No voters means no true democracy

In their obsession with the trees and not the wood of the South African local government election results – and the inevitable wrangling about coalitions which will follow – most experts missed the reality that, for the next five years, it will be a minority of people that dictates the lives of the majority.

And by that we do not mean a return to the days of apartheid when whites governed the country… much as some claim is happening again because of a resurgence of the DA in these elections.

We are talking numbers… and they don’t lie.

There are an estimated 38 million South Africans aged 18 and above who are eligible to vote.

Just 29.2 million of them bothered to register, meaning that, even before the election process got underway on Wednesday, 25% – or one in four – of them had opted out of the democratic process entirely.

And even among those eligible to vote, not everybody did, with a voter turnout of 52%, or 14.9 million of the 29.2 million registered.

That turnout figure may have been some cause for celebration among the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), which conducted a thorough campaign to educate voters, seeing turnout go up by about six percentage points, compared to the 2012 local government elections.

Yet, when you look at the wood, not the trees, it is disturbing that, in this poll, 52% of the people got to decide the future of the other 48%.

Whatever that is, it isn’t true democracy.

There may be many reasons behind it, but it should concern everyone that just under half of all South Africans don’t believe their vote has any power to change things.

Perhaps it is ignorance, perhaps it is disillusionment.

But unless we get more people to make their mark, true democracy still remains some way off.