Your vote counts, so use it

Yes! I voted in the forthcoming South African election. On Saturday in Dublin, Ireland, I went to the embassy and joined the long queue of scatterlings like me, surrounded by exotic accents like mine, and waited to vote for two and a half hours.

RG Snyman stood 20m behind and two metres above me. Good vibes abounded: a chap called Wiseman was making boerie rolls, people left the queue to get coffee for each other, someone lent me a coat.

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Finally, I presented my ID book to the good folk manning the voting station, the very same ID book I used in 1994…

“That’s the same ID book I used in 1994,” I told the official proudly, though she wasn’t even a twinkle in her daddy’s eye back then.

“Sjoe, you looked beautiful,” she said. I ignored the past tense. “It’s that big ’90s hair,” I joked.

Also, back in the day we could smile in all our identification papers, which helped. Then I was handed a mammoth ballot paper with 52 candidates, more than double the size of 1994’s paper, the one with Mangosuthu Buthelezi glued on the bottom after the IFP decided to join in at the last minute.

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Finally I voted, along with some 75 000 Saffers worldwide. They voted regardless of why they had left South Africa: for love (that’s me), for work, for a change, for their children’s futures, for fear – a nervous young man told me he thought all South Africans were traumatised – but not for the weather, not here in Ireland.

They stood in line because, politics aside, every single one of them cared enough about our land to register as an overseas voter and to travel cross-country – some getting up at an ungodly hour on a weekend, some staying in hotels – to exercise their democratic right, to fulfil their civic duty.

And, regardless of where they were putting their X, all these people wanted the same thing: a well-run country in which they felt they mattered. Right now I think it’s safe to say that nobody in South Africa has that. That is why many left yet still they cared enough to get up, get out, and vote.

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So please, make your mark too this voting day. Your voice counts – but only if you use it.