1. We underrate the need for skills as a country. There is need for mainstream skills that make one employable and also entrepreneur skills. Manhattan was not built by the government of USA but by single business and each skyscraper is due to an enterprise like Rockefeller. So we need to iomprove skills of Zambians so they can start business and in return Zambia will improve.
2. Politics in Zambia are still problematic for the intellectual. We need the leaders to just one day say we need to put the interests of the country first before self. This will happen in say 10 yerars when most of the old guys have left.
3. Infrastructure is key. Many developed countries are developed because they don't keep doing the same things over and over. In Zambia we keep spending billions ont he same roads and buildings over and over and how can you develop? Developed countries spend once on something and build it forever. Many civilisations have left things which are still used today e.g. the sewage system of London is from the 18th century in places. How much of Zambia's infrastructure will still exist in 50 years?
4. The role of the engineer in development is underrated. Planning for simple things like drainage to reduce Cholera and Malaria can be better done if the engineer was allowed to take charge here. But we have planners from business doing this when they should be in business.
5. Investment in education is vital in both Zambian individuals and indeed the school sector.
6. The judiciary needs powers to operate independently. When this happens, we shall have a responsible government.
7. Investment in the ICT sector is vital to ensure we have cheaper communication and so get a lower cost of doing business.
8. Government investment in irrigation should be key. Visit Nakambala to see what 2 million USA can do to the economy of Zambia. If we can start producing outside the rain season crops that are needed, we should get our economy going well.
9. Lower public expenditure is key to save our resources. The most impressive office I visited this year was a government office when business is busy tightening the belt to break even.
10. We need more Zedians in the diaspora to invest back home. They may not necessarily have to come back but built a house or a business here so the balance of payment for Zambia is better.
“If you don’t vote early in life, then chances are when you’re 40 or so, you’re not going to,”
Young American from Salt Lake City.
“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and under-nourishment. ”
Robert Maynard Hutchins, American Educator.
BACKGROUND
A policy that can stand the test of time and stands a chance of being successful in providing solutions for which it has been drafted needs to foster partnership among and participation of the various stakeholders in the sector the policy is addressing. Social change, progress and development are normative and they are defined and interpreted differently by different people. “Herding people like animals into a venture can never be development.” (Nyerere Julius) People need to have their priorities included in the policy so that it is not a prescription but an amalgamation of views, priorities, solutions and reservations.
For decision-making processes, hearing the youth perspective is critical, as their concerns top the agenda - education, access, and employment. Who can talk with greater authority about these concerns than youth themselves? Clearly, young people hold the key to change, innovation, and action in many sectors. For the decisions and declarations to result in action, the processes will need to comprehensively engage youth as never before.
For example, in the global information society, young people are often the leading innovators in the use and spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Increasingly, youth are adapting and using these technologies (including, for example, mobile phones, internet, computers, radio etc) to meet local information and communication needs. But young people can remain an untapped resource if decision-makers do not integrate their knowledge, vision and experience.
PREAMBLE
This paper does not attempt to exhaust all academic arguments on matters of youth participation in political processes nor does it offer a one-size-fits all solution to apathy. It however, contributes to the debate on how we can effective have youth participation in political processes. It also looks at apathy in voting and not in all political processes because voting is the most basic duty of a citizen and no participation in this activity usually means no participation in other political activity.
SOME CONCEPTS AND TERMS
The paper shall not define all concepts but will instead look at a few key words. Participation has been looked at above and some the remaining keywords are ‘young people’, ‘youth’ and Apathy. Youth has for a long time been agreed to represent people aged 15-25, but even that agreement is widely ignored by many countries and groups that consider youth to be even up to 40 years old. In practice, there is the tendency to stick to the 15-25 years age group for the definition of youth and 15 – 30 for young people. The purposes of this paper, youth is 15 –25 and young people is the age range from 0 – 30. The Convention on the Rights of the Child declares in its first line that every human being under the age of 18 is a child. But for the scope of this paper, children are those below the age of majority. Apathy is defined in simpler terms is ‘lack of interest’, ‘lack of concern’ or simply ‘laziness’.
