CIVICUS

FROM THE DESK OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

Should the voting age be reduced to sixteen? International Youth Day: a time for reflection

Release Date: 15 August 2007

By Kumi Naidoo, CIVICUS Secretary-General

Dear e-CIVICUS Subscriber,

Last week I was joined by colleagues from Zimbabwe and from two CIVICUS programmes, Civil Society Index and Civil Society Watch, in a meeting with a delegation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in South Africa which was led by Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about the role the South African government is playing in their mediation efforts on behalf of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) with regard to the deepening economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe .

Our message was a simple one: Please include the voices and concerns of Zimbabwean civil society in the mediation efforts. We also voiced an appeal to the Government of South Africa to develop a bold approach to addressing the challenge of the large number of Zimbabwean refugees fleeing political persecution and extreme economic hardship into South Africa . It is believed that there are 3 million Zimbabweans in South Africa at the moment with about 2500 attempting to cross into South Africa every day. We received a positive response from the Minister and his colleagues and applauded them for inviting a delegation of Zimbabwean civil society leaders for a consultation about their views on how to address the crisis in Zimbabwe . While all parts of Zimbabwean society are adversely affected by the current crisis, young people, are particularly affected as the schooling system crumbles and youth unemployment deepens.

This meeting preceded International Youth Day on 12 August and it offers us an opportunity to reflect on young people in societies undergoing conflict and more broadly. Sadly, adults still see young people as half empty rather than half full, essentially focusing on what young people have not experienced, instead of what they have achieved. In all social movements over time, including those focused on poverty, peace, gender equality and economic justice, young people have played a central role. In Africa , where we have the slow passive genocide that is known as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we are seeing thousands of teenage headed households emerging all over the continent. In actual terms, young people are not simply the leaders of tomorrow, as many adults are happy to proclaim, but are leaders today.

Given the growing lack of interest in electoral democracy and elections in many parts of the world, perhaps we need to reopen the debate about whether the time has not come for the voting age to be reduced from 18 (the case in most countries) to 16. Nelson Mandela, when the discussions about what the voting age should be during South Africa ’s political transition from apartheid, suggested that the voting age should be 14. His thinking was that if young people, sometimes under the age of 14, were willing to spend time in apartheid’s prisons and be part of the liberation struggle, then surely they were good enough to exercise the vote. In the end the voting age was settled at 18 as per international convention.

Today, the nature of how information is accessed and the role schools could potentially play in enhancing a strong civic-mindedness raises the question about whether we should not revisit the issue of the voting age. If the voting age was reduced, it would engender the interest and participation of high school students, enabling their registration as voters and giving them a greater stake in society.

If we take an issue such as global warming and climate change, we find that adult leaders often act without the urgency of securing the planet for future generations and perhaps this crucial issue, one of the most frightening facing humanity, will be given a bigger boost with more sensible policies emerging should young people, already very vocal in environmental activism, have a greater political voice.

As someone who entered public life as a fourteen year old activist against apartheid inequality, I know how much I have learnt from both the failures and successes that various youth and student organisations experienced during the struggle against apartheid injustice. I also know that much of the work I do these days is informed by what I learnt from youth activism. I often remark that what I learnt from universities and schools was much less useful to prepare me for a life of struggle for justice than what I learnt from participation in youth activism.

Might I also urge you to think about your own work and whether you are doing enough to open up space for young men and women in the governance of organisations that you are involved in. CIVICUS, which has a very youthful staff (when I started at CIVICUS at the age of 33 I was the oldest and am still one of the oldest) also has much work to do to ensure that we are empowering young people to participate actively in all aspects of society. At this year’s CIVICUS World Assembly we had our first ever youth assembly that was entirely organised and run by young people.

We were also extremely pleased that from more than 100 nominations of candidates to the CIVICUS Board, Rajiv Joshi , who is 22 years old, became the youngest ever person to be elected onto the CIVICUS Board. Rajiv, who is the outgoing President of the Scottish Youth Parliament, will be an important voice of young people’s concerns and interests on the Board together with other CIVICUS Board members, who recognise that civil society needs young people much more than young people need adult led civil society organisations. We will never have a strong civil society at the local, national or global levels if young people are not fully engaged.

What do you think? Do you think that the voting age should be reduced? I strongly urge a global public debate on this issue and would like your guidance about whether this is an important opportunity to breathe life into faltering democracies from the United States to Uzbekistan . Please express your opinion in this week’s poll that follows below.