Why I Get Angry With People Who Don’t Vote

An empty ballot isn’t neutral. Complaint without a vote is just noise, and populism costs the people who can least afford another failed experiment.

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

Written By: Penny Tainton

As we approach the final registration weekend ahead of our November 4 Local Government Elections, I once again find myself grappling with the emotions that elections always bring.

Because I get angry with people who don’t vote. Not irritated, angry. I have spent my career inside the machinery of government and political parties in this country, and I have seen up close what happens when citizens hand their power to whoever shouts loudest, or to no one at all. An empty ballot isn’t neutral. It’s a decision, and more often than not it’s a decision that benefits the people least deserving of it.

Because I get angry at how many of those same people spend the years between elections complaining. About the potholes, the water outages, the councillor who never answers a call, the party that promised and delivered nothing. All fair complaints, and I share plenty of them. But complaint without a vote is just noise. It costs nothing, it changes nothing, and it lets the person making it feel involved without ever being accountable for the outcome. If you didn’t vote, you handed your say to someone else and then complained about what they did with it. You don’t get to do both. Pick up the responsibility or stop pretending the outrage means anything.

Because I get angry with people who fall for promises that have already been broken a dozen times over. We’ve watched the same script play out across municipality after municipality: grand announcements, ribbon cuttings, five year plans that don’t survive contact with a single budget cycle. The promises still land because they’re aimed at desperation rather than judgement. I understand the desperation. What I can’t accept is that we, collectively, keep rewarding the people who manufacture it.

Then there’s the newcomer to every election - no track record, arriving with no history of delivery to be held against, which somehow gets mistaken for a clean slate. It isn’t one. It’s an absence of evidence, and we should treat it that way. even worse is the recycled “newcomer”, the one who failed inside an established party, left before they could be held to account for it, and repackaged themselves as a brand new movement, as if changing the logo erases the record. That’s not reinvention. It’s evasion, and it ought to disqualify someone rather than excite us. Leadership isn’t a personality contest. It’s a demonstrated capacity to govern, to manage a budget, to keep the lights on and the water running and the potholes filled. A track record, good or bad, is the only honest information a voter actually has. Walking away from one before the consequences land doesn’t make it disappear.

Underneath all of this sits something I find genuinely offensive, and I don’t use that word lightly. Racism, from any direction, is a moral failure. In the hands of a political strategist, it’s also a tool, and a reliable one. I’ve spent enough time inside political rooms in this country to know exactly how deliberately the race card gets played, and how well it still works, more than three decades after we were supposed to have triumphed over this. It isn’t conviction driving that choice. It’s arithmetic. Fear keeps people voting along old lines instead of new ones, and a divided electorate is an easier electorate to control. I watch that strategy succeed, over and over, and it turns my stomach every time.

What makes it worse is what it betrays. We were promised, once, that this country would become something genuinely new, a place where a person’s future was no longer written by their race at birth. That promise underpinned our transition to democracy. Every time a politician reaches for race to win an election rather than to redress a real, specific wrong, they’re betraying that promise for their own short term gain, telling us the new South Africa was always just a slogan and the old categories are too useful to retire. That’s a betrayal of everyone who believed 1994 meant what it said, and of every young person since who has grown up being told their identity is a battleground. It is simply unforgivable.

None of this is abstract. The cost shows up in service delivery failures that keep entire communities locked in poverty, in municipalities that can’t process a water leak let alone plan a budget, in the daily, grinding indignity of a life made harder than it needs to be because some politicians find it more useful to keep a nation divided than to build one. Identity politics doesn’t put a child through school or fix a sewage line. It only ever protects the people who benefit from the status quo. It’s long past time someone said so plainly.

And this isn’t only our challenge. Look anywhere in the world right now and you’ll find the same hollowing out of leadership, the same preference for the leader who performs over the one who does the harder, quiet work of governing well. Populists everywhere have learned the lesson our own politicians learned long ago: it’s easier to be loved for what you promise than respected for what you deliver. Tough decisions, the ones that actually fix a budget or a failing utility or a broken procurement system, rarely win applause in the short term, so fewer leaders are willing to make them. We keep being asked to choose between a comfortable lie and an uncomfortable truth, and too many electorates, not just ours, keep choosing the lie.

Falling for that rhetoric is never free. Populism sells itself as the movement of the ordinary person against a distant elite, but it rarely governs for them once it wins. It hollows out institutions instead of building them, because a leader who answers to no one finds checks inconvenient. It replaces expertise with loyalty, so the people running ministries and municipalities are chosen for how loudly they cheer rather than whether they can do the job. It spends the future to flatter the present, because a promise that sounds generous today and bankrupts a treasury in five years still wins the next election.

By the time the bill arrives, the blame has already been pointed elsewhere, at a minority, an institution, a predecessor, so the cycle can start again with someone new. The people who can least afford another failed experiment, the ones already queuing for water or waiting years for a house, are the ones who pay for it. Populism doesn’t just disappoint the people who believed in it. It costs them, directly and disproportionately, every time.

We deserve better than this, everywhere. We deserve leaders who put the interests of the people they serve ahead of their own survival in office, and who are still willing to make the unpopular calls good governance requires, cutting what doesn’t work, saying no to what sounds good but doesn’t add up, holding the line on institutions even when it costs them politically. Serving people and governing well are not in tension. They’re the same job, done properly. The real tragedy of our politics, here and elsewhere, is how rarely we’re even offered that choice.

What keeps me doing the work I do, despite the anger, is a stubborn belief that most South Africans are better than the politics being done to them. I meet young leaders every year who want none of this. They want competence, honesty, and a country they can build a life in without their surname, their language, or the colour of their skin determining their prospects. They want a South African identity that’s actually about being South African, not a coalition of grievances managed for electoral gain. That’s not naive. I think it’s the only realistic way forward, and it’s worth being angry, loudly and without apology, on its behalf.

Penny Tainton brings over four decades of leadership experience across corporate, political, government and state-owned enterprise environments, having served as strategic adviser to two Western Cape Premiers and Executive Director of Policy and Governance for the DA. She now directs the DA’s Young Leaders Programme and presents internationally on governance and leadership development for the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung.