JONATHAN JANSEN: Learning our political A, B, C makes us wiser at making an X on the ballot
There is enormous political currency to be gained from this class of citizens. Zuma, for example, made no bones about his contempt for “clever blacks” and would revel among his base, often in his native tongue, presenting himself as the common man persecuted unfairly by the elites.
Does your level of education determine how you vote? One of the refrains in the last US election was that “whites without college degrees” (66%) were more likely to vote for Donald Trump than “whites with college degrees”. The pro-Trump vote was even more emphatic for “white men without college degrees” (71%). There seemed to be a relationship, therefore, between race, education levels and voting for a (supposedly) conservative white, male politician. In SA the pattern is not much different. Black citizens with less education outside of the major metropoles seemed to vote for then president Jacob Zuma’s political party, the ANC. In the big cities, from Port Elizabeth and Pretoria to Cape Town and Johannesburg, the governing party took a pounding, presumably because of the larger numbers of better educated black (and white) voters. There is enormous political currency to be gained from this class of citizens. Zuma, for example, made no bones about his contempt for “clever blacks” and...
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