When you wait to vote on Wednesday, if you look around, you will be reminded that SA looks a lot more like the queue at the department of home affairs than it does the queue for a flight.
Most of us are poor and rely on the state. A few of us are middle class and can pay our way out of the mess in state health and education — or rely on our employers to do so. Very few of us are genuinely wealthy. This is a country made up of mainly poor black people, with a small diverse cohort removed from these travails by geography and money.
Yet, if you look into the eyes of a compatriot in the queue, you are most likely looking at somebody who wants the same things as you.
Most of us want peace and freedom from violence and crime, the women and girls especially. Most of us want all our children to have a better future, no matter where they come from. We want our parents to have access to healthcare that will sustain them for a long life, and we want our children to be able to play in the street and to go to school to learn usefully and in safety.
We want the lights to turn on when we flick a switch. We want to drink the water from the tap without getting sick, and we want access to sanitation services that keep us safe and in a modicum of dignity. We want transport that is safe to take us to jobs that give us a chance to live a life beyond subsistence.
The different ways we believe we should build this society is the reason we have elections. We may not agree on politics, but most of us agree that we should decide this collectively by voting. We are, in our bones, democrats.
That we are voting today is a testament to this country’s resilience and the sacrifices of a historical cohort of courageous activists, a handful of whom still inhabit our body politic. We must not fall into the trap beloved of some foreign observers in which this endurance is presented as some kind of exotic marvel concocted out of the African firmament. This caricature of the mysterious, innate robustness of the African is as offensive as it gets.
Rather, the durability of democracy and the careworn and panel-beaten institutions that deliver it are the outcome of great sacrifice by people who have stood up to the assault on the institutions of state, the ransacking of the companies it owns and the infrastructure in its care. It is a result of swimming when the other option is to sink.
South Africans keep going in the face of little other choice, and it has made some of us legitimately and righteously angry.
It is not the job of this newspaper to tell people for whom they should vote, but we can say that there are certain principles that we believe we should follow.
Parties that wish to discard the constitution of our democratic republic — which was won at the cost of such lasting trauma — do not deserve your vote, because the salvation of this country is in that document, not in spite of it.
Parties that wish to prise us apart on the basis of our ethnicity, race, language, sexuality or tribal origin are telling us that they want this country to burn, not thrive. Do not vote for fascists of any variety.
Parties that harness your anger and spit rage, rather than solutions, will not solve our problems, but compound them. And those who cannot in good faith say that they wish the best for all of us collectively, in all our head-spinning fracturedness and across all our cultural chasms, do not deserve your vote.
It is a time for a smaller government with big ideas about how it might serve us, not strip us of wealth and opportunity. We need a government that will do its work efficiently and not one single thing more. In the process it will allow people to live with dignity and purpose.
While this is a nation of nations, we are more than ever one. We are mashed together by deteriorating economics, a difficult geopolitical era and the simple passage of time in each other’s company. More than ever, it is true that “I am, because we are” — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.
History has made this place what it is. We say: vote with compassion for your fellow South Africans, and vote for the party that you think will give every last one of us a real chance at a better future. Let Wednesday be the start of something new.
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