Democracy isn’t a one-day event — and it goes far beyond voting on election day. What we do every day in between elections is what really matters.
So says Mbali Ntuli, founder of the Ground Work Collective. The former DA member of the KwaZulu-Natal legislature quit both the party and the legislature in March 2022, but she is as busy as ever.
Established in 2022, the Ground Work Collective works to build a more inclusive democracy and stronger communities. It does this by helping people understand their rights, grow food and register to vote. Ahead of the local government elections on November 4, it aims to recruit 7,000 election observers.
Through the collective’s Protect Our Democracy programme, volunteers are trained in election law, observation methods, ethics and reporting and are deployed to voting stations across South Africa. The observers, says Ntuli, are often young people who get to see democracy in action for the first time.
“We’ve done an electoral analysis where we found that in this election there are going to be 946 voting stations that are red zones. That’s where the margin is so small, or there’s such high political contestation that it could go anywhere.
“You need independent observers because that’s where you’re likely to have people either sparking violence or questioning [the voting outcome],” she tells the FM. “Once you have the credibility of your elections called into question, then you start to have a real big problem.”
That, says Ntuli, has a knock-on effect. Investors get shaky, the economy shrinks and jobs are lost. Democracy, she argues, has to be defended.
“If we don’t protect it and do something as simple as just being here on election day to make sure that the count is accurate, we will find ourselves in a country that is even worse off than it is now.”
In the 2024 national and provincial elections, the collective had about 3,000 volunteers across the country. Observers also get to see what happens behind the scenes.
“Once people see that, it actually makes them trust the institution more, and it makes them want to come and do it again,” says Ntuli.
About 80% of the 2024 volunteers have already signed up again, according to the collective. Much of its work, she says, is done through schools, community organisations and universities.
“Our approach to registering young people is that we try to get them in school when they’re 16 and take them on a two-year journey until they’re 18. By the time they are ready to vote for the first time, they’ve had two years of intensive civic education. You’re not just expecting them to vote just because it’s time to vote.”
While some worry about political fragmentation, Ntuli sees single-party dominance as equally problematic.
One conversation worth having, she says, is about the local government’s Municipal Structures Amendment Bill, better known as the coalitions bill. This would make written coalition agreements mandatory and make them public. Parliament’s co-operative governance committee has said the bill will not be finalised before the elections, but it is one to watch.
“It’s clear that we’re going to have fragmented elections, and we’re going to have coalitions for the foreseeable future. There’s no doubt about that.
“None of those parties is going to behave the right way unless you put pressure on them. They’re going to continue fighting for positions vs actually fighting to do the right thing for the voters until the voters change them,” she says.
Ntuli also doesn’t think the sheer number of parties is the problem. The Electoral Commission of South Africa says 546 parties are contesting the polls and 136,790 candidates have been nominated for 10,526 council seats. This is about 43% more candidates than in 2021.
“I would rather we groan and moan about the number of parties until we actually have the kind of parties or the kind of leaders we want than be stuck with a couple of options.”
If votes didn’t make a difference, she says, political parties wouldn’t work so hard to win them.
“As an ordinary patriotic South African, instead of going to have a braai or to the beach, you can give back to your country by giving a couple of hours of your time to stand where you vote and be an electoral observer.