APATHY
Apathy is best visualised in voting which is an activity that every qualifying citizen is expected to take part in and yet for many countries, voting is usually characterised by a large number of eligible voters not voting at all. In the United States of America for instance, there has been a four-decade decline in voting. During the struggle for voting rights legislation in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson called voting ‘the first duty of democracy’. This means that if many Americans are not even involved in the most basic requirement of citizenship, voting, considering only 49 per cent voted in 1996 (only 32 per cent of young people aged between 18 and 24 voted), then they are unlikely to be involved in the many other duties and responsibilities of maintaining a democratic society. The decline in voter turnout hit record lows during the mid-term elections in 1998 at 36 per cent; this was the lowest turnout since World War II. Nationwide that year, fewer than 20 per cent young people between the ages of 18 and 24 bothered to vote. This represented a 20 percentage point decrease in voting among this age group from the 1972 presidential elections when the voting age was lowered to 18. That year, according to the American Demographics Magazine, more than 50 per cent of 18- to 24-year olds cast ballots. During the Vietnam War, 18-year-olds were old enough to be drafted, fight and possibly die for their country, but the US government did not view them as old enough to vote until the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution lowered the voting age to 18.
America is not the only country experiencing voter apathy; it is almost a worldwide phenomenon and Zambia is not being spared.Zambia goes to the polls again in 2006 following the death of the incumbent elections. This is a bye-election. The last major elections in Zambia were the tripartite elections of 2006; these comprised the local government elections, parliamentary elections and the presidential elections. Before, the 2006 elections, there were the 2001 elections which I shall analyse in this essay.
Generally, there has been a downward trend in voter registration and voting in Zambia from the 1991 elections to the 1996 elections to the 2001 elections bearing in mind also the subsequent bye-elections sandwiched between these major elections. According to the Electoral Commission of Zambia, during the 2001 elections which saw the ruling party retaining government and also the ushering in of the immediate past Zambian Republican President, H.E. Patrick Levy Mwanawasa S.C., a total number of registered voters was 2 604 761 persons of which 46.88% were young people defined as 18 to 30 years old. Further, the Electoral Commission of Zambia, Age Distribution Report of 2002 says that ofthe 1 083 062 young people who registered as voters about 47.77% were female, showing that among young people, participation in the electoral process is almost equal between males and females. This is quite consistent with the fact that 49.96% of Zambians are female. Of the total number of registered voters registered for the 2001 elections, only 67.24% voted. From the above report and other related data sources however, it is not easy to decipher how many of these registered young people actually voted during the elections. The report however, referred to a figure of 48% participation among young people during the 2001 elections. It does not however mention where the participation quoted is of all potential voters among the young people or it is of all registered young voters.
Exercising ones franchise in voting involves having the right documentation and going through the registration process. According to the Central Statistics Office Preliminary Census Report of 2001 and Department of National Registration, Passport and Citizenship, out of 854 618 young people who did not have N.R.C.s, 68% managed to obtain these documents countrywide.
Magnitude of Problem of Apathy
The decline in voting and other forms of citizen participation among young people is ominous because of what it bodes for the future. Like the young America quoted at the beginning of this paper said, if one does not learn the lessons of citizenship in the early formative years, there is little reason to expect that one will be transformed in mid-life into a model citizen. There is need for the young people of today to redefine the future but they can only do that with a commitment and understanding of the value of voting and other forms of citizen participation. It is not an exaggeration to say that the strength or weakness of democracy in this century will be determined to a large extent by the attitudes that young people bring into the larger society over the next decade of so. This means that all mechanisms meant to fight apathy among citizens must have a component that helps identify strategies to reconnect young people to the democratic process.
According to the New Millennium Survey Project, a study that was carried into American youth attitudes on politics, citizenship, government and voting, young people these days are clearly not slothful or selfish, for when it comes to one-to-one volunteering in homeless shelters or in tutoring programs, young people are volunteering in greater numbers than the past decades. But when it comes to participating in the democratic process; when it comes to young people’s attitudes about citizenship and voting or politics and government, their distrust, disinterest and ignorance is profound. This is largely as a result of adult leaders in our major institutions. Older adults - parents, politicians and other public educators and those in the media – are not doing a good job when it comes to preparing and inspiring young people to be active, informed citizens.
Reasons for Apathy
When interviewed, young people give different answers for their apathy. Some of the reasons include:
80 per cent of American youth said they did not find it much of their civic duty or responsibility;
More than half of the same group believed that government was run by a few big interests looking out for themselves and not for the interest of all and that they could not trust politicians because they were dishonest.
Further, only a fifth of the surveyed group felt that voting was extremely important and often spoke with their parents about politics, government or current events when they were growing up.
About half the young people surveyed said that schools did not do a great job giving young people the information needed to vote.
According to Jack Doppelt, Author of ‘Non-voters: America’s No-shows’ and Associate professor of journalism at North-western University, the chief reason that young voters give for not voting is that they think nobody is listening to them. Coupled to that they don’t think that politicians come through on what they promise or say. Even if a voter were to publicly and truthfully declare whom he or she voted for, that individual voter’s approval is still not binding on any aspect of the winning candidate’s behaviour for the statutory length of his term. No contract has been made. A voter would not have much luck if he tried to take back his vote, not even if the candidate they voted for started betraying them the day they take office. Habitual voters like to tell conscientious non-voters that if they don’t vote, they have no business complaining about what happens later. If anything, the reverse is true.
