SA’s young voters are not apathetic, they are auditing an unresponsive democracy

Young South Africans are not apathetic but increasingly unconvinced that voting translates into accountability, as broken promises and unresponsive local institutions erode trust in democracy. The answer is not another lecture to ‘show up’, but a system that keeps a visible ledger of promises, performance and consequences.

Themba Dlamini is a husband, father of four, pastor and chartered accountant who loves South Africa – warts and all. He is the author of Village Boy: A Memoir of Fatherlessness, and writes to wrestle with hard truths, stir hope and help build a country in which his children can thrive.

A generation has completed its first audit of democracy and returned a finding.

There is a lamppost near a taxi rank in almost every township in this country. This month, a new election poster is going up on it. Same party, sometimes the same face, five years older. The tap promised last time is still dry.

The young man putting up the poster has come of voting age beneath promises that have not. Nothing in the system has given him a way to record that fact where it counts. In November, he will be told that he is apathetic.

He is not. He has been keeping the book. He has watched one full cycle of promise and delivery, from poster to poster, and reached the conclusion any auditor would reach from a ledger with entries on only one side.

In June, the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) told us that more than 70% of eligible 18- and 19-year-olds were not on the voters’ roll. To its credit, the commission has used the tools available to a registration body. After the June registration weekend, it zero-rated its online portal so that registering costs no data, announced a second weekend for August and kept online registration open beyond it.

Young people had already begun responding. Four in five of the new voters added in June were under 30 . Even so, at the end of July, on the eve of the second registration weekend, seven in 10 first-time voters were still missing from the roll.

The IEC itself has said that young people are far from apathetic. The charge comes from everyone else: the commentator, the party official, the minister with a sad face. Youth apathy, we are told again. The young do not care.

Apathy exists. I have seen it. But apathy is not what seven in 10 looks like.

What I have met far more often is a young person who is unconvinced, and the two conditions are not the same. An apathetic person wants nothing from you. An unconvinced person wants a great deal and has stopped expecting you to deliver it.

The evidence bears this out. The Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC’s) long-running social attitudes survey shows that the belief in voting as a civic duty has held: two in three South Africans still say it is a civic duty, including more than six in 10 among the youngest cohort.

In the late 2000s, six in 10 South Africans believed their vote made a difference. Today, fewer than three in 10 do. Among Gen Z, it is fewer than one in four. An IEC-commissioned HSRC study of young people considering abstention in 2024 reached the same conclusion: most still regarded voting as important.