EFF MP Carl Niehaus discussing the duty to vote in South Africa.
By Carl Niehaus
As I sit here at the Economic Freedom Fighters registration table at the Rosebank Primary School in Rosebank, writing these words while busy registering new voters and assisting those who want to make sure that they are properly registered, I am overcome. This is one of the voting stations and voter registration points in Ward 117, my home ward in my Rosebank constituency in Sub-Region B of Johannesburg.
Watching young South Africans and those who have never before claimed their democratic rights step forward to register fills me with deep emotion. The weight of history presses upon me with a force that brings tears to my eyes and a tightening in my chest. This is not an ordinary Sunday. This is the final day of the second and final voter registration weekend before the local government elections of 4 November 2026. Yesterday and today, the first and second of August, the people of South Africa once again take into their hands the hard-won instrument of their own liberation. And I am here, at this table, in this voting district, because there is nowhere else in the world I would rather be.
I joined the liberation struggle in 1979 at the age of nineteen, when I became a member of the People's Liberation Army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Even before that formal step, from the age of sixteen the fire of resistance had already taken hold of me. I have carried that fire through decades of underground work, imprisonment, hardship, and the long, grinding battle for freedom. I intend to carry it still until my last breath, whenever that may be. There is no greater honour, and no higher duty, than to ensure that the vote for which so many died is not only protected, but exercised with purpose, with clarity, and with revolutionary determination.
