Xolela Mangcu:CROSSFIRE
The political transformation of the past 10 years will no doubt go down in history as one of the most important events of the millennium – on par with the French, American, Indian, Chinese, and Russian revolutions. Some of our leading scholars have taken to talking about the “maturing” and “consolidation” of our democracy, and rightly so. But self-congratulation always has to be accompanied by a willingness to talk frankly about our shortcomings as well.
There is a foundational flaw in our democracy that goes back to the early days of the transition, but has become a defining characteristic of our political culture. While the political transition itself was the result of mass mobilisation in the townships and villages of this country, the negotiations process was, at times, a secretive affair whose outcome hinged on the bargaining skills of the leaders of the various political parties, mainly the African National Congress and the National Party.
Having delegated power upwards during the negotiations, we then invested in a number of political and institutional support systems consistent with the overall emphasis on elite decision making. The centralisation of authority in national leadership; the dominant role of political parties as containers of debate, discontent and disagreement; the party list system; the concomitant emphasis on what Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki would do for us; and the language of delivery are but a few manifestations of an increasingly top-down political system.
All these developments run the risk of producing a split national identity. On the one hand would be a group of political and economic elites who, by virtue of their proximate race/class distance from power, would become the real, active citizens. And on the other hand, a passive population that would be nothing more than “empirical objects of government policy, not citizens who participate in the sovereignty of the state”.
Promises of delivery would become nothing less than “the opiate of the masses” – the only language that the government could use to talk with its constituencies. In less than a decade we would have gone full circle from the mass clamour for democratic participation to the elite model of democracy normally associated with political snobs such as Edmund Burke and Joseph Schumpeter.
It will, of course, be argued that the negotiated transition was the only way we could have brought ourselves from the abyss of interminable racial violence. But that’s only half the answer. A full answer would have to suggest how we can build on the progress of the past to deepen democratic participation in the future. As Yale University political scientist Ian Shapiro argues: “The problem with negotiated transitions is not that the institutions are imposed from above, but rather that they are not imposed in a sufficiently thoroughgoing fashion.”
And so, for me, the most important question in the upcoming elections is not which party to vote for – since they all operate within the same elite model of democracy – but whether we can start talking about alternative models of democracy in this country. It seems to me that we need to go beyond the conception of democracy as merely the right to choose our leaders – which is a necessary but insufficient condition for democratic participation – to some kind of direct, participatory and communicative democracy.
As Steve Biko once put it: “In a government where democracy is allowed to work, one of the principles that are normally entrenched is a feedback system, a discussion between those who formulate policy and those who must perceive, accept or reject policy. In other words, there must be a system of education, political education, and this does not necessarily go with literacy.”
Or, as Es’kia Mphahlele more recently said: “We are wrong in thinking that because the government is democratically elected, therefore there is democracy. Democracy is about the relationship between the politicians and their constituencies, and the `African renaissance’ must therefore go to the heart of the people in making them think democratically.”
Participation is the cardinal principle of democracy – not only because of its intrinsic value, but also because it increases the political efficacy of citizens by giving them direct training in the policies and tools of governance.
Almost 200 years ago, John Stuart Mill suggested that this kind of democratic training is best obtainable at the local level, where citizens can make decisions about issues they can immediately relate to, and then generalise that knowledge to the broader, national political system.
The best example of this in this country is the black consciousness movement of the 1970s. Many of our current leaders, in the public, private and non-profit sectors, received their leadership training through the political education and development programmes of organisations such as the Black Community Programmes – even if some of them would now disavow black consciousness politics. But, even if people do not agree with the substance of black consciousness, we can at least go back to the veritable tradition of conscientisation that was the hallmark and signal achievement of that movement.
As the development economist Albert Hirshman has observed, the social energies that are aroused in the course of a social movement do not disappear when that movement does, but are kept in storage and become available to fuel later and sometimes different social movements.
Or, as Ashu Varshney puts it: “While futures are indeed created, they are not typically created on a clean slate. It is hard for nations to leave their pasts behind. The more pertinent issue is: how does a nation reconstruct its past? Which traditions should be revived, and which ones dropped? The ideological task is to retrieve that which is valuable, and to make this selective retrieval a political reality.”
If black consciousness contributed to our current crop of leaders, we should ask ourselves how we can contribute to the development of future leaders in this country. I doubt very much if such contributions will happen through the procedural view of democracy as showing up at the polls every five years.
A more long-term view would suggest a balance between the vertical politics of elite representation bequeathed to us by the negotiations process with a more horizontal politics of direct democracy that comes from deep within our own history.
Dr Xolela Mangcu is a senior analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies