward councilor of that specific ward.

For example, five political parties contested the election. Only four won seats in council, so this means each ward, has one ward councilor, and three PR councilors, and each from a different political party.

So this means there is for each party , there is a PR councilor representing the ward. Some PR councilors (from the bigger political parties) are only given one ward to take care of, and the smaller parties PR councilors have more than one ward.

Depending on the seats won in council.

After elections, everything is back to normal and now the fun starts.