Exiled by paperwork: a Benoni writer's vote dilemma

For one writer, the question of who deserves a vote in South Africa’s election begins in an unlikely place: the hallway of a childhood home in Benoni, lined with ramparts of canned baked beans.

The writer is registered in Dublin, Ireland, and so cannot vote, even though they are back in the country in time for the election. The dilemma runs deeper than the paperwork. Looking at the roadside posters, the honest answer to the question of who to vote for is uncertain. Will the parties fix the potholes? The electricity? The yawning hunger of an angry nation? Reading those posters too carelessly, the writer jokes, could land a voter in a pothole, physically and metaphorically.

That wish for practical, unglamorous results traces back to a family habit. The writer’s father was an inveterate grocery shopper who treated supermarket supplements like the holy grail, circling the real deals before returning home victorious with 40 tubes of toothpaste and 24 packs of Vitamin C. The Benoni house swelled with 60 cans of baked beans, 20 jars of coffee and a mountain of toilet paper. It was great, the writer recalls, until it wasn’t, when friends began mocking the baked bean ramparts in the hallway. The stockpile drove the writer’s mother slightly potty, as she wondered where it would all go. At the father’s funeral, she was only half-joking when she offered bottles of HP Sauce from the store cupboard to anyone who wanted one. She still had 16.

The father’s logic, the writer concedes, was undeniably sound. Spending R100 on 50 boxes of teabags in 1985, when they would normally have cost R200, was genuine saving. But there was a catch. Savings you never see do not feel like savings. There was an immediate, notable dent in his finances, and that R100 saved did not magically reappear in his pocket two years later.

It is on this point that the family story becomes an argument about government. The writer thinks of the father’s teabags when considering what the authorities, government and municipalities could be spending money on to fix the future. Long-term investment behaves the same way as bulk grocery shopping: the money goes out now, and the benefit arrives quietly, later, if at all, in forms nobody can hold.

Meanwhile, the timing could hardly be worse for that kind of argument. In this election, drowning in hyperbole and the odd murder, it is a losing game for serious politicians and measured debate. A stitch in time saves nine, but spending on long-term fixes and future-proofing is never sexy, especially when big issues are happening right now and people are hurting right now. The writer notes this is true globally.

The comparison offered is with health. Consistently eating well and exercising sets a person up for a stronger future, but you will never see the diabetes that did not happen or the knee replacement you never needed. Prevention works by remaining invisible. The reward for discipline is the absence of catastrophe, which is a difficult thing to campaign on.

Still, the writer argues, that invisible work is what the country needs: the unsexy, day-to-day, adult stuff done now. South Africa, in this framing, needs the civic equivalent of a stockpile of baked beans rather than more of what the writer calls farting into the wind. The piece closes where it began, with a plea for restraint over spectacle. We need to make politics boring again.