By Papama Meleni, SASSFE ManCo Member

Why would the generation that has spent this year describing how constrained its activism has become also be the generation least likely to use the one political tool that requires no campus’s permission at all? That is the real question sitting underneath the 2026 Local Government Elections on 4 November, and it is a harder one than a simple call to vote suggests.

What a Council Actually Decides. Start with what is actually on the ballot. A university controls what happens inside its own gates: lecture halls, residences it manages directly, campus policy. It does not control the water that reaches a student’s flat, whether the lights stay on, whether the street outside is safe to walk home on at night, or whether refuse gets collected in the neighbourhood where a student rents a room. Those things fall under local government, and local government is exactly what South Africans are electing on 4 November. This is not a side issue for anyone’s academic career. A student cannot revise for an exam through a three-day water outage, or study safely in a room with no working streetlight outside it. Whether a degree gets finished on schedule often depends less on what happens in a lecture hall than on whether the basic conditions to study at all are being met, and that is a council’s job, not a university’s.

A Concept Worth Knowing: Clarity of Responsibility. Understanding why that vote matters requires a concept political scientists use to explain why some elections hold governments accountable and others don’t. The idea is simple enough to explain with a group assignment. If one person does all the work and the group gets a bad mark, everyone knows exactly who to blame, and that person has every incentive to do better next time. If five people share one mark and it goes badly, each person can point at someone else, and no single person carries the full cost of the failure. Coalition government works like the second scenario. When several parties govern a municipality together and something goes wrong, responsibility gets spread across all of them, and each can plausibly blame the others. Voters lose the clear line from a problem back to the person responsible for it, and without that line, elections struggle to do the one job they are supposed to do: reward good governance and punish bad governance.

Seen in Real Life. This is not a hypothetical. In the City of Ekurhuleni, a change in the governing coalition after the 2021 elections was followed by a shift from several years of clean audit outcomes to a qualified audit opinion for the 2022 to 2023 financial year. When the finding became public, the parties that had governed together that year publicly blamed each other, and one blamed the coalition that had governed before it, rather than any of them accepting responsibility outright. That is clarity of responsibility breaking down in real time, in a municipality where students actually live and study.

Why Turnout Makes This Worse. This problem gets worse, not better, when a whole age group rarely turns out to vote. It is well documented, and widely discussed by South Africa’s own electoral bodies, that younger voters register and vote at noticeably lower rates than older generations, and that this gap has persisted across recent local government elections. Voter registration for the 2026 election closed on 7 August, so this year’s pattern is now largely set. Here is why that matters beyond the trend itself: even where responsibility for a failure is clear, a politician only feels pressure to fix it from the people who actually vote. A group that rarely turns out has less power to punish poor performance even when everyone can see exactly who caused it. Low turnout does not just weaken democracy in general. It specifically weakens the one mechanism, punishment at the ballot box, that clarity of responsibility depends on to mean anything.

Who Feels It Most. None of this lands evenly across the student population. Students who can afford private, well-managed accommodation are comparatively insulated from a municipality’s failures. Students who rely on NSFAS funding, already carrying debt from a scheme that Deputy Minister Nomusa Dube-Ncube acknowledged at last month’s Student Leader’s Dialogue often forces them into accommodation that is both expensive and university accredited, are typically the same students living in the parts of a city where water outages and infrastructure failures land hardest. The students with the least financial cushion to absorb a municipal failure, and the least room in their academic schedule to absorb the disruption it causes, are also the students structurally least likely to vote for the council that could be held responsible for it.

A Fair Objection. It would still be wrong to conclude from this that every coalition-run municipality is broken, or that voting is pointless wherever power is shared. Many coalitions govern without the collapse or public infighting that dominates headlines, and some non-voters may even be making a reasonable calculation rather than an apathetic one, judging that their vote will simply be diluted by exactly the kind of post-election blame-shifting described above. That reasoning deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. But it points the wrong way for anyone who actually wants things to improve. Sitting out an election because responsibility is blurry guarantees the blur continues unchallenged. Showing up, even into an uncertain outcome, is the only way to make politicians feel the cost of leaving it that way.

Not Abstract for SASSFE. At the same Dialogue, current students described no longer being permitted to wear student-activism regalia under university policy, and spoke to a broader sense that today’s university system makes it structurally harder to mobilise and organise than it was for previous generations. Set against that testimony, the ballot box is not simply one civic option among many. It is the one avenue of political leverage available to students that no university policy has restricted, and it is also, on the evidence above, the one most students are not using.

What SASSFE Is Asking For. SASSFE is not calling on students to treat 4 November as a substitute for organising, negotiation, or the harder work its advocacy has always required. It is calling on every SASSFE member and affiliate who is already registered to vote in this election, specifically in the ward where they currently live as students, not only where they are originally from, since it is that ward’s council that will govern the water, electricity, and safety that daily student life, and daily academic performance, actually depends on. Understanding clarity of responsibility does not fix a broken coalition. But it does explain exactly why showing up, even once, still counts for something no campus rule can take away.