Political parties fail to appreciate importance of the youth vote
Young people make up 49% of the electorate but it is likely they will be ignored going into the 2019 elections
Since the election of Barack Obama as US president a decade ago, the spectre of the youth has been haunting many a political establishment around the world, including acting as a catalyst in the forced removals from power of deplorable (mis)leaders in Egypt, Tunisia and Burkina Faso. So pervasive has this agency of the youth been that it has taken from obscurity to the mainstream of global politics candidates who subscribe to an ideology whose obituary was long written with the fall of the Berlin Wall. With six months until SA’s sixth democratic general elections, data from the Electoral Commission of SA and Stats SA show that young people make up 49% of the electorate — that is 17.7-million of the 36-million South Africans who are eligible to vote in 2019. Getting them to register and turn up to vote on election day is a minefield for any political party — one that has not been conquered since 1994. Based on the rhetoric coming from the three largest parties in parliament, a conclu...
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