JUSTICE MALALA | Our politicians are out of touch and voters have given up

It’s pretty easy to understand why more than half of South African voters did not turn up to cast their ballot in the 2021 local elections.

The national voter turnout was a shocking 45.8% on that beautiful November day. The North West and Mpumalanga registered the lowest turnout at 42% of registered voters. Our best performer, the Northern Cape, only managed a pitiful 53.3% turnout.

Turnout measures the percentage of those who, among registered voters, pitched up on the day. If you count the number of those who didn’t bother to register in the first place, then the percentage of those who give a toss about turning up on election day is more like 27%.

Why? We can spend the whole week and month criticising voters for not turning up, but I contend that politicians have stopped responding to the cries and issues of ordinary people. I honestly don’t think our politicians know what is happening in the villages, townships, towns and cities of South Africa — or they are consciously ignoring the cries of the citizenry.

The nyaope and the xenophobia problems will lead to a massive explosion in our society. This is a ticking time-bomb and our political leaders in government and outside of it are doing nothing to deal with it. This is how people end up taking the law into their own hands

Go to any township or village, town or city in this land of ours and you will find that citizens are in despair about the scourge of drugs, specifically the highly addictive tik or nyaope.

Every street and every third household has a nyaope addict. These desperate young — and old — drug addicts are stealing pots, pans, gate railings, anything metal to sell to scrap collectors so that they can make enough cash to buy their next shot.

This drug problem is a major driver of the challenges that face many communities.

Why are so many people prepared to sabotage their own electricity supply by damaging Eskom infrastructure in townships, for example? It starts with a drug problem, and the injunction to the drug addicts to deliver copper cables, and it ends up with young people stealing their own communities’ infrastructure — and dying from electrocution.

Every so often, one politician will refer to nyaope in passing — but you hardly ever hear the police minister or any of his cabinet colleagues talk about it.

Meanwhile, every week I hear of and see videos of youngsters caught in the commission of crimes and subjected to unspeakable violence by exasperated communities. These kids, those who are caught and beaten to a pulp, are the lucky ones. Many others die from overdoses and diseases associated with their addiction. Visit the cemeteries.

Everywhere else in the world, there would be a multifaceted strategy to deal with the importation of drugs into SA, their distribution networks in the country, and the breaking up of the gangs that sell these drugs even in the most remote villages. Yet it is extremely hard to see a co-ordinated approach to this scourge from our government, opposition parties or the police.

Journalists don’t even ask about the drug problem.

Let me put it this way: more money and time is spent tracking, lying in wait, and killing cash-in-transit heist crooks than there is dedicated to dealing with a crime that kills our young (and old) people — and leads to the commission of many other crimes after individuals become drug addicts.

There are other burning issues that our politicians just don’t talk about. If you talk about the nyaope pandemic in our communities, then you must talk about the problem that this drug problem has helped fuel in many of the same communities: xenophobia. Often, now, the Nigerian community — the majority of whom are doctors, nurses and other professionals living here legally — are falsely and wrongly labelled as being behind this drug problem.

Populists in the political space have exploited the massive vacuum created by government leaders (and by many men and women of conscience) who have opted not to talk about this.

Believe me, the nyaope and the xenophobia problem will lead to a massive explosion in our society. This is a ticking time-bomb and our political leaders in government and outside of it are doing nothing to deal with it. This is how people end up taking the law into their own hands.

These are not sexy topics to tackle. Most politicians like being on a podium, telling their audiences how they support Russia in its attack on Ukraine, while not getting any pushback from anyone.

The real issues here in SA, though, are that our children are dying from a drug pandemic, that the cost of petrol and basic foods has risen inexorably for the past three years, and that wages and salaries no longer cover the bare minimum.

In this scenario, voting seems like a waste of time while politics and politicians seem irrelevant and distant.

In this scenario, a 27% voter turnout tells us that we have let our people down and that they no longer believe that politics can bring about change. So they will look elsewhere for change. They will either follow a strongman with a forked tongue, or they will take matters into their own hands.