Former DA KwaZulu-Natal member of the provincial legislature Mbali Ntuli is confident that her transition from party politics to community development work will help address young people’s current disillusionment with government, which she says makes it difficult to hold those who have been elected to leadership positions to account.
On Tuesday, she unveiled the Ground Work Collective, an organisation she has founded as a vehicle to ensure civic education and entrepreneurial skills development will be priorities for communities.
Ntuli says the Ground Work Collective’s work will include galvanising young people to register to vote ahead of next year’s election.
This will be accompanied by civic education initiatives aimed at ensuring that they actually do go to the ballot boxes to make their mark.
Having dumped the DA last year, Ntuli says she will not be looking for a new political home, despite having spent most of her career as a politician in the party, including serving as its federal youth leader.
She says that, while she remains a politician at heart, she wants to leave party politics altogether and focus on working with communities to help to encourage active citizenship and better civic participation in political processes.
“I think more than enough people have formed their own parties. I don’t want to do that and I don’t want to join another party. I just want to work with communities to offer the kind of help they need,” she says, adding that, while her work will continue to be political within the Ground Work Collective, it will not be partisan.
She says that, while the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) has made substantial efforts to teach people how to vote, little has been done to teach citizens about the country’s political systems and how to make proper political choices at voting booths to ensure an accountable government.
The Ground Work Collective has already approached the IEC to work with it in achieving this objective throughout communities.
Ntuli says that her departure from public office was due to both the bad state of politics and her personal mission of ensuring that citizens are activated and taught about governance and how to hold politicians t account.
She points out that, while South Africa’s median age is 27, many young, eligible voters who are mostly jobless are turning away from voting or participating in the country’s political processes because they realise that these do not work for them, but rather for the political class.
“There’s a correlation between high rates of voter participation, accountability, representation and turnout. Voters nowadays simply don’t turn up at polling stations. They don’t care because they know they’re on their own,” she says.
The Ground Work Collective has already conducted extensive research into challenges confronting communities and possible solutions, working with business, civil society and academia.
Ntuli says the disproportionately large number of people in the electorate has a profound impact on voter turnout and warns that without a targeted focus on civic education, the current lower voter registration rate could further reduce over time.
The Ground Work Collective is planning to flesh out specific projects that will be launched in communities next week, including bringing partners on board to help boost the work of the new organisation.
Ntuli says that, while many South Africans are “rightfully overwhelmed at the circus that is our politics”, they need to understand that they are at risk of outsourcing decision-making to the people who may be least qualified to do so.
She says Ground Work Collective’s work will be gerared towards ensuring that people are empowered to force elected political parties to be “afraid of them and their collective power”.
The work of civic empowerment will be complemented by food production skills development for poor communities as a way to increase their food security.
