Howard Barrell:OVER A BARREL
I see I am not alone in considering democracy an inconvenience. The president of the African National Congress, Thabo Mbeki, and a few of his allies at the top of the organisation find it so, too.
For there they are concluding that the good members of the ANC in the Free State, Gauteng and Mpumalanga – in all nine provinces, in fact – are much too stupid to choose suitable candidates to be provincial premiers. For their part, ordinary ANC members evidently agree with this judgment. Some time ago, you will remember, they obligingly surrendered to Mbeki the right to decide who their premier candidates should be.
So, farewell then, Mathews Phosa in Mpumalanga, Mathole Motshekga in Gauteng and very nearly Ebrahim Rasool in the Western Cape.
Hello to Ndaweni James Mahlangu (remember him?), one-time bantustan minister, in place of Phosa. Greetings to Mbhazima (once plain Sam) Shilowa, outgoing general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, replacing Motshekga. And a special welcome to Winkie Direko (thank you, thank you, settle down now, please), lesser-spotted member of the National Council of Provinces, to replace Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, who was herself parachuted in as Free State premier in place of Patrick “Terror” Lekota in 1996.
We can be sure that these three individuals (if that is the right word) will know from the outset, when they become premiers of their respective provinces after the election on June 2, that their first responsibility is to the president of their party. It will certainly not be to the voters in their provinces or to local ANC members.
We can be confident that the six other ANC premier candidates have got the message too. ANC members and the electorate may propose, but Mbeki disposes.
The ANC, of course, can set up whatever internal constitutional arrangements it wishes to. If ANC members choose to transfer to their president the power to appoint other levels of party leadership, including provincial premiers, they are free to do so. It is the kind of good sense I, too, would require of my members if I were president of the ANC. For I know I have more confidence in myself and my choices than I could have in them and theirs – even if they were the people who had initially had the good sense to elect me party president.
What we are dealing with here is a later variant of democratic centralism. You will remember, back in the old days, that this doctrine of organisation allowed both free political discussion and free elections within the party until decisions had been taken; thereupon, strict hierarchical discipline applied, and no dissent was allowed.
Our forebears, however, found all the debate a little tiresome. Accordingly, they refined the doctrine. They got rid of debate and elections, and settled for autocratic control alone.
This approach was to prove much more effective. When in power, it had additional advantages in view of the special difficulties we then confronted.
The state Constitution we were obliged to accept had all sorts of liberal democratic provisions. These laid down a set of standards for decisions. These standards made it possible for views opposed to our own to triumph. There were basically three ways in which this could occur: because these standards favoured our opponents; because our opponents applied them; or because one of our people lost his or her head and applied these standards in favour of our opponents. Not unnaturally, we found any of those outcomes difficult to accept.
Wouldn’t you if you were not only in power but also plainly right?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favour of liberal democracy. I, too, am a liberal democrat – some say of a special type. I’m willing to be liberal and democratic with whomever yields liberally in the face of the trust democratically reposed in me to take whatever decisions are necessary.
But you can see: we had a problem in relation to the state. It required us to be a little more clever than usual. But we were up to it. The solution lay in our party’s tradition of democratic centralism. Party discipline was the key. If we could get people to consider themselves subject to strict party discipline while serving in the state structure, we would pull it off. But how?
It turned out to be relatively simple in the end. We said state service was just another way of serving the party and of achieving its mandate to transform our society. For a party member, therefore, serving in the state structure was really just another form of party work. From this it followed that the party could instruct party members to serve in the state structure and where they should do so. It also stood to reason that, while there, the party member should do his or her state job in line with party edicts. And it followed that the party could recall a member from state structures at any time – either because the party wanted to redeploy him or her elsewhere, or perhaps because the member was not following party injunctions.
To carry this out – and also to avoid the inconveniences I had experienced earlier when my nominees were not elected at party conferences – I got the party to agree to let me set up a “deployment committee”. Of course it had a majority of my people on it, and its function was really only to advise me. But the term “deployment committee” gave a certain ring to the grubby job of shuffling the pack. People who might have been expected to know better even proudly told their friends they were waiting to be “redeployed”. For a while at any rate, you could send them singing into almost any shithole as long as they could brag that they had been “deployed” there.
What the hell, as the Frenchman said, democracy is only the name we give to the people each time we need them.