Voting Drive for Homeless

The advertising by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) over the last few weeks - and the big registration drive over this past weekend - has been trying to make sure that all South Africans are aware of the importance of registering.

Universal suffrage - in which all citizens above a certain age are entitled to vote - is something we now see as normal but that has clearly not always been the case. South Africa is famous for excluding people because of the colour of their skin but is not the only country to have done so. Every country at some stage excluded women - the UK has only just celebrated 100 years of women being able to vote and Saudi Arabia only extended the franchise to women in 2015! Another frequent test was property ownership which meant that poor people were excluded from the ballot. In fact, the very limited number of non-white people on the electoral roll of the Cape Colony (before the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910) were there because of their property rights.

The poor are no longer excluded per se from being voters but they are much less likely to register and they are much less likely to vote. This is true of most poor groups and even more true of homeless people. At the Denis Hurley Centre, we work with the 4,000+ homeless people who stay in central Durban. 90% of them are South African citizens but only a handful are registered to vote. But I am pleased to say that working closely with the IEC we are trying to change that in time for this year's election. After all, Archbishop Denis Hurley was one of the leaders who fought so hard for democracy in South Africa.

This week the IEC is setting up a satellite office at the Denis Hurley Centre to make it even easier for homeless people to register to vote. In fact, the service will be open to anyone who comes along and they can register regardless of where they live. We are conscious, for example, that there are traders in the Warwick triangle who were working hard over the weekend and so unable to register. They - and anyone else - can pop over to the DHC between 8am and 5pm today to check if they are registered, to register if they are not, or to change the address of where they are registered.

One stumbling block for the homeless had been the need to give a residential address. After all, if people are homeless they do not have an address! If they gave the address of where they are from, they would have to go back to that town to register and to vote making it almost impossible for them. But the IEC has accepted that, if someone can assert that they slept on a particular bit of pavement or in a park for three of the previous seven nights, that counts as an address for these purposes and they can be registered to that place.

A bigger stumbling block though is ID cards. These are necessary in order to register and in order to vote. In fact, they are necessary for accessing almost everything official in South Africa - from getting a grant, to buying a cell phone, to opening a bank account. A person without an ID (or equivalent) is in effect a non-person.

That is how many homeless people are treated by society anyway - as non-persons. An initiative of the Denis Hurley Centre to turn beggars at robots into newspaper sellers had an unexpected consequence. The paper vendors all wear uniforms with their names clearly shown. One of them told me that, as a vendor rather than a beggar, what has changed is not how much money he makes, but how he is treated by drivers.

"Before, they would drive past me and look through me as if I wasn't there. Now, even if they do not buy a paper, they notice me, they smile, they even call me by my name. I have become a person to them!"

Unfortunately, almost half of homeless people do not have ID's and so have become non-people. In some cases, they lost them or they were stolen - in far too many cases they disappeared when police were raiding the places where the homeless were sleeping or confiscating their meagre belongings. The local Home Affairs office has been co-operative in helping us to help the homeless and secure them IDs. But the further problem is that, while a first ID is free, a replacement costs R140: too much for the homeless person and indeed for the DHC.

We are hoping that Home Affairs will soften their hearts and come up with a waiver so that homeless people can get IDs and join those who are now registering. We want everyone to have the chance to be politically empowered. Those who have signed up are now sporting a wrist band - in a staunchly apolitical grey colour - which carries the words "I can now vote - can you "

Homeless people encouraging each other to get politically involved is the next step in our programme and we have, with the help of UKZN Law School and a grant from the US Government, been training homeless leaders as political mobilisers. A mark of the early success of this was when 40 homeless people recently attended a stakeholder meeting about homelessness convened by the Deputy Mayor. They comfortably took their place alongside businesses, councillors and ratepayers, making their views known in the very same Convention Centre that regularly sends out security personnel to eject the homeless.

This is just the start of a process. We know that democratic education takes a long time. 25 years in, South Africa is still in many ways learning how best to use the political voice that was won in 1994.