Nokuthula Simelane was 23 years old when she vanished. The liberation activist, who had been carrying messages between Swaziland and South Africa as a courier for Umkhonto we Sizwe, never returned. She never saw the democratic elections her sacrifice helped make possible. Decades later, President Cyril Ramaphosa stood at the University of Mpumalanga on Thursday and asked a new generation to finish what she started.
The occasion was the inaugural Nokuthula Simelane Memorial Lecture, held as South Africa approaches the 2026 Local Government Elections, the 14th nationwide poll since democracy. Ramaphosa’s address was less a commemoration than a challenge, aimed squarely at young citizens whose disengagement from the ballot box is reshaping the country’s political future in ways they may not fully recognise.
The numbers are stark. Fewer than half of registered voters under 30 turned out in the 2024 elections, and young people remain less likely to register than older South Africans. That gap has direct consequences for communities across the country. “Young people are less likely to be registered to vote than older people,” Ramaphosa said. “This puts young people at a disadvantage. It limits their ability to determine the future of their communities, their cities and towns, and their country.”
Low turnout is not simply a civic abstraction. Local government elections determine who controls water supply, housing allocation, refuse collection and the basic services that shape daily life for millions of South Africans. When young people stay home, those decisions are made without them.
Simelane herself was young but clear-eyed. She understood the machinery of apartheid and chose deliberately to resist it, accepting the risks of arrest, torture and death. Ramaphosa argued that the same clarity must guide the present generation as it confronts the distance between constitutional promises and lived experience. South Africa’s Bill of Rights is among the most progressive in the world, guaranteeing human dignity, the right to vote, freedom of expression and the right to life. Yet for millions, those protections remain words on paper.
“What does the Bill of Rights mean for a person still living in a shack, for a child learning in a classroom that is falling apart, for a family that goes hungry, for a household without water?” Ramaphosa asked. “Nokuthula did not fight so that human dignity would exist only on paper. She fought so that human dignity would be a lived reality.”
The gaps he described are measurable. More than 82 percent of households now have access to clean water, but millions remain without it. A housing backlog of approximately 2.6 million units separates constitutional ideals from the conditions in which ordinary families live. Progress, the President stressed, must mean lasting change in people’s lives, not merely infrastructure installed and statistics updated.
Meanwhile, gender inequality drew sustained attention in his remarks. Young women in particular continue to face school dropout, unemployment, gender-based violence and unequal opportunity, even as women have advanced in education and public leadership. The newly established Nokuthula Simelane Centre for Gender and Intersectional Studies, Ramaphosa said, must deepen the understanding that gender equality is not a favour extended to women but a fundamental human right. Men, he added, carry a specific responsibility to confront discriminatory attitudes and to actively prevent violence against women.
Democracy, Ramaphosa cautioned, cannot be measured by elections alone. South Africa has built what he called “one of the more resilient constitutional democracies to emerge from the twentieth century,” but resilience depends on the people the system is meant to serve actually using it. “The strength of our democracy lies not merely in the conduct of regular elections. It lies in the participation of those whom democracy is meant to serve.”
Simelane never cast a vote. She never helped a neighbour register, never stood in a queue outside a polling station, never saw her name on a ballot. The South Africa she fought for is still being built, and the President’s question, left open at the University of Mpumalanga on Thursday, is whether the generation that inherited her freedom will choose to shape it.