Ken Owen
When I was a journalist I used to say: “Always predict elections – if you are wrong nobody will remember, and if you are right, you can remind them.”
But these days, I must confess, I am no longer close enough to daily politics to pretend that I can predict what, by the time you read this, might have happened in the elections. I make broad assumptions from what I read or hear, but I don’t really know.
So I want to look at the elections from a different perspective. Let’s start with this observation:
In South Africa today it takes just 2300 votes:
- to change the president and deputy president;
- to change the cabinet;
- to change the membership of parliament
- to replace a provincial premier, so weakening an already weak federal feature of the constitution
- to fire and replace the head of any government department, any chairman of a statutory commission, to shut down our equivalent of Scotland Yard or the FBI, to spring a notorious criminal from jail, or to condone or even reward criminal behaviour
- and, with a few changes of personnel and a bit of legal sleight-of-hand, to stop a prosecution despite solid evidence of crime.
All this has in fact happened since the Zuma faction of the ANC with its 2300 votes defeated the Mbeki faction of the ANC at the Polokwane party congress. The only word to describe what happened at Polokwane is the one I used at the time: it was a putsch. It gutted and made nonsense of our famed Constitution, and it gave us a democracy of a kind not generally known in the West.
It usurped the rights of the electorate, made parliament a rubber stamp for party apparatchiks selected in smoke-filled rooms, and it shifted policy-making out of both the executive branch of government and the legislature.
Power shifted decisively from the electorate to the party elite. As Mathews Phosa said, there is only one centre of power, and that is party HQ.
Worst of all, there is nothing to prevent another Polokwane in a year or two, with another radical shift of power, another change of government and policy, another round of purges. All it takes is 2300 or so “disciplined cadres”.
How did this come about?
Obviously, part of the reason is that the Constitution is fatally flawed because proportional representation (as Van Zyl Slabbert tried to warn us) empowers politicians at the expense of the people.
But Polokwane was something more than that: it was a deliberate, well organised and ruthlessly executed seizure of power that merely exploited the flaw in the Constitution.
You can blame Jacob Zuma and his fanatics, or you can blame the criminals and shabby people who rallied around him, from Winnie Mandela to Baleka Mbete, and Mo Shaik. Or you can blame Mbeki’s vengeful victims and enemies, like Tokyo Sexwale or Mathews Phoza.
But I can’t help thinking that this is the start of “the second stage of revolution” which has been planned for so long to install a “vanguard party” at the centre of the system.
Our vaunted democracy is in the process of being gutted. However we vote, the party hierarchy will decide who governs and for how long, what policies will prevail, and who our foreign friends may be. Whatever the issue, the party will decide.
In that sense, this has been a virtual election, not much different from Soviet elections that were regularly held under Stalin.
People tend to forget that the Soviet constitution was much admired. It just didn’t apply to the nomenklatura.
We are in much the same position:
The nomenklatura are above the law. It is straight out of Soviet Moscow or, if you prefer, from Animal Farm.
The nomenklatura are entrenching themselves. You can see it happening as they become steadily more corrupt, and more contemptuous of public opinion.
The scum floats to the top.
To call us either a democracy or a Rechtsstaat is fanciful and dishonest. It’s the latest form of SA denialism.
Nor can we look to any “alternative government” to change proportional representation; each party’s elite will find reason to cling to the system in order to entrench the privilege of its own apparatchiks.
Happily, not all is lost. The Constitution still commands great public respect, so that government and party feel obliged to observe its forms even while defying its spirit.
The courts remain, in the main, defiantly independent and the press functions in its own haphazard and incompetent way.
Most important for the moment is that the IEC still functions, and it has been possible, if not altogether likely, for the electorate to begin to remedy the situation – provided they did so in this election, or in the next.
Let me try to sketch the situation:
The ANC is in substantial disarray, riven by factionalism, with rival factions tapping each other’s phones, forging signatures on phoney documents, and hunting down dissidents. It uses patronage, bribery, intimidation, and occasionally assassination. Character assassination is routine. Both sides interfere in the objective functioning of the legal system.
But political parties have immense inertia, and for the time being the ANC remains overwhelmingly the most powerful party.
Can it be prevented from getting a two-thirds majority that would enable it to gut the Constitution? Can it, perhaps, be held to less than an absolute majority in this election, or the next?
Cope has raised the hope that this just might happen.
Of course, the DA is the official opposition, but I see no prospect that it can become an alternative government. The decision by Tony Leon and Ryan Coetzee to rebuild the party on a power base of whites was catastrophic.
The party acquired its present status by exploiting the racial fears of whites to cannibalise the National Party, and it is now exploiting the racial fears of coloured people who think they are “not black enough” to cannibalise the Independent Democrats.
That strategy is doomed, and not only because it has left the DA with a taint of racism. It is doomed because its support base is emigrating and dying off. The 2007 mini-census showed that we had fewer 20-year-old white males than 60-year-olds.
Above the age of 60, whites make up 20% of the population; under the age of 10, they are less than 5%. In ten years’ time there will be no white power base.
Demographic trends for coloured and Indian populations are much the same, with a small time lag.
In short, the DA has no future unless it can outbid Cope for dissident black votes. And given its race-obsessed white and coloured support base, it has no hope of doing that.
That leaves Cope, which is finding that to launch and establish a new party is the work of many years. If they manage to get 10% of the vote this time, I’ll view it as a magnificent triumph. If they get one MP, as the Progs once did, I’ll see it as success.
So where does hope lie?
It lies in the character of proportional representation systems. They naturally fragment political parties. They foster palace politics. They encourage a proliferation of minority parties.
And in the end, they compel politicians to form shifting, unstable coalitions. In short, they compel compromise.
Helen Zille has shown a talent for this kind of politics, and if she can restrain her party – and herself – from treating other opposition groups as mortal enemies, she might begin a process of coalition formation. But I notice that lately she has been venomous towards both De Lille and Cope, so I doubt that she has a clear coalition strategy in mind.
The basic fact is this: to check the ANC we need Cope and the DA, and Inkatha and Bantu Holomisa, and the PAC and ACDP, and anybody else we can find. Instead of trying to eliminate and cannibalise small parties, we should make space for them and encourage them. In this diverse society, the essential political skill is the art of compromise.
The challenge is not to get people to support the main parties as “an alternative government” but simply to get them to the polls – to vote against taxes, or for tribal law, for sharia if you must, for local grievances, for whatever reason. To contain the politicians, the people must vote against them.
There lies the hope.
If it is not realised, then we face a new freedom struggle. Indeed, it may be starting already: I discern some emergent similarities to the period in the fifties when Chief Justice Centlivres and the Black Sash and a few liberals began to demonstrate in support of the Constitution.
We know what a long road lies beyond that point.
