Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
South Africans and democracy
Only 35% of South African respondents said they preferred democracy and rejected all three types of authoritarianism. To put it in perspective, Afrobarometer provided a list of polled countries. South Africa comes 27th in its public support for democracy, just below Burkina Faso and Liberia. The average support across the 35 countries was 43% (meaning, according to the survey at least, that less than half of the citizens in the countries polled are committed to democracy). Mauritius topped the chart at 74%, followed by Senegal at 66%. In the 2011-13 survey, 42% of South Africans were found to be committed to democracy.
