Greater education beyond high school will sink the ANC

I do not know a single person in my friendship circles from across the colour line who intends to vote for the ruling party.

One reason is that they are mostly degreed people whose careers do not depend on the government (perceived, wrongly, as the ANC) giving them grants or jobs.

They are independent of the ruling party for their professional lives and make their own personal fortunes.

Their education has weaned them off a party which would like them to believe that it feeds them.

Of course, there are formally educated comrades who live off tenders and other forms of government largesse whose lives will implode dramatically when the ANC dips below 50% of the total votes later this year; these are the ones to be wary of for they will not accept a loss at the polls.

Still, herein lies the long-term solution — educate more and more citizens beyond high school and the ANC is emphatically sunk.

Some cynical friends believe that the ANC is deliberately giving people a poor education in order to stay in power. That is to credit the ANC with a deep thinking of which it is not capable.

But that does not mean the ANC is unaware of the dangers of not courting those with low levels of formal education who are dependent on the state for their day-to-day survival.

That is why I think the strategy of some politicians is effective if also despicable — go into townships and rural areas and warn people that the DA will take away their grants.

This of course is nonsense; I do not believe the DA, even if it leads a 50%-plus coalition without the ANC, is that stupid.

True, the DA lacks any sense of racial justice (the premier, the mayor of my city, and the education MEC are all white men; go figure) and would like us all to believe that inequalities aren’t the consequences of embedded racial injustice.

It knows enough to realise that there would be a terrible political reckoning to confront if it messed with the grants system.

Regardless, the fearmongering works because ANC apparatchiks warn poorly educated people that their ample grants are on the line if the DA wins in some form.

By the way, SA is not exceptional in this regard.

Trump is still running neck-and-neck with Biden in polls about the November election outcomes because of one demographic that for the first time in US history emphatically separates Republican and Democratic voters — college-educated whites.

Trump has been found to be a rapist who defrauded New York State of hundreds of millions of dollars and yet he enjoys support of a sizeable majority of whites without college degrees.

Those with education beyond high school despise a man who has no guiding values for his personal life or elevated vision for America’s future.

Despicable to the core — in the past few days he again mocked people with disabilities, including their president who has stuttered since childhood — his base of uneducated support could not care less.

This does not mean, of course, that there are not growing numbers of citizens in SA who are turned off from ANC politics despite them not having education qualifications beyond high school.

The Uber driver and the hotel cook and the domestic workers I talk to are pretty fed up as well with what they perceive as a corrupt government led for the moment by the ANC.

I just do not know whether in the ballot box on May 29 the niggling concerns about subsidised government support will be allayed.

Overstated, of course, but there is an element of truth in Nelson Mandela’s oft-quoted dictum — education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.

It is also a gift that can give you the powers of discernment in this election year, but it depends very much on your level of education.

We have evidence for this trend from the ways in which relatively well-educated people voted in the metros from Tshwane in the north to Nelson Mandela Bay on the east coast.

It is in the cities where the more educated of our people congregate.

For me, education has human development goals that stretch well beyond politics.

That is why we should extend opportunities for young people and adults in rural areas to be educated beyond high school.

But it would be a happy consequence if, in the process of gaining post-school education, our most disadvantaged citizens could stand on their own feet, financially and politically.