Openness in government has led to the rise of a new group of parliamentary lobbyists, reports Marion
The new South Africa has given birth to a new breed of opportunists. They lurk in the corridors of power with files under their arms, monitor the parliamentary timetable, sit diligently through long committee meetings, and take every opportunity to make new contacts. They are the new lobbyists and their agents, the parliamentary monitors, intent on catching the eyes and reaching the ears of decision-makers.
They represent a diverse group of organisations — the non-governmental sector, business, concerned citizens or groups who have taken certain issues to heart.
Full-time and part-time lobbyists are taking Parliament’s commitment to ”transparency” as far as they can. While most members of the public cannot afford to travel to Parliament to put their case, nor understand how to do it, the lobbyists are taking the floor at public hearings and engaging the politicians wherever possible.
All lobbyists and monitors interviewed agreed categorically that it is much easier to get into Parliament now than in the years of National Party rule, but many said they had encountered other
Local government lobbyist Ashleigh Westaway, from the Surplus People’s Project, said: ”There is a core of parliamentarians who are honestly trying to make Parliament more accessible, and there are many people who are ready to listen, but to get a hearing and to actually influence policy are two different things.”
Ultimately, it’s not what you know, but who you know that counts. Precisely for this reason, many NGO lobbyists are in a good position because they have networks of personal contacts, made in apartheid days, that stretch right into the heart of Parliament and the Cabinet.
For example, the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (Nadel) managed through lobbying ” well-placed contacts” in the president’s office to reopen nominations for judges in the Land Claims Court, after the short-list had been finalised. Nadel wanted at least one woman judge; the short-list had included only
It could be argued that the lobby worked because the issue was an important one, but would somebody like women’s activist Nina Romm have had the same success? Romm — a loner who stood on a women’s ticket for last year’s elections — says she has given up lobbying on women’s issues because she did it flat out for two-and- half years and has run out of money. ”Give me funds and I’ll lobby,” she said. Funds and lobbying, it seems, go hand in hand.
Bastienne Klein, the co-ordinator of the Black Sash Advice Office, says that foreign funders like lobbying and would be prepared to pay NGOs to get lobbying in full swing.
Klein also believes that it is very important to ”mobilise” around issues, to drive the point home. Lobbyists from all NGOs agree that the power of the lobby resides in the extent of the support that can be claimed. It is a numbers game.
A Nadel representative, Michelle Norton, says that mobilising support is a lobby tactic that has been taught to NGOs at Nadel workshops. She said that Nadel brought out an American civil rights lobbyist to South Africa to train members of NGOs to lobby effectively. They had discussed tactics such as the production of simple-to-read fact sheets, sit-ins and protest marches.
However, Norton said that Nadel preferred to call these activities ”legislative advocacy”.
”Many South Africans are uncomfortable with the idea of lobbying, but the visiting professor explained that it’s not necessarily an underhand process like we see in LA Law, exerting unfair influence or passing money under the table.”
The people with money to pass under the table are, of course, not in the NGO sector. They are more likely to be found in the business community. But even here, lobbying is taking on an air of respectability.
The South African Chamber of Business (Sacob) has a parliamentary information office run by a lobby veteran. Peter Duminy spent twenty years in the lobby business in Australia before coming to South Africa. He says he is not a lobbyist himself, rather a ”post office” for information, which he feeds out to the specialists. They are responsible for the lobbying.
”What I have learnt from my time in Australia is that you insult a politician if you approach him or her without specialist knowledge — politicians don’t want to meet public relations people, glad-handers. They want to get a point of view on a matter.”
Another office working quietly behind the scenes is that of the Chamber of Mines, headed by Johan Liebenberg. He employs six full-time public policy analysts who monitor all the committees and inform parliamentarians about the mining industry. Liebenberg is satisfied with the way Parliament is being run:
”We are looking at a transparent system where it is possible for people who represent interests outside of Parliament to have access to the process.”
The editor of Cosmopolitan and Femina, Jane Raphaely, has also thrown herself into lobbying in Parliament — on women’s issues, human rights, and child welfare. ”It is incumbent on editors of consumer magazines, if they care about their readers, to use contacts, influence and knowledge to lobby in Parliament,” she said.
And how does Parliament respond to all this? Alf Karim, the director of Parliament’s Public Education Department, has been brooding over plans to publicise Parliament for many months. These plans, he hopes, will make average South Africans feel more confident about coming forward to have their say on their own. But he has realised that the new, but still exclusive, Parliament does favour the rich, the resourced and the articulate, by virtue of its structure and the way it works. With that in mind, Karim has realised that Parliament will have to rely on the lobbyists and their organisations to get a sense of public opinion.
”The non-governmental sector is central to the survival of our democracy,” he says from the heart of Parliament, with a hint of irony. The irony is compounded by the fact that lobbyists are not elected, but are either appointed or are volunteers. Yet they are the ones giving substance to South Africa’s new democracy by articulating the link between the hundreds who have seats in Parliament and the millions who scratched anonymous crosses on the ballot papers of April 1994.