Introducing popEd – a podcast by My Vote Counts

South Africa heads into the Local Government Elections at a moment when the settlement of 1994 is coming undone.

Fascist mobs are using violence to keep migrants and ethnic minorities out of hospitals and schools. Our cities are decaying. Ordinary people – especially women – are left to navigate violence, neglect and crime every day. More than half of young people are unemployed, with little promise of economic freedom.

And an elite pact called the GNU is emboldened enough to push legislation like the PIE Amendment Bill – legislation that echoes the apartheid playbook and threatens to criminalise poor people.

So how did we get here?

To make sense of this moment, we spoke to six people who have played a role in holding our democracy together.

The result is popEd – a new MVC podcast named after a tradition of building people’s power through political education.

Across the series, we ask some uncomfortable questions.

What happened between 1994 and now?

What was the political stalemate that led to South Africa’s first democratic election?

What did the Marikana massacre reveal about the toxic relationship between the state and capital?

What weakened our labour movement and contributed to the collapse of our social fabric?

How do we understand the rise of authoritarianism, ethno-nationalism and violence on our streets?

And what does the ANC-DA governing coalition tell us about the ways ordinary people have been shut out of decision-making?

But popEd isn’t only about looking backwards.

Because even amid the unravelling, people are building.

Young people. Shack dwellers. Community movements. Organised citizens. They are imagining different ways of living, organising and exercising power. What can we learn from them? And what would it take to build the society they are imagining?

These conversations are an attempt to think through not only how we got here, but what comes next.

popEd builds on MVC’s work to reform political systems, create the conditions for a genuinely participatory democracy, support social movements to build power, and create spaces for civil society to organise and think together.

Because democracy cannot simply mean showing up to vote every few years.

At this moment, we need to remobilise society. Reclaim democracy. And rethink what people’s power can look like.

This is popEd. A project of My Vote Counts.

📅 THE DROP SCHEDULE

🎙️ New episode: Every Wednesday at 12h00

So subscribe, follow the series, and turn on those notifications on YouTube 🔔

Yours In Solidarity
Minhaj Jeenah

Executive Director | My Vote Counts