Firoz Cachalia
A common theme runs through last week’s editorial and Howard Barrell’s column in the Mail & Guardian. Under Thabo Mbeki’s leadership, they assert, the African National Congress is centralising power in ways which undermine democracy and the Constitution. Both are critical of the manner in which the ANC has appointed candidate premiers, and the way the ANC as the governing party relates to the state.
They raise important questions about the role of political parties in a democracy, and about the nature and exercise of power in a constitutional democracy. Unfortunately, their highly subjective reflections are grounded neither empirically nor through comparative analysis. This results in crude political caricatures, and highly generalised claims.
It should immediately be apparent that both Phillip van Niekerk and Barrell fail to distinguish processes for selecting the leadership of a political party from appointments to public office. They raise at best a question of intra-party democracy rather than democracy in general. Indeed, inherent in the conflation of these different questions is the confusion of state and party they worry so much about. It is the electorate, not the party membership, which confers a temporary mandate on a party to govern, and it is to Parliament and the electorate that premiers and cabinets are constitutionally accountable.
The ANC, by contrast with its competitors, is both a mass membership party and, for the moment, a governing party. This has a defining impact on its internal procedures for making various kinds of decisions. Its leadership is elected at all levels in a direct ballot of individual members on a one person, one vote basis. This continues to be the case after the national executive committee assumed responsibility, pursuant to a decision of the national conference, constituted on a democratic basis, to uncouple the process of electing the chairperson of the party in provinces and the process of selecting the party’s candidate premier.
Individual members also continue to play a critical role in the selection of candidates. They too are elected by a direct ballot of individual members, subject to the right of the national executive committee to lay down guidelines and to order our candidate list above the 20% threshold. The guidelines are aimed at ensuring gender representivity, non- racialism and good governance by requiring our members to take account of these considerations in selecting candidates and from whom appointments to public office will be made, if the party is successful at the polls.
The decision to separate the position of provincial chairperson from the provincial premiership will, I believe, contribute to good governance, by reducing internal conflicts within the provincial leadership of the governing party, which have had such a negative impact on provincial governance, and by subjecting the selection of candidate premiers to broader considerations than ephemeral popularity.
The ANC is thus evolving the kind of “internal constitutionalism” which creates different procedures for different kinds of decisions. The Van Niekerk/Barrell thesis, while embracing a rather simplistic conception of constitutionalism at the level of government (as a set of constraints on an elected government), suggest that any limit imposed on simple voting procedures within the ANC, regardless of the kind of decision that is an issue, amounts to an erosion of democracy, not merely within the party but at the level of society.
Curiously, while much of the Van Niekerk/ Barrell thesis is based on complaints about the ANC’s internal procedures, the internal decision-making processes of other political parties in South Africa and other democracies escape their scrutiny. Such an inquiry and some basic familiarity with the comparative literature on the subject show that the ANC compares favourably with other political parties in long- established democracies.
But first, a word about our South African competitors. Before 1994 the National Party underwent a process of “governmentalisation” (absorption into government structures) and functioned like other “conservative” parties. Typically, in such parties, power is formally concentrated in the hands of the leader and the parliamentary party. The parliamentary party chooses the leader who makes key appointments, both to the government’s front bench team, as well as top officials in the party organisation. The Democratic Party is also largely a parliamentary party, with a small cadre outside Parliament, oriented primarily to electoral success.
When such “parliamentary parties” are in government, there is a more or less complete fusion of government and party. When “mass membership” parties are in office, on the other hand, the power of government ministers and the members of the governing party caucus are constrained by the party’s membership and its alliance partners outside Parliament. This ensures that power is distributed beyond the confines of Parliament and is not concentrated in the person of the parliamentary leader/ premier/president.
Individual mass membership is the defining characteristic of modern political parties. Some established political parties in mature democracies have only recently begun involving their members in decisions that were previously the preserve of the parliamentary leadership. The British Labour Party, for instance, allowed the membership a direct vote in leadership elections only in 1981.
The ANC is thus a modern party which in many respects is ahead of its time. We have, of course, not yet established an “optimal” division of responsibilities, in the making of various kinds of decisions between the party’s executive bodies and its membership structures. This is perhaps a question that is never finally resolved. There are costs and benefits to every kind of procedure for making decisions about candidate premiers, including the present one.
All political parties are subject to “the iron law of oligarchy”, as the Italian political philosopher Michell once famously observed. In the ANC at least this tendency is subject to the countervailing pressures of the membership. I am among those who see an important role for both leadership and membership in our internal decision-making processes.
The decisions made by the ANC with respect to the selection of candidates and nomination of candidate premiers have nothing to do with the philosophy of “democratic centralism” or the supposed psychological proclivities (which have recently spawned an army of experts) of the ANC’s president. On the contrary, the ANC has been dealing with universal questions which confront all parliamentary parties, and in particular governing parties in democratic societies. A more informed and thoughtful approach on the part of the M&G to these important issues would have made for interest reading.
Firoz Cachalia is the leader of the house in the Gauteng legislature