By the time the next issue of this newspaper hits the streets our second general election will be over, Thabo Mbeki will be president-elect (as opposed to designate), the African National Congress will be the ruling party (probably with a two-thirds majority, as well as with KwaZulu-Natal) and many of our readers will no doubt be wondering as they yawn: “What on Earth was that all about?”
It is a question which – no matter how shrouded it is in yawns – needs be asked and answered. How will political science classes, X years down the track, look back on the general election of 1999; of what significance is this event to the second millennium and the brave new society which is South Africa?
The answer, we would hope, will be that 1999 was the election which brought home to South Africa how integral a real opposition is to the concept of democracy. Just as our courts cannot operate properly if either the prosecution or the defence is not present, so democracy – which relies on a similar adversarial approach – is not democracy unless government is effectively challenged in Parliament. Unless, that is, the government of the day faces the prospect of losing power if it fails to perform.
We do not mean to be completely dismissive of those who have thrown themselves in the path of the ANC juggernaut on the hustings this time around.
There is a something fundamentally admirable about the rough simplicity of Louis Luyt, which no doubt reflects his early success in the fertiliser business.
There is doubtless a place in society for a vivisection lobby, though Reverend Stanley Magoba’s proposal that it prey on humanity suggests a fatal misapprehension as to the composition of the electorate.
Bantu Holomisa and Roelf Meyer have been endearing as the “Odd Couple”. Even Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the one-time agent of military intelligence, is to be applauded for facing up to his victims in such a public fashion, although as with a penitent thief we would prefer him to have disappeared rather than rise from his knees to begin proselytising at us.
But it is Tony Leon’s Democratic Party (perversely, in view of its likely triumph in at last consigning the Nats to the rubbish bin of history) which disappoints us most, for its reliance, however subliminally, on a campaign which effectively exploited the racial divisions of the past.
While we nurse some admiration for Leon – the man who has brought the adder’s strike to the somnambulist world of South African liberalism – it is arguable that even the Nats themselves tried more genuinely than the DP to distance themselves from the role as champions of white privilege. If that is the role they want then let them have it – there is room for representatives of all minority interests, even the pith-hatted brigade, in our democracy.
But let no one delude themselves that theirs is the route to effective opposition.
We quoted Mbeki in an editorial three weeks ago as arguing that the ANC is not a party as such, but still a liberation movement. It is only when the country has been “transformed” that “the ANC will begin to identify itself in terms of different schools of political thought”.
The ANC “must resist the liberal concept of `less government’, which, while being presented as a philosophical approach towards the state in general, is in fact aimed specifically at the weakening of the democratic state. The purpose of this offensive is precisely to deny the people the possibility to use the collective strength and means concentrated in the democratic state to bring about the transformation of society.”
The argument is a powerful one, but fundamentally misguided, because as long as the ANC appeals to the collective loyalty forged in the heat of the struggle against apartheid, there will be no room for real opposition outside the old – largely racial – divides of the past. And what we have, in the absence of real opposition, is democracy postponed.
The danger of the ANC’s insistence on maintaining its identity as a broad church is one we have articulated on many occasions in the past; that it will begin to mistake the ANC for the state, internal rules and “discipline” for the Constitution – that the time taken “to bring about the transformation of society” will be time enough to become accustomed to the sacrifice of democracy on the altar of political expediency.
The majority of South Africans looked to the ANC to liberate it from minority rule. The ANC still contains the best, the brightest and the bravest in the land. We look to those within its ranks to lead us now out of the politics of the liberation era and into a true democracy.