The value of loyalty and discipline in politics is greatly overstated. As much cruelty and idiocy have been organised in their name as in the service of probably any other attribute.
The camp commandant at the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp during World War II; the communist who raised no opposition to the murderous purges in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s; the member of the African National Congress security department who kept silent in the early 1980s about atrocities against those accused of spying for the enemy; apartheid’s principal assassin Eugene de Kock – all were loyalty and discipline incarnate.
The same is true of the great mass of MPs who, week in and week out, vote en bloc for or against pieces of legislation because their whips tell them to – or who fail to raise publicly the desperate concerns of voters because to do so may embarrass their party. Crime is one such issue for ANC MPs.
The problem with loyalty and discipline is this: leaders usually decide what constitutes loyal and disciplined behaviour; leaders often control the system of rewards and punishments for conduct; and leaders invariably determine what purpose the loyal and disciplined should serve. Hence loyalty and discipline can easily become slogans for use by authoritarians to pursue their own purposes – and be of little use to anyone else, let alone to facilitating effective government.
This problem is one reason why people who draw up democratic constitutions are usually careful to limit the sanctions a leader can use to enforce unity around his purposes. Otherwise what a leader may call loyalty and discipline can stymie free debate and democratic law-making.
We have a major difficulty on this count with South Africa’s Constitution. The problem has to do with internal party loyalty and discipline. It is this:an MP who resigns from his or her own party, or is expelled from it, loses membership of Parliament and so the salary on which he or she probably depends.
That gives the party bosses a great deal more sway over their MPs, what they say and what they do, than is good for democracy. It stifles internal party dissent. It may imply that, in the making of laws, party management is a more important consideration than MPs’ individual intelligence or conscience.
The offending section of the Constitution (Section 13 of the Annexure A Amendments to Schedule 2 to the Previous Constitution) also makes it impossible for an MP to cross the floor of the National Assembly or National Council of Provinces to join another party – one of the hallmarks and great dramatic moments within a democracy.
This section turns loyalty and discipline into sjamboks with which party managers can herd MPs into their respective kraals at voting time, and keep them there. The political abattoir awaits any MP who escapes.
This anti-defection section of the Constitution has been challenged before – by Colin Eglin of the Democratic Party. And a cross-party committee of MPs, formed to consider the question, has put it on hold until after the general election due next year.
In abeyance or not, the issue remains an urgent one. It is made all the more urgent by the recent decision of leaders of the ANC that, for the coming election, the party’s national executive committee will have the right to reorder or change three out of every four names appearing on ANC election lists for provincial assemblies and for Parliament itself.
What the ANC leadership’s move means is that our largest party – likely to get another clear majority in next year’s election, perhaps even the kind of majority it needs to change the Constitution unilaterally – will have established extraordinarily tight control over its public representatives. ANC national and provincial legislators will be held in a sort of full Nelson.
This need not be the case. It is possible to have cohesion in political parties without having to exercise this kind of control. Parties in other electoral systems using proportional representation – Germany is an example – get along perfectly well without having to demand loyalty and discipline from their MPs under threat of losing their livelihood. A German MP, elected on a party list, may change parties or lose party membership without automatically losing his or her seat.
If you have to exercise the degree of control over public representatives that the ANC leadership is intent on doing, there are several possible explanations. One is that you do not believe your party has much internal cohesion. Another is that you do not believe there is much sense in others listening to opinions apart from your own. A third is that you would prefer to hold dissent captive and mute within rather than do battle with it out in the open. Etcetera.
It was the ANC which, in the Codesa negotiations, pushed hardest for the anti-defection clause. It knew back then that its personality was split – basically between liberal nationalists and communists. It knew also that there would be many forces – from individual ambition and the drive to enrichment to the drip-drip changes that come about when people accommodate themselves to peaceful change after a period of near war – which might pull it apart. And it wanted a mechanism which would, it said, ensure cohesion.
The same was true of the National Party. It, too, was being pulled apart by centrifugal forces at the time. It backed the ANC on the clause.
Forces undermining the ANC’s and the NP’s cohesion are more serious now than they were then. How you respond to these forces as leader of either party depends on whether you see them as creative or fearful. Do you see them as presaging an overdue end to the politics of “don’t listen to him because he was on the other side in the war”? Do you see them as the welcome onset of the politics of “that idea may serve our interests, too, so let’s hear her out”? Or do you take the conservative view and see them as a threat to be resisted at almost all costs?
What most scares some ANC leaders is the realistic prospect of, say, 50 ANC MPs breaking away and being allowed constitutionally to retain their seats and to sit as a separate Communist Party bloc in Parliament.
I find it difficult to see, however, how that could be a disservice to anybody. A breakaway group would free the remainder of the ANC of enervating dissent; the defectors would have to develop their own clear policy proposals; they would have to win over the electorate to their own distinctive views rather than hiding them under the ANC’s skirts. And this would go a long way towards breaking the sclerotic grip that old-style liberation movement politics has on South Africa.
We need to get rid of the anti-defection clause at the next opportunity. Our Constitution needs to reflect the assumption that MPs have been elected on their own merits, not their party’s alone. We must loosen the grip of party managers. We need the voice of dissidence and imagination centre stage in our politics. We need it making and breaking parties. Sometimes it’s the only source of fresh air when democracy looks like suffocating.