Three of SA’s opposition parties are calling for a change in the current system of parliamentary representation, reports Howard Barrell
Opposition parties are clamouring for changes to South Africa’s election laws to make MPs more directly accountable to voters.
The leaders of the Democratic Party, New National Party and United Democratic Movement are among those calling for aspects of a constituency system to be introduced into the current, purely proportional system of parliamentary representation.
Tony Leon of the DP is arguing that the current system promotes a Parliament of ”pliant MPs, the majority of whom do little more than fill quorums and provide the government with a voting majority”.
Marthinus van Schalkwyk of the NNP says people are becoming estranged from their MPs and public representatives, who are merely names on lists, rather than identifiable members of their communities. The introduction of some aspects of constituency-based elections is necessary to correct this, he says.
”There is a growing demand by the people to know who their representative is who must assist them when they need assistance,” Van Schalkwyk wrote in a letter to National Assembly Speaker Frene Ginwala last week, in which he asked her to mandate Parliament’s constitutional review committee to consider changes to South African electoral practice since 1994.
The UDM’s Bantu Holomisa echoes Leon’s and Van Schalkwyk’s criticisms of the current system, adding there should be a drastic reduction in the number of MPs, and that the resultant savings should be spent on providing each MP with a professional, paid researcher.
The Constitution says the number of MPs each party has in the 400-seat National Assembly should be proportional to the number of votes it has received. But the Constitution does not dictate how precisely that proportionality should be achieved. Opposition parties are now coming forward with suggestions on how best to construct that proportionality.
Similar suggestions are also under debate in some circles of the African National Congress. The ruling party is understood to be reluctant to rush into any changes to the current system. ”We will want to examine any proposals very, very carefully,” an ANC official told the Mail & Guardian.
At a debate hosted jointly by the M&G and the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) in Cape Town on Thursday, Leon proposed reducing the total number of National Assembly seats from 400 to 300 and introducing a multi-member constituency system to elect 240 of these 300 seats.
Leon’s system would entail dividing the country into 80 constituencies, each having, say, three MPs. If a party won, say, 75% of the votes in one of these constituencies, it might win all three of that constituency’s seats; otherwise, the three seats might be shared between two or three parties. This would make for a more proportionally accurate spread of parties among the 240 constituency-based MPs than under a single-member constituency system – such as that operated among white voters under the old apartheid system.
Leon suggested that the remaining 60 seats in the National Assembly be elected from closed party lists. These seats could then be awarded to parties to top up the number of constituency seats they had won in such a way that the total number of seats each party eventually controlled in the Assembly would be directly proportional to the total votes cast for it.
Leon said his party too planned to submit its proposals to the review committee.
Van Schalkwyk said the NNP had not yet finalised its suggestions, but he thought the DPs proposal for multi-member constituencies might confuse a high number of the country’s many illiterate voters. He favoured most MPs being elected in single- member constituencies, with a top-up from party lists to ensure overall proportionality.
Stephen Twigg, the young British Labour Party MP who caused a sensation at the last United Kingdom election when he defeated Conservative Defence Secretary Michael Portillo in what had been a safe Conservative seat, told the M&G/Idasa meeting Britain was still some way from replacing its first-past-the-post, single- constituency system with a variant of proportional representation which had constituency aspects to it. The change, proposed by a commission set up by Prime Minister Tony Blair under the distinguished former parliamentarian Roy Jenkins, was being ”fiercely opposed by the forces of conservatism both in the governing Labour Party and the ‘capital C’ Conservatives”.