The queues that never formed
Somewhere in South Africa on 29 May 2024, a person woke up, looked at the ballot paper waiting at their nearest voting station, and stayed home. They were not alone. Between 23 million and 25 million adults did the same thing, a number so large it dwarfs every party’s support base. The ANC, still the country’s largest party, won 6.46 million votes that day, roughly one in six eligible adults. The people who stayed away outnumbered its voters by more than three to one.
For the residents who did show up, the numbers were sobering enough. Turnout among registered voters fell to 58.64%, the lowest of any general election since 1994, with 16.29 million people voting out of 27.78 million registered. But registration is itself a filter, and the filter is leaking. Measured against the voting-age population, estimated at between 39.7 million and 41.4 million people, turnout was about 41%, down from 86% in 1994. The number of eligible adults who never registered at all has grown from roughly 7 million in 2014 to roughly 11 million today. These are people who made their decision long before election day, quietly, at home.
Ask those who stopped voting why, and you will rarely hear indifference. You will hear a verdict: “they come when they want votes only, and they disappear afterwards.” That sentence, spoken in ordinary language about ordinary disappointment, carries a political analysis with a long pedigree, even if the people voicing it would never use the label.
The label is anarchism, a word usually deployed as an insult, a synonym for chaos. In fact it is a body of argument about power, and its central claims are ones millions of South Africans already make without knowing it. The first claim is that the state is not a neutral machine waiting for the right hands to hold it. It is an institution built to concentrate power, protect property and manage the people below it, and those who run it develop interests of their own. The second is that those who enter government find their choices narrowed by debt, investors and treasury rules, and call it realism. Lucien van der Walt put it plainly to a Khayelitsha audience before the 2019 election: “We never voted for privatisation in 1994, but we got it.” The third claim is that real power lies in what people build themselves, most visibly when their politics stand outside and against the state. Since the 1980s, and earlier, the South African working class has argued that workers should build their own organisations rather than hand their hopes to parliament. The person who says politicians only arrive when they want votes is making Bakunin’s argument without having read him.
The verdict has reasons behind it, and they are written into daily life. Official unemployment stands at 33.6%, rising to 47.4% among young people, and to 43.8% once those who have given up looking are counted. The World Bank ranks South Africa first among 164 countries for inequality. Every party that has won local or national elections during this period has maintained that structural inequality. The slide in turnout, from 76.7% in 2004 to 58.6% in 2024, is not fully explained by logistics either, though the IEC itself admitted its new voting-station rule turned people away in 2024, and people move and work far from home and fall off the roll. Logistics cannot explain the millions who never registered, nor the direction of the trend.
Yet here the anarchist tradition parts company with the stay-at-home. Silence is not a strategy. A government elected by 16 million governs just as comfortably as one elected by 40 million, and a boycott that ends on the couch costs the powerful nothing. The tradition’s answer to disillusionment was never to do nothing. It was to organise, now, where people live and work, and to build counter-power: the collective strength of working-class and poor communities, independent of parties and the state.
This is not an abstraction. It is the most reliable record the country has. In 1917, African workers in Johannesburg, shut out of the franchise, formed the Industrial Workers of Africa, the country’s first union for African workers, under the slogan Sifuna Zonke: “We want everything.” In 1973, close to 100 000 workers went on strike in Durban without a union or a vote, and the state conceded that black unions were here to stay. The Treatment Action Campaign forced a reluctant government to provide HIV treatment, backing court action with the threat of mass civil disobedience. The Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee reconnected power by hand when prepaid meters cut families off. Abahlali baseMjondolo organised shack dwellers under the slogan “No Land! No House! No Vote!” and paid a heavy price, including the murder of its leaders. In each case, people won something an election had not delivered, and the ballot box, where it appeared at all, came afterwards to ratify it. Governments move when they are frightened, not when they are flattered.
The strongest objection deserves a straight answer. Surely the vote is better than nothing? It is. The right to vote was won through immense sacrifice, and its existence under a constitutional order securing civil liberties is fundamentally far superior to the apartheid regime. But elections will not advance the working class. A vote takes minutes; a movement takes years. If hope is poured into the first and the second is neglected, nothing changing should surprise nobody. The ballot has never been where change begins.
There is also a deeper cost, one paid in daily habits. Elections ask people to be spectators. They teach that politics is done on our behalf by professionals, that our task is to pick a leader and wait, and that between elections we should be quiet. If the leader disappoints, the remedy offered is another election, another leader, another cycle of hope and betrayal. Elections also divide neighbours into rival camps, sharpen ethnic and regional loyalties, and hand opportunists a stage for scapegoating, whether through vigilante campaigns against migrants or its politics dressed up as service delivery. People are told to fight one another for scraps instead of asking why there are so few.
Meanwhile, the upcoming elections are municipal, the sphere supposedly closest to the people, and this is exactly where the collapse is most visible. Municipalities are broke, captured by tenderpreneurs or hollowed out by factional appointments. Sewage runs through the streets; residents go days without water. Potholes become craters, refuse piles up, and contracts go to the politically connected. Coalitions form, collapse and reform as councils become marketplaces where seats are traded for positions. Ordinary residents keep paying rates and tariffs for services that do not arrive. Where does the pressure to repair a water pipe actually come from? Rarely from a manifesto. More often from residents who block a road, occupy an office or organise a community committee that refuses to be ignored.
Whether voting is a personal decision or not, it should not be mistaken for the main event. The 23 million already understand the first half of the argument: the ballot box is not where power lives. The second half is harder and better. Power is something people build.
Leroy Maisiri is a researcher and history lecturer at the University of Fort Hare and a PhD candidate. He writes in his personal capacity.