I have for months now been certain and embarrassed about who I am going to vote for this week. This is a change from the voters' dilemma I felt during the last local government elections.
The reason for the voter’s dilemma was because of how I had thought about my vote. I simply couldn't get myself to ignore the legal meaning of the choices I make on the ballot paper.
When you vote for a party, that means you’re legitimising that party’s manifesto. You're signalling, constitutionally speaking, a preference for that party to get into the government and carry out the mandate that it has sold you on the campaign trail.
And so I always asked myself: "Do I want to endorse this party’s grand vision and specific set of policies?"
Obviously, in reality, we aren’t robots. So who knows what the complete set of motivations are that contribute, in the end, and in an unconscious way, to the choices we end up making.
But at least at the level of active deliberation about my vote, that was the genesis of the dilemma. Each of the main options came out looking undesirable. And would look undesirable again if I took that route of thinking about my choices.
For years now, I have more or less agreed with the ANC's vision for our country. But the party's governance track record leaves a lot to be desired. There is a deep leadership crisis within the party, both ethically and technocratically speaking. Feasible proposals are useless in the hands of ethically bankrupt men and women.
The DA, on the other hand, isn’t quite the liberal egalitarian party I wish it to be in order for that choice to be an obvious one for me. I still self-identify as a liberal, but liberalism is complex, and the particular variant of this ideology I subscribe to is one that values egalitarianism deeply, and not shying away from structural analysis to make sense of the world we live in.
This DA, however, is mostly ideologically confused and, to the extent that it reveals bits of identity here and there, it remains deeply ahistorical in its analysis of the material conditions most South Africans live in.
At any rate, I don't care much for a South African political party that doesn’t take identity politics seriously.
The EFF, in its turn, best captures the discontent of the socially and economically disenfranchised voters. And, truth be told, the fate of the middle class and the wealthy is tied up with the fate of the poor and the working class.
Our wealth and assets, on the cushy side of the inequality divide, remain precarious if the base structure of society remains unjust.
But the EFF, for reasons I can’t unpack here, has a set of poorly thought-through prescriptions for how to undo the injustices.
So, if I adopt my legalistic logic from 2011, I would again have a voter’s dilemma, at least in respect of these major parties. None of them is an ideal match.
But I've changed the way I think about my vote. I won't be asking whether I want to endorse the policy positions of the parties on the ballot paper before me.
I have decided, instead, to ask a different set of questions: Which ward councillor and which political party on the ballot papers before me will strengthen democratic and responsive governance in my municipality?
And once I shifted the basis on which I vote, it became easier to eliminate some options and to bring back others I had previously written off.
It is, I like to think, a pragmatic approach to voting rather than being impossibly theoretical or legalistic. As it happens, the ward councillor I am going to vote for comes from the same party that I am going to vote for on the proportional representation ballot.
So why, despite this clarity, am I embarrassed about my choice, so much so that I won’t tell you, dear reader, which party is getting these votes from me? I'm not a robot, and so of course I still care deeply about political ideology, about identity politics and about policy proposals.
This party, for example, displays inexcusable chauvinism in its political praxis. That makes me deeply uncomfortable. And I think some of its ideas are, frankly, childish.
But voting for the party, I hope, will help to ensure greater responsiveness and accountability from the bureaucrats and political principals in my city. Competitive politics, as we know, is the lifeblood of a sustainable democracy.
What I will not do, however, is abstain from voting. Politicians have way too much power for us to opt out of determining who should be exercising such power over us.