4.1: Internal party elections
In Part 2, I promised to respond to the argument that the ANC was, after all, legitimately elected by the majority of SA voters (and that my claim that we no longer live in a democracy was therefore inaccurate).
My response: our elections at government level (national, provincial, local) were legitimate, but at least for the past ten years, the ruling party’s weren’t.
Mavuso Msimang (left) with Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe and members of the Tambo family at a wreath-laying ceremony in 2012. Credit: GovernmentZA.
(Click to enlarge.)
Here’s how Mr. Mavuso Msimang, ANC stalwart with a glorious career in the ANC stretching back to the 1960’s,[1] put it in an interview with Radio 702’s breakfast show host, Xolani Gwala (April 5, 2017):
[…] You know, if the elections, South African national elections, that are managed by the IEC, were to be conducted by how the ANC conducts its own elections to… to elect its leadership… Oh my God, there would be a hue and cry. No citizen would accept that kind of election. So it’s amazing then that […] the ANC, leading government, or being the government, [is] quite comfortable that it should continue to be elected in a very, very suspect, fatally flawed system of electing people.
No wonder then that the media, academics and NGO’s regularly report on allegations of election fraud in ANC elections at every level of our political system[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] – and that political gangsterism is costing lives.[7]
If we don’t change the rules, there’s a good chance that any other ruling party or alliance will eventually fall victim to the same practices, as people jostle for government positions.
Elections in political parties should be regulated in the same way that our government elections are: if elections in political parties are not free and fair, the candidates who are fed into the various levels of our government can have no democratic legitimacy.
It will cost us a bit of money, but experience has taught us that it’s peanuts compared to what intruders into our democratic system cost us.[8]
4.2: Electoral representation
Our current system of electoral representation gives party leaders far too much power at the expense of the accountability of our representatives to voters.
Voters don’t get to express themselves on who their Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of the Provincial Legislature (MPLs) should be – it’s party leaders who decide.
This is what led to the failure of our MPs and MPLs to hold their executives to account. It’s another vital element in the success of the state capture project.
The electoral system we have today is almost a carbon copy of the system hastily put together for the interim Constitution of 1993, just so we could have democratic elections the following year. It was carried forward to the 1999 elections, but the final Constitution of 1996 required that an electoral system be introduced for elections beyond 1999.
Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, appointed by Pres. Mbeki in 2002 to head the Electoral Task Team, seen here in Accra, Ghana, in 1987. The report of the ETT was ignored. (Photo by Jannie Gagiano, from an obituary by Michael J. Savage.)
So in 2002, the cabinet under President Mbeki finally appointed an Electoral Task Team (ETT) “to draft legislation for an electoral system for the next national and provincial elections”[9] – which was by then only two years away.
Despite the severe time constraints, the ETT produced what is in my view an excellent report in January 2003 that, if implemented, would have gone a long way to solving the problem of accountability that makes our current system vulnerable to capture.
It did this by recommending a system of roughly 69 separate constituencies (respecting provincial and municipal boundaries), that would have brought the people’s representatives far closer to their home turf and would have opened the way for voters to eventually express themselves directly on their choice of candidates.
In other words, the ETT recommended a form of Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMPR), which takes advantage of the benefits of proportional representation, and adds to that the accountability of a first-past-the-post system.
And it’s tried and trusted: our local government elections already work like that.
If you want to jog your memory about MMPR, here’s a 2-minute video that explains the MMPR system in New Zealand rather well:
However, the report was never acted upon and the old system was simply carried forward, to this day.
The reason the ruling party was less than enthusiastic about the recommendations in the report is not hard to see: our current system may be bad for voters, but for party leaders it’s paradise, particularly for the ruling party: at that time the ANC still had enough “brand power” to ensure people voted for it out of a sense of loyalty, irrespective of its performance in government, and party leaders had the power to appoint the “people’s representatives”. Sweet!
The report also contained “minority recommendations” by members who wanted no change to the current system. I can’t resist quoting a sentence from those recommendations:
Nothing has been said on why the present system should not be retained. What are the evils that will befall our country if we do so?[10]
Now we know. And to escape from capture, we must have change. I’m not saying the recommendations of the ETT should be implemented indiscriminately now – it’s over 14 years since the report was completed and one should look at how conditions have changed since then.
All I’m saying is that the ETT report may be a good place to start looking for what kind of reforms we need to free ourselves from capture.
4.3: Insufficient checks on the power of the president
The vast powers granted to the president by the Constitution, particularly the untrammeled power to make appointments to key positions like those of the National Director of Public Prosecutions and the Commissioner of Police, is one of the pillars of the state capture project.
For a president suspected of serious crimes, this clearly leads to a travesty of justice. Obviously those key appointments should be subjected to some other form of scrutiny, apart from that of the president.
This is just one example of how the vast powers of the president is an impediment to accountability. When the time comes, all the powers of the president, as well as the way in which s/he is elected by secret ballot, should be thoroughly examined to determine how to prevent conditions favourable to state capture from recurring.
4.4: Business interests of state employees
The fracturing of the fault-lines between state and business, as evidenced by the large number of state employees who have parallel business careers,[11] became the crack into which the captors jammed their blood funnel. “Everybody does it” became the cloak under which our state captors sneaked in to steal our democracy.
The Public Service Regulations of 2016[12] goes some way towards addressing the problem by at least prohibiting state employees to do business with the state, but it does not go far enough – full-time state employees have no business running parallel private business entities.
Not only should this practice be prohibited, but an eye should be kept on the government careers of senior civil servants and public representatives who revolve the door between business and state. And enforcement should be draconian.
We’ve learned the hard way what the effects are of blurred lines between state and business.
4.5: Conclusion
Of course, much else can be done to improve our political system. Regulating lobbying activities to state bodies is one improvement that immediately comes to mind. However, the first step is just to get our democracy back. Together with political finance, these four changes should in my view do that, and get us into a new dispensation.
In the next part I look at what Parliamentary majorities are needed to make the changes that are necessary.
Footnotes
Click on the footnote number to go back to where you were.
[1] http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/mavuso-walter-msimang
[2] https://omny.fm/shows/the-breakfast-show-702/time-running-out-to-save-the-anc-stalwarts
[3] ANC national audit team see ghosts
[4] Rigged: Fake members boost Jacob Zuma
[5] Introduction: Understanding the ANC at sub-national level – Open UCT (long)
[6] Through the garage door, blindly choosing from the pre-selected
[7] The killing fields of KZN: Local government elections, violence and democracy in 2016
[8] #GuptaLeaks: Guptas and associates score R5.3bn in locomotives kickbacks – from just one deal.
[9] Report of The Electoral Task Team, 2003, p. 4
[10] Ibid p. 68
[11] A good, if somewhat dated, indication of the scope of the problem can be found in a bill submitted to Parliament by the Democratic Alliance in 2013 (Business Interests Of State Employees Bill). For your convenience, I’ve pasted the relevant section on this page.
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