Voter apathy is dangerous for a nation
By Victor Angula.
Voter apathy can be defined as the unwillingness of people to participate in the processes of electing their political leaders. Fewer and fewer people turn up to vote during elections for political leaders.
And this surely is one of the most serious problems facing the Namibian nation.
The Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) has only a week and a few days before the Voter Registration process comes to an end, on 1 August. But ECN is saying that it is not happy with the numbers of those who have so far registered.
A few days ago they said that the number of those who have registered stands at some 800,000 out of a possible total of 1,5 million. Apparently 1,5 million Namibians are eligible to register, that is to say, they are what the ECN is targeting.
Which means that it is likely that more than 500,000 people will not register to be able to vote in the November general elections.
This is a third of the total population of those who are supposed to register and eventually vote. And come election time, even those who have registered not all will go out to vote.
This shows that there is such a serious political indifference and a never-mind attitude towards the institutions of government power.
And this is a serious problem. When the population of a country doesn’t worry about politics and processes of electing their leaders, then democracy dies.
In fact voter apathy is a symptom of a dead democracy. Namibia’s democracy is dead. That is why people are not attached to the institutions of state authority. People don’t feel that it is their patriotic duty to elect those who serve them in government institutions.
Slowly, with this voter apathy, democracy becomes fake and just a borrowed concept, a concept which is meaningless to the people.
And here lies the danger for a nation. No nation can go forward if its population is not interested in politics, especially if this is apparently a democracy. Democracy requires popular participation. Or else it is a dead democracy. Even an autocracy is more productive in comparison to a dead democracy.
– Victor Angula is the editor of Omutumwa News Online. He can be reached at victorangula@yahoo.com
