Troydon Wainwright

Some people I know believe that voting is useless. “My vote won’t make a difference anyway so why bother,” they say.  Of course, they still complain bitterly about the state of the country and endlessly criticize the government. Arguing the merits of voting with them doesn’t make any difference.

The only thing that seems to shut them up is laying out some numbers for them. For example, in the 2014 South African General Elections the ANC got 11,436,921 votes. That same year 6,985,585 registered voters didn’t turn up to vote.  If that same number had voted for the DA, the DA would have won 11,077,169 votes and the ANC would have had their seats in parliament practically cut in half. If the non-voters had voted for the EFF or even a much smaller party like COPE, then one of those parties would have easily been the new official opposition.

True, not all of the non-voters would have voted for the same party. Nonetheless, think about this: South Africa has a population of almost 53 million people; let’s call it 52 million for argument’s sake.  According to the IEC’s (Independent Electoral Commission) 2014 statistic there are 25,388,082 registered voters in the country. That means that at least 26,611,918 South African’s didn’t vote. Naturally, a large portion of those South Africans are under 16 years of age and therefore too young to vote.  I haven’t been able to find out exactly how many South Africans are too young to vote but given the 2011 census numbers and current birth rate the number should be about 15 million (if anybody out there has the real number, I would love to hear from you). What that means is that about 11, 611,918 South Africans are not voting. In other words, there are more people in SA not voting than there are people voting for the ANC, the ruling party.

If all the non-voters (who believe their votes wouldn’t make a difference) decided to form a single party and vote, they would be the new ruling party. In a land that has fought so long and hard for democracy, the real majority, as it turns out, are the people who don’t engage in the democratic process.

The point is their votes would make an enormous difference. If you happen to be one of the non-voters, please bare in mind that your failure to vote has made the votes of those who do engage in the democratic process more powerful. Moreover, you through your failure to act are also responsible for the state of the nation.

I am truly grateful to be living in South Africa. I realize that many of my white brothers and sisters don’t understand how lucky we are to be here.  They don’t realize that we were lucky enough to get out of apartheid with our lives, let alone our lifestyles.

If the black people had not been so wise and farsighted, we would have been driven into the sea or murdered on mass when apartheid ended. The atrocities and injustices suffered by black people by white hands are near endless and date back many centuries. Nonetheless, when apartheid ended our black countrymen let us continue to live among them, in their land, in peace and prosperity; a prosperity which they themselves were denied through apartheid and which the legacy of apartheid and colonialism continue to make very difficult for them to obtain.

I cannot begin to voice how grateful I am to the black people I live among. They are much more intelligent than they are given credit for.  They deserve heck of a lot more respect than they get. Whenever I see a white person being rude or arrogant to a black person for some petty reason, I feel like shaking them. “Wake up!” I want to shout in their faces, “Do you know where you are? Do you understand what they did for us after all we did to them?”

Sure South Africa is a land plagued with problems; a land whose history was too often written in blood. Nonetheless, it is a land to be proud of with a people who I am proud to call my countrymen.

It is important face to what is wrong with South Africa and its past that still haunts us. It is also important to build on what went right and to give credit where it is due. I for one am grateful that whatever South Africa’s problems are, I will face them with a people who have proven themselves to be more honorable and civilized than any western nations that I can think of.

Are there black people who are part of the problem? Of course there are but so what. There are plenty of white people who are part of the problem, too. Even these people, black or white, are human beings in need of guidance more than anything else. Until we start looking at each other as part of solution instead of part of the problem we will never be the kind of nation that South Africa once promised to be; the kind of nation that could be an example to the world. Meanwhile, I will continue to be grateful to be a South African and to live among a great people.