Civic joy in South Africa’s vote

A watershed election reveals youthful determination to sweeten democracy with compassion and unity.

The Monitor's View

Thirty years after South Africa ended its violent system of racial segregation called apartheid through peaceful elections, it may be poised for another watershed moment: a transition from one-party rule to pluralism and power-sharing.

For the first time in three decades, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) may lose its majority in elections later this month. Voters are deeply frustrated by persistently high levels of corruption, crime, inequality, and unemployment. Just 16% of South Africans ages 18 to 24 express optimism about the future, according to a survey released this week by the Ichikowitz Family Foundation.

Discontentment, however, has not led to disengagement. Just the opposite. According to the Electoral Commission of South Africa, the May 29 election will include 31 new political parties. More than half of the nearly 15,000 candidates for local and national office are under the age of 50. Four in 10 are female. Fifteen candidates have only just reached the minimum voter age of 18.

That civic enthusiasm underscores how democracy is maturing, not just in South Africa but across the continent. Entrenched parties like the ANC tend to look backward, basing their claim to power on how they helped their societies break free of colonialism. But 60% of the continent’s population is under the age of 25. Younger Africans are forward-looking, innovative, and impatient.

“A young nation like ours is no place to advocate for quiet, sterile democracy,” wrote a South African data scientist Wednesday in American Purpose, using a pseudonym. “Now the Rainbow Nation is growing up to become ... loud, rambunctious, and argumentative” – driving a shift in importance from political parties to “the individual uniters rising up within each party.”

One candidate for the governor of KwaZulu-Natal province, Chris Pappas of the Democratic Alliance, sees younger people looking to the future. “My generation, we acknowledge the legacy of apartheid, its challenges and inequality, but we also can’t live there permanently,” he told the Sunday Times.

Jaco Kruger, academic dean of St. Augustine College of South Africa, sees as a change in the way Africans are defining their concepts of nationhood – from material factors like ethnicity to “an intangible reality that exists in the minds and the hearts of a large and diverse body of people.”

“Nationhood remains an open question and a task for citizens’ imagination,” he wrote Thursday in the Mail and Guardian newspaper. Through storytelling, dialogue, and listening, leaders and citizens learn to “see possibilities for connecting the dots in a different way so that a better story may be told and better conditions for living together may open up.”

Casting their gaze forward, South Africans are shaping a future – for themselves and their continent – unfettered by a limiting past.