Based on the theory of rational expectations, low voter turnouts make sense. The public, with the high literacy levels of these days, is smart enough to see when the system isn’t working and that they are helpless to change that by their vote. The people never see the reasons; they just blame the system irrespective of political party. Given a choice between parties, they do not feel like choosing the lesser evil, believing that a lesser evil is still evil and that there is nothing better with the devil you know. Voters decide not to vote because they do not want to sanction the regime because somehow, voting sanctions the whole apparatus of permanent rule and one’s own permanent role as one of the ruled.
With changes in the way we communicate and live in the world, some young people even go to an extent of saying that the only way they could vote is if the voting process was online and it was compulsory. This is because young people spend a lot of time online and do many things there and voting would naturally fit in there. Young people navigate their lives online; where once we wrote letters, we now send emails; those who were physically isolated are now a click away from buddies across the world and can communicate in real time. To a large extent, it is here than the powers that be should interface with young people.
Further, making elections optional does not help fight voter apathy some young people say. In Australia where voting is compulsory, the right is taken more seriously. There voting is a rite of life. Turning 18 is equated with fully-fledged, legitimate drinking, drinking and voting. As an integral part of the coming-of-age package, this social and personal conditioning sticks with you.
Young people lead evolving lives and are constantly moving from one place to another; they therefore usually feel that they do not belong to one place for a long time in order for them to know or feel affected by the local politics including the elections. This extends to the national political scene. A small-scale model of national politics is student government or politics, commuter students don’t know what is going on around their campuses. They come in, take their classes and leave. They don’t pay attention to what is happening on their campuses to feel very involved. Back to the national scale, young people are too busy learning and building careers to be in one place and this robs them time to learn the politics of their area and so be interested in both local and national politics. Young people are mobile due to job mobility and also school and so may not be in their constituency when elections come and being relatively poorer and fewer resources to travel back from where they are domiciled, it becomes difficult for them to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
When voting becomes a tiring ritual, any cause that makes voting to be difficulty and time-consuming encourages voter apathy. In Zambia for instance, it is believed that 5 509 polling districts and the 1 287 polling wards are not enough for the eligible voters in Zambia and this can lead to voter apathy because the daunting tasks for waiting in long queues before voting is not acceptable to all. Further, anomalies in the delimitation of wards and preparations of voters’ list also appear to play a major part in pouring cold water over voter enthusiasm. In India during the 2000 elections 66.5 per cent of the voters cast their votes and this figure went down to 59.94 per cent in the next elections especially in the southern states. Reports were received of candidates themselves not being able to cast their votes and several persons having to return without voting as their names figured in lists pertaining to far-off booths. In urban areas of India, the voters appeared to have chosen not to go through the ordeal of checking their names in several booths so that they could exercise their franchise. Only the diehard voters were prepared to go from booth to booth, based on helpful tips provided by political party workers and booth agents, to cast their votes.
For some young people, the fact that elections are free makes them unappealing. They say that getting to the polls involves some time and trouble, but once a voter has managed to arrive there, admission is free! A serious person, they say, knows that he or she first pays his money and only then takes his choice. When he or she is told that something is free, he immediately suspects a scam is in progress. Free government education is not taken as seriously as expensive private school education for example. Free admission rewards whimsy rather than serious-mindedness but it’s only one way the voting system encourages irresponsibility.
Voting is also anonymous and so it does not allow for those voting to be ashamed or their choices or proud of them. This means that those who take time to think through their choice of candidates usually feel betrayed by the masses who are swayed by cheap politics and vote irresponsibly. This leads to staying away as these serious-thinking voters feel their vote will be meaningless despite the well-meaning thoughts behind it.
Another problem that leads to apathy is the nebulous nature of political party stances on economic, political and social issues. There was a period when elections were waged on economic issues powerful enough to define the two major parties and divide the public. These issues stemmed from the deepest hopes and fears of an average man, and had the power to cement their loyalty to one party or the other and to draw them to the polls. As the economic issues weakened, the large set of less comprehensive issues emerged: civil rights, street crime, school prayer and welfare dependency were the first ones followed by gender issues, the environment, education, abortion and world trade. All were important but they intersected with each other in confounding ways. As a result, the issues of one election are usually different than the issues that had dominated the previous election or would economic be at the forefront in the next one. Can the political parties create cohesive and enduring coalitions out of this mix of issues? The short answer is that they can not do so. The issues are too crosscutting and too numerous for a political party to combine them in a way that could easily satisfy a following. Despite people being more educated these days than decades gone, they increasingly find it harder to say what the parties represent these days. The changes in party politics also helps to explain why candidates now have trouble crafting messages that voters find compelling. These candidates have so many communication weapons and media consultants at their disposal and yet they have never found it so hard to frame their message. Campaign messages today are strikingly different in the wide range of issues they address, the contradictions they contain, the speed with which they turn over and the small different in the wide range of issues they address the contradictions they contain, the speed with which they turn over and the small percentage of voters with whom they resonate.
