[imagesource: Jacques Nelles / The Citizen]

Yesterday, South Africa headed to the polls for our local elections.

Perhaps I should say a small percentage of South Africans, to be more accurate. We appear set for the lowest turnout in an election since 1994.

One can blame the weather, or in the case of Helen Zille, deliberate tactics to discourage voters in areas the DA believed it had a stronghold.

The party still looks likely to win Cape Town once more, but as much as South Africans voted with their ‘X’ in the respective boxes, so too did they vote with their feet in choosing to stay away in huge numbers.

How do you choose a party that reflects your values, when they all seem to have such glaring shortcomings?

Zapiro can certainly see the light. Here’s his cartoon for The Daily Maverick over the weekend:

The ANC trying to shift the blame for load shedding solely to Eskom in the days before the election tells you everything you need to know about the party.

Zero responsibility, zero accountability.

Then again, Zapiro was tame in comparison to Richard Poplak’s column, titled ‘2021: South Africa’s second-last elections’.

Everything about it is brutal, so picking out bits here and there doesn’t really do the full picture justice.

Still, let’s try:

Like a corpse tethered by battery chargers to a failing coal plant, South Africans lurch toward the 2021 municipal elections powered by nothing more than impulse.

…while these are the second-last elections, we will almost certainly enact election cycle pageantry during whatever version of illiberalism South Africa innovates in the next decade or so. It’s just that the elections of the future won’t matter at all—they’ll be show trials for lousy ideas crafted by an increasingly inept array of second-rate autocrats.

…Academic and political discourse mimics the American left/right dialectic, except without the urgency or ten-dollar-a-word opinion pieces. Public life is littered with men and women so stupid, and so mendacious, that the mean national IQ has dropped below zero…

You get the picture.

Optimism is not his strong suit. Optimism is not always warranted.

A few more very sharp barbs before we call it:

South Africa’s 256 municipalities and eight metros are—and I mean this literally—the greatest fuck up in the entire history of humankind…

Should we fail to make our voices heard, then the inconvenience and expense of elections will, like so many things, become nothing more than a fashion show for authoritarian gangsters.

South Africans are running out of time to save democracy. Consider the second last elections a warm-up for the real fight.

I’ll put the kettle on for a strong second cup of coffee then, shall I?

It’s still worth keeping an eye on how our elections are panning out.

News24 has two pages I’ll be checking throughout the day. The first shows the live election results, as official tallies come in from across the country. Check in on that here.

The second is News24’s elections forecaster 2021, “based on a statistical analysis of votes counted to date and show what we expect the final result to be once all ballots are counted”.

As it stands, The City of Cape Town, Ekurhuleni, and Nelson Mandela Bay have forecasts in.

[sources:dailymaverick&dailymaverick]