UCT SRC Elections: A farce

It’s that time of year… The brightly coloured A3 posters have been pinned to every possible surface, the overly chipper candidates are striding around campus like the politicians they’re hoping to emulate. Yes, its UCT SRC Election time! Now, excuse me if I sound a bit pedantic but I cannot understand the point of it all.

80-90% of the Student Body have never, and probably will never, meet these bright-eyed candidates. How on earth can we as the “little fish” in this UCT-Shaped-Pond hope to elect the best people for the job?

The answer is we can’t, and as a result the University gets a group of people who are elected primarily based on how good their photograph is! These people go on to supposedly take the students’ concerns to the powers-that-be. How do they figure out what our concerns are?

The truth is that I don’t really care: I just go about my day to day life at UCT and generally forget that we even have an SRC. What I do care about are these stupid posters that are covering our normally beautiful campus. There is absolutely no way that their presence is going to make me vote (or not vote) for a particular candidate… especially because I’m faced with a wall of 2 of these photos!