Although voting does not seem to carry the same kind of risk other political acts do, acts such as standing up and bearing witness, spurning political bribes, telling truth to the powers-that-be, ostracising servants of the regime, or unfurling a banner of defiance, voting, as youth see, is an apathetic bow of obeisance to their rulers. And youth being naturally ‘rebels’ or at least critic of any form of control look at elections suspiciously.
Another reason that is given for apathy is that political campaigns most times do not stress much on local-level development and more on political issues having no connection with the problems at the grassroots.
There is a lacuna between the time the person gets his National registration Card (N.R.C.) and the time they are legally eligible to vote. In Zambia, a person can get his N.R.C. at the age of 16 but can only vote at the age of 18. This implies that a number of young people sometimes miss elections by a margin of months or even weeks simplify because they are not yet 18 but they possess all the documentation to be able to vote. And since major elections come after five years, they then have to endure half a decade to exercise they freedom of franchise. In practise, half of Zambia’s population cannot vote as they are barred by law. According to the UNFPA in a document called the ‘The Country and it’s People’ which summarises the 2000 Census held in Zambia, 56.8% of Zambians are below 20 years, more than 56% of Zambians are under the age of 19 and 45% of Zambians being below 15 years.
Free will in elections is hard to be exercised by young people as they are used for evil ends by other more selfish political players. Electoral violence, while not commonplace in Zambia, is not unheard of in Zambia. Oftentimes, young people are in the mix of fighting and cajoling others into voting for their candidates irrespective of the calibre of their man or woman simply because they are hired to do so. This is definitely related to the economic vulnerability of young people. Unemployment in Zambia is a problem and so Zambian young people are at times not employed, and will dedicate their time to campaigning for others instead of being involved in the political race itself or voting.
SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS OF APATHY AND PARTICIPATION
Having thoroughly looked at apathy and participation, the paper now suggests a few solutions for both problems of voter apathy among young people and lack of a good environment for young people’s participation in political and governance process.
Some Solutions to Apathy
According to New Generation Party president Humphrey Siulapwa in Zambia, an increase in numbers of polling districts and wards can help defeat apathy because these would easily be accessible to them at the time of their convenience on polling days. He was speaking when then Electoral Commission of Zambia acting Senior Public Relations Officer Sylvia Bwalya announced an increase in the number of polling districts and wards from the previous 5 509 to 6 456 and to 1 422 from 1 287 respectively. [Times of Zambia, September 28, 2005]
Voting is the only form of citizenship or apparent citizenship that most people have been told about, and that’s part of what pushes them to the polls. It is therefore important to tell them well and so have them view voting as a noble thing to due. This calls for a new form of awareness which takes into account voter needs.
Voting should be made as easy as possible and it should have the fewest flaws possible to give it integrity so that those who don’t trust the system can be compelled to attend polls.
A solution in Zambia would be to allow for a system that can track ones vote to their constituency irrespective of where in the country they vote from. An online system might be the answer.
Maybe let’s punish those that fail to vote; we’ll levy a fine on them. This is a true liberal thinking but the moral of it is we need to compel voters to turn up on polling day.
This paper will not go far in giving solutions on voter apathy as it has in depth analysed the subject and give the causes thus allows for people to formulate the needed solutions. For instance, the author feels that Literacy is not a problem leading to voter apathy; English is spoken by about 26% of Zambians and the adult population is 67.2% has the ability to read and write in at least one language. Literacy among youth (15-24) is 70% (UNFPA 2004).
The paper shall not conclude but instead seeks contributions to this argument put herein.
I am an enigma; I am like five people rolled into one. Project manager by career, engineer by training, visionary by choice, analyst by nature and sports person by way of life. In 2008, I was appointed by the Minister of Sports onto the 2011 All Africa Games Capacity-Development and Talent-Identification Committee in Zambia. I own a 5-a-side team called Black Boys and run a football league for children and youth in 14 villages in Mumbwa. Head a Youth NGO called Rescue Mission and so alot of HIV/AIDS work. Also a political analyst.
Worked in the UN system as Youth Advisor, currently doing a lot of youth work and always loved the youth.
