Election Day 22/4/09

Yes, South Africa held its fourth democratic election this week! Maybe this made the news at home? I’m not sure. Well I don’t really have a lot to say about it, because I didn’t even follow it (I was writing a paper that was due that day). Election Day is a public holiday here, so people didn’t have to work and we weren’t supposed to have school. But since we of course couldn’t vote, we still had class and had a paper due. Our class was just held at our professor’s house, which was a good time. We just had a normal lecture, but we were served coffee and sat on her comfy furniture. Her dogs and cats went around disrupting our learning too. And afterward we went out for some sundowners, but we didn’t stay long because the restaurant had to close down by 6:00 so they could take their employees to vote. There is a law that if you make your employees work on Election Day, that you need to provide time and transportation for them to vote.

Elections run a little bit differently here than they do at home. Here you vote for a political party, instead of a candidate. There are literally HUNDREDS of political parties that you could vote for, but the main ones are the African National Congress (ANC), Democratic Alliance (DA) and Congress of the People (COPE). The ANC is organization that led to the end of apartheid and the one that I’ve studied most extensively. The DA is the party that most whites in the country voted for. And COPE is a new party this year that branched off the ANC. The elections were almost a joke in that EVERYONE knew that the ANC would win. Well, actually I don’t think that the winner has been announced yet, but I’ll tell you now that they won the election.

Anyway so you vote for a party and then the party chooses who the president will be, usually the president of the organization becomes the president of the country. Thabo Mbeki was the President for the last two terms, he took over after Nelson Mandela. But because of corruption and I don’t know what else, he was made to resign and Jacob Zuma took over as president of the ANC and the country. I think this happened pretty recently, maybe right before we came here. Jacob Zuma is not a favorite, he is involved in corruption and a rape scandal. But because of more corruption, he was never brought to trial. It is all very messed up. So the people knew that when they voted for the ANC, that they were voting for Zuma as President. I hope this isn’t confusing, or that I’m getting the facts wrong. Kate, post a comment if I said something wrong. A problem with this is that since the ANC is the organization that led to the end of the apartheid, it is the organization that the majority of the country supports. They don’t care if their policies don’t make sense anymore or if their candidate is corrupt and uneducated. It is sad, but the majority of the people voting aren’t educated enough to research and find out who the best candidate for them actually is. So the country is stuck with Jacob Zuma who thought he could prevent himself from getting AIDS by taking a shower after having intercourse with someone!

I heard that there were accusations of corruption on Election Day too. I guess in one city, a whole voting station went missing, ballots, pens, the tent, everything. So now, where are those missing ballots, who turned them in? Other places ran out of ballots, so the people waiting in the long lines couldn’t vote. Some voting stations had to close down before everyone who was in line got to vote, I’m not sure if they opened up again on Thursday to let more people vote or not, I just know that was an idea. I guess the main thing is that South Africa is still developing itself as a democratic nation so there are still things to be worked out. One great thing is they have a very high voter turn-out rate, I think it was like 80-85% of the people voted on Wednesday!