Jay Naidoo pt 3: Creating change through local movements
Key topics:
Youth disengagement shows deep distrust in politics
Magaliesberg Initiative builds community-led change
Call for new movements rooted in trust and dignity
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By Jay Naidoo
Building Movements from the Ground Up
Genuine movements begin quietly, long before any banners are raised. They ignite a spark of purpose inside each of us. As I wrote in Organising Tomorrow, Today, leadership starts with clear intention. Each morning, I pause to name the priorities that connect my heart, mind and hands. This simple practice keeps my actions rooted in purpose rather than driven by crisis. When our values and actions are one and the same, credibility flourishes; no collective can survive without such integrity. I have seen too many activists burn out and families strained by absence. Without a close circle of trusted companions, none of us can succeed.
This inner discipline naturally leads us outward, grounding our work in place. Every bioregion in our country and world holds its own memories, watersheds and soils, ancestral foodways and community stories. For a movement to thrive, it must grow from this unique ecology and culture, drawing resilience from its environment. Decision-making and resources must remain with the local community; true ownership cannot be outsourced. In the formative years of the union movement, shop stewards understood that they needed mandates from their members. They would negotiate, report back and take new mandates. They were inherently connected to their base. Not anymore.
We are at a moment of rupture. The old ways of politics, grand promises, slogans, and top-down speeches are failing us. Young people who are jobless and poor cannot eat slogans. Constitutional rights and the law mean little when daily life is marked by empty stomachs, broken promises and despair. Our constitution is noble, but when people do not see it in their homes in clean water, in decent work, in dignity, it feels far away, almost irrelevant.
Consider this: voter turnout in South Africa’s 2024 general elections fell to 58.6 per cent of registered voters. Even more troubling, youth participation was far lower. In the 2021 local government elections, turnout was just over 45 per cent, and among 18 to 29-year-olds, both registration and turnout have been steadily falling.
This is not simply abstention. It is a vote of no confidence in our democracy, a refusal to be part of a system that has delivered so little. If more than 40 per cent of eligible voters stay away, especially the young people most affected by unemployment, poverty and lack of opportunity, then democracy risks becoming a hollow shell. Either this moment becomes our blessing, a call to invent new ways, or it becomes our greatest curse: the slow collapse of promise into neglect.
A Living Experiment in the Magaliesberg
It is in this context that the Magaliesberg Initiative emerges, not as another project, but as a living experiment in what becomes possible when communities choose to believe in themselves again.
In the Magaliesberg bioregion, water aquifers are under threat. Illegal chrome wash plants poison soils. Traffic, dust, and broken roads degrade daily life. People are saying: enough. But “enough” without hope is despair, so we are building something different.
We have begun dialogues across lines hardened by history: young people who have lost hope and elders who remember a past both painful and powerful; mine owners and environmentalists; cultural activists and community health workers; black and white farmers and farmworkers, women organising to confront the rise in gender based violence. Together we ask: can we put behind us the old battles of race, ideology and blame, and build instead on our common stakes: clean air, safe water, secure livelihoods, access to ancestral lands and dignity for all?
The Magaliesberg Initiative has already agreed to co-create, with all stakeholders, an authentic intergenerational dialogue that opens pathways of hope and opportunity. We will not wait for government handouts or rely on political parties. We are building forward opportunities for local ownership by creating cooperatives in regenerative agriculture, reclaiming degraded land, ensuring transparent governance with open budgets and accountable decision makers. We hope to weave culture, spiritual practice, song, story and land memory back into daily life so that people feel they belong, not as supplicants, but as rightful custodians of this sacred bioregion. This is authentic dialogue we want to manifest into action.
It is a slow and sometimes painful process, messy, noisy and even dangerous. But deep buy-in and participation demand that kind of work. It recalls the reconstruction and development programme of our early democracy, displacing the old gatekeepers who sought to own communities and rejecting the consultant’s model of engagement that begins and ends with a hotel meeting and a slick plan. If every single South African can be a lifeboat in this armada of hope and opportunity, we will be unstoppable.
This is no dreamland. It is urgent because the stakes are already being felt in every community here. What works in the Magaliesberg may become a pattern for the rest of the country. This engagement acknowledges that extraction and damage are real, but so too are partnership, restoration and the reclamation of agency.
Read more:
Why New Ways of Engagement Matter
From top down to distributed leadership
Traditional party politics concentrate power, silence dissent and drift far from everyday realities. New movements require rotating facilitation, shared leadership and collective decision making. Youth, women and indigenous voices must be central, not marginal.From slogans to lived experience
Rights and laws are necessary, but not enough. Young people must feel those rights in their schools, their job prospects, their health and their environment. We must build each step, community gardens, local enterprises, skills training and ecological restoration so that theory becomes tangible experience.From protest to creation
Protest is vital: it exposes harm and holds power to account. But protest alone burns energy. We also need spaces of hope and repair. Can we co-create spaces that are sanctuaries for the difficult conversations we have to have, a living laboratory where we practise regeneration, justice and accountability?From alienation to belonging
Low youth turnout is not only about distrust; it is about not feeling seen or heard. Laws and constitutions drafted far away can seem like someone else’s story. We must bring decision-making closer, make it visible, participatory and relational.
What We Risk and What We Can Gain
If we ignore this moment, if we dismiss the youth, silence their despair and allow the gap between law and lived life to widen, we risk losing a generation: resentful, excluded, unmoored. This is not only a threat to political stability; it undermines the very fabric of social cohesion and our ability to imagine community over fragmentation.
But if we act, and not merely with words, the gains are immense:
A resurgence of trust among neighbours of all cultures and races, and between people and institutions
New livelihoods rooted in care and place, sustainable rather than extractive industries
Renewed cultural life: stories, spiritualities, and land rituals restored
A democracy centred not in capitals or legislatures, but in homes, fields and watersheds
Hope, not a sentiment, but the oxygen of action. When people see real openings, they begin to believe again. Belief invites action
An Invitation
As an Elder, this is what I commit to. It is an invitation to all South Africans: white and black, indigenous and migrant; youth and elders; workers, farmers, church leaders, artists and engineers. Let us test new ways of organising, of treating land as more than a commodity, of creating livelihoods and restoring dignity. Let us leave behind the ideologies that divide rather than heal. Let us build movements from the ground up, not to capture power for its own sake, but to cultivate power that serves life and deepens social cohesion. I am an Elder and grandfather, and I extend my hand of friendship and collaboration to all who share a love of our country and people.
Let us Organise Tomorrow, Today.