Howard Barrell
OVER A BARREL
Greater numbers have never guaranteed greater quality. Four hundred MPs are as likely to include 201 fools as they are a majority of sensible individuals.
Likewise, if we have a cabal of, say, 20 people making all our important national decisions, they are as likely as 400 MPs to be guided, on balance, by good sense.
So, what is there to choose between rule by the many and rule by the few? Should we conclude the worst if, as is evidently happening in South Africa now, a smallish group of people around President Thabo Mbeki is centralising power around itself and making ever more of the important decisions while the larger, legislative branch in Parliament is becoming increasingly residual?
My own inclination – like that of a few other people – is to say: Yes indeed, light the bonfires and prepare to return to the barricades – dictatorship will again soon be upon us.
The impulse is understandable. First, we have our past to contend with. Then, we tend to feel we have more immediate influence with 400 members of Parliament than we do with a president and his Cabinet.
MPs are, in a much more identifiable way than a president, part of the same confederacy of dunces as the rest of us. They live among us, whereas Mbeki and his inner group tend to be remote. Also, we (believe we) can more directly replace a party of MPs at an election, whereas the president is elected at one remove from us by Parliament.
Though our constitutional right to replace MPs may make us feel safer about them, it too, however, provides no guarantee that they will behave sensibly in office.
So, then, might there be something to say for greater centralisation – even the gentle smack of dictatorship – in South Africa today? Should we secretly hope that Mbeki turns himself into someone as effective as the democratic authoritarian Lee Kuan Yew, the man who, in 40 short years, led the people of Singapore from squalor to levels of prosperity that now rival those in the richest states in the world? Or into a Mahathir Mohamad, the feisty, dogmatic Malaysian leader who has led his country to similar vigour and well-being over the past two decades?
Neither man is a tyrant or self-seeker; he just does not believe others have anything approaching his grasp of the way forward for his country, nor as good an idea of what its destination should be. As a consequence, he sees little reason to listen to others. And most Singaporeans and Malaysians have evidently agreed with Lee’s and Mahathir’s views on their own virtue.
Both men – and the less savoury versions of them in East Asia who oversaw rapid industrialisation and economic growth in South Korea and Taiwan – believed that, if their countries were to reach those destinations on time, they could not afford to be fettered by the incessant debate.
They could not afford neither the humming and hah-ing that democracy can entail nor the deference to opposing views that it demands.
In their eyes, South Africa’s Constitution, with its earnest liberality and wordy hymns to freedom and equity, probably reads like a recipe for “democrazy” or anarchy, rather than workable democracy.
For, were Lee and Mahathir to look for the major threats to our country and its stability, they would almost certainly identify poverty and unemployment.
They would then rigorously interrogate themselves about how they could overcome these two problems.
And their time frame for doing so would most probably be set by the need to avoid a poverty-induced political explosion or the gradual unravelling of our legal and economic framework to the point where the state collapsed and the country descended into the kind of warlordism now evident in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They would almost certainly conclude that the solution for the country lay in going for high economic growth – the same conclusion they reached about their own countries. They would as certainly calculate that we needed annual growth of between 7% and 10% for the next 12 years to begin to make a serious inroad into our rate of unemployment. They would conclude that what we needed was jobs – many jobs, not yet good jobs.
And they would conclude that anyone who thought these outcomes could, or should, be achieved with simultaneous equity and without bruises should leave politics for religion, Disneyland or intensive psychotherapy.
What is more they would, in reality, succeed in achieving these objectives. They would use muscle, scorn and bureaucratic obstacles to frustrate their opposition – whether it mobilised from inside or outside their own parties.
They would make whatever changes they needed to make to laws and regulations to attract to the country those with the money and wherewithal to create jobs.
Just as important, they would do whatever was necessary to make it attractive for their own talented or rich citizens to remain in the country and invest their capital within its borders.
They would enforce a regime of social discipline among the population – letting it be known that all levels of society had social obligations and that, for example, the behaviour of the squatter camp was not acceptable in a new housing estate.
And violent and other predatory criminals would be given the kind of knocks by the criminal justice system that would cause many of their colleagues still at large to seek alternative employment.
Does one need a group of authoritarian democrats – even a dictator – to achieve these outcomes? Perhaps. Personally, like Winston Churchill, I tend to believe that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time”.
But I do wonder.