Whitney Houston believed that the children are our future. I’m not familiar with all her work, so it’s possible she also sang songs wondering where bears go to the loo or whether the pope is Catholic, but in terms of the repertoire I know, she never made a safer comment than when she suggested that human beings age.
There were other songs, of course, in which she philosophised about time and space. I Will Always Love You, for example, deals with our mistaken belief that a lifetime is “always” while simultaneously — and paradoxically — confirming that Dolly Parton is immortal.
Generally, however, the central premise in The Greatest Love Of All is simple and true: babies are born, new generations spring up, bringing with them new perspectives and new beliefs. Assumptions held to be self-evident by previous generations are cast aside, and on we go.
When I was in my early 20s one of my assumptions was that democracy was a good thing, especially in SA, and that voting — the regular jolt of animating electricity that keeps democracy alive — was an essential part of a useful life.
I still believe these things, but I also know that many don’t: in 2019, with SA being driven ever further into crisis by its contemptible governing party, less than half of eligible voters could muster the wherewithal to turn up at a polling station.
Even so, I was startled by one statistic revealed by the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) at the weekend as it gets ready to try to woo the 14-million eligible voters who haven’t yet registered. According to the IEC, of those 14-million missing voters, “just about 50% ... are under the age of 29”.
Like many statistics cited in dry press statements, it was easy to glide over. But under its beige surface, two numbers present a political — and perhaps even an existential — crisis for this country.
The first number is 7-million — the number of unregistered voters aged 18-29. The second is 12-million — roughly the number of people in that age group, according to Stats SA’s 2022 midyear estimate. Put those two numbers together, and you have a country in which 7-million out of 12-million young voters haven’t registered.
Of course, it’s still early days, and it’s possible that one or two million more might be convinced to register; but given that not all registered voters eventually turn up (in 2019, fully 10-million stayed at home), I don’t say it’s alarmist to imagine a near future in which 7-million or even 8-million of those 12-million young people — up to two-thirds — no longer participate in SA democracy.
For some politicians, the solution to this looming mass boycott by young people is to yell at them like Grandpa Simpson shouting at clouds, as demonstrated by Julius Malema in October when he told a crowd of supporters that “if you are a youth and you are not registered to vote, you are a sell-out”.
Of course, Malema doesn’t do anything that isn’t about pulling in new members to his cult, and in this case he wasn’t so much condemning young voters who won’t vote as appealing to the sort of young acolytes who want to be scolded by Angry Daddy.
Still, it does, I think, provide a fairly clear example of what SA’s young people are seeing when they look at politics: middle-aged millionaires, many of them hypocrites, tut-tutting about their refusal to participate in a system that often seems to do nothing but make the hypocrites richer and exclude young people harder.
Certainly, if I were 18 and hadn’t yet registered to vote, seeing Malema call me a sell-out would convince me that voting is for masochists and fools. Which, I suppose, is why Malema did it: every undecided or apathetic voter who stays away is another fraction of a percentage point for him in the final tally.
It goes without saying that there are many reasons young people are losing interest in SA democracy, and not all of them are ideological. An 18-year-old told me this week that the only reason he’s registered is that someone from the DA knocked on his door and asked if he was. Otherwise, he said, he might have “forgotten” since there is so little discussion about voting and politics in the world he inhabits.
It’s easy to retreat into ageism and mutter about young whippersnappers being too busy eating avocado toast to do their civic duty. But if SA democracy is going to stay viable, I think it’s important to try to see it through the eyes of a young person, and to recognise that the political system they are being asked to invest in is not the same one that formed our now middle-aged assumptions about democracy back in 1994.
To many young people, it must feel as if we are asking them to participate in a naive social experiment that their parents once said was groovy. We are, in effect, asking the feral, world-weary children of the 1980s to believe in hippie communes and Flower Power.
Whitney was right. The children are our future. But that future is shaped by their experience of our present; and right now, the present is the burnt-out tail-end of 30 years of decline. And what sensible 18-year-old would get excited about that?
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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