Robert Mattes a second look South Africans could be forgiven if they have become a little arrogant about their new democracy. After all, who could blame them? They negotiated a “miracle” transition, steering from probable terrible conflict to non- racial peace in a few short years. They engineered a state-of-the-art Constitution replete with innovations like the National Council of Provinces, a wide range of classic political rights, and an array of socio-economic rights backed up by a bevy of independent watchdog agencies and commissions and a strong Constitutional Court.
Even Freedom House, the relatively conservative and critical international watchdog of democracy and civil liberties, defines South Africa as “free” and comes close to giving it its highest ratings for its protection of a full range of political freedoms and civil rights. Larry Diamond, the doyen of international democracy analysts, has gone so far as to call South Africa a “liberal democracy”. But a Constitution, relatively well-run elections and stable elected representative institutions do not a complete democracy make. As political scientist Richard Rose has recently argued, if political institutions are the “hardware” of a democratic system, what people think about democracy and those institutions constitute the “software” of that system. And as all systems designers know, software is just as important as hardware. The recently completed South African segment of the Southern African Democracy Barometer, a seven-country survey of citizen attitudes toward democracy coordinated by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, demonstrates that while South Africa’s shiny new political hardware may be in place, the software, the “stuff” of the democratic polity, is not. It reveals significant deficiencies in citizenship in South Africa and its most damning evidence comes not from some unrealistic comparison with Swedes or Britons, but with other Southern Africans. It is instructive to focus on three buzzwords of the Constitution that it often uses to describe the kind of democracy to which it commits South Africa: representative, participatory and inclusive. Representative? As of July/ August 2000, only minorities of citizens feel that their elected representatives are interested in what they think or want. Just 48% of black South Africans think Parliament – what should be the sine qua non of democratic representation – is interested in what they think. This figure was as high as 73% just two years ago. Only 43% think that their provincial governments are interested in their opinions and an even smaller 32% for local government councils. Inclusive? Survey trends over the past two years reveal a rapidly increasing sense among Indian, coloured and white South Africans that they are being left out of the new political dispensation. Steve Friedman made a telling point on these pages three months ago about the monopoly of the lobbying arena by white-oriented interest groups. Yet at the grassroots level, the situation is quite different. Just 17% of ordinary rank-and-file whites think Parliament is interested in them and an astonishingly low 6% of Indians. Only one-quarter (26%) of coloured respondents think their provincial government represents their interests, as do just 15% of whites and 8% of Indians.
Participatory? While ordinary South Africans have an exceptionally strong record of participation in various kinds of protest – undoubtedly stemming mainly from before 1994 – they are the least likely in the region to take part in various forms of more normal political participation. For example, 30% of South Africans say they have participated with others to address some important community or national problem. This is far less, however, than the 42% of Malawians who have done this, 51% of Namibians, or 55% of Zimbabweans. Twice as many Zimbabweans have written a letter to a newspaper as have South Africans. Perhaps the most telling finding comes in the extremely low rates at which South Africans make contact with government leaders or with other influential community leaders to give them their view or opinion about something. Just 6% said they had contacted a government or party official in the past year to give them their view. In contrast, 22% of Zambians had done this, 29% of Zimbabweans and 30% of Namibians. Just 3% of South Africans took the trouble over the past twelve months to contact a local councillor about some matter (compared to 11% in Lesotho, 13% of Zambians, 20% of Namibians and 27% in Zimbabwe). Just 0,2% – or four of the 2E200 respondents in the sample – said they had made contact with a member of Parliament in the past year. That this is not such an impossible task, especially if you have a member of Parliament, is revealed by the 7% who did so in Zimbabwe and Zambia. Somewhere in South Africa’s recent past of elite negotiations, constitutional design and institutional innovation, the people have been left behind. This process started from an unfortunate base, proceeding as it did from the dark days of apartheid, which had ingrained a political passivity among all except the small minority who actively became involved in the liberation struggle. Yet the long period of elite negotiations seems to have further inculcated a sense of politics as theatre, rather than participation. All of this has been further entrenched by the country’s pure public relations electoral system that has had the effect of delinking constituents from their national and provincial legislatures. Taken together, South Africa might be heading toward what Goran Hyden has described elsewhere in Africa as the “suspended state”, disconnected from those it presumes to lead. What can be done to halt the slide? At the risk of sounding like an Alcoholics Anonymous counsellor, the first step is simply to acknowledge the problem. South Africans are not the interested, informed, participant creature of politics, glamorised by nostaligic memories of the heady days of the United Democractic Front. Once that is done, civil society could do well to launch a national dialogue to refocus attention on the interactive link between the citizen and elected representatives – particularly in legislative bodies. It would proceed on two broad fronts. The first would point to renewed emphasis on civic education to supply the resources that equip people to become more fully involved in politics. Yet sheer exposure to political information is not the answer, otherwise one would be hard pressed to explain the widespread support for democracy and rates of participation among Malawi’s largely poor, rural population. In fact, South Africans already have the highest levels of access to political information through various forms of news media in the region. As importantly, South Africa’s constitutional engineers and institutional innovators need to turn their well-honed talents to reinvigorating or reforming South Africa’s representative institutions in order to give people greater incentive to become involved in the political process. How can South Africa’s legislative bodies be freed from the shackles of tight party discipline to allow them to become truly deliberative bodies, thus allowing legislators and councillors the ability to truly represent constituent views, and thus give constituents reasons to express those views?
Robert Mattes is the manager of public opinion surveys at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa