Steven Friedman
Worm’s eye view
Excited at the prospect of another session of Parliament? Me neither. The speaker and parliamentary media were last Friday predicting an important, lively session. They would, wouldn’t they? That is, after all, their job. The rest of us will be forgiven for assuming that it is far more likely that this year in Parliament will be even more of a stylised ritual than last as politicians on both sides of the house play to a gallery well beyond the walls of the chamber. Before anyone gets the wrong impression, having a multi-party Parliament elected by everyone is better than not having it. At worst it is a platform for part of our national debate. And, in the hands of a committed maverick like Patricia de Lille, it can also be a platform for exposing that which might otherwise remain secret. But the claim that we are likely to see weighty deliberation on the nation’s business and vigorous oversight of ministerial actions is hard to credit. The governing party holds nearly two-thirds of the seats, more than four times that of the official opposition, even if we lump the Democratic Party and New National Party together. Its overwhelming majority gives it no incentive to pay much attention to the opposition. And, lest anything interesting happen in Parliament, the African National Congress leadership seems intent on imposing stricter discipline on its law-makers. The trend is to greater uniformity in ANC statements and actions.
Both factors suggest that the real decisions will not be made in parliamentary committees and debates.
Rather, they will be (and in many cases no doubt already have been) taken in small meetings in ministries, the Cabinet and the presidency. Parliament will largely offer a platform for ANC members to rubber stamp them, opposition MPs to rail against them without much hope of being heard.
Another effect of party discipline is to turn the National Council of Provinces into a waste of public money. The council was meant to be a chamber where provinces voted their provincial interests, not a party position. Had it become that, it would have become a platform for some of the more vibrant debate in our politics. In reality, it invariably votes on party lines, turning it into a duplicate of the National Assembly.
But aren’t many parliaments like this? Yes where one party dominates and maintains strong internal discipline, the result is much the same. That does not mean that we should be satisfied with second and third best.
More importantly, the way parliamentary politics works right now obscures many of our key divides. And this means that, on many issues, citizens are not represented. We know that there are differing views within the ANC on economic policy. We can guess, from the absence of many ANC MPs when the vote to legalise abortion was taken, that there are divisions on this issue too. And, from debate in constitutional negotiating forums, we know that the same can be said of the powers of traditional leadership. But when have we heard ANC MPs debating each other on these issues? And, given the current trend to greater party discipline, how much chance do we have of hearing it in future? To some this may seem absurdly idealistic. Since when do governing parties or any others allow their representatives to differ loudly in public? Well, quite often. In several African states Tanzania and Kenya spring immediately to mind the notion of the “rebel” MP who often does not follow the party line is well established. And their parties stay in power despite this. What, if anything, can be done? Two remedies suggest themselves. First, we need to revive the debate on our electoral system, which seems to have died because no one influential in politics has reason to breathe life into it. We can, for example, have a system in which parties are represented in Parliament proportional to their vote and some or all MPs are directly responsible to voters in a constituency.
That would not ensure that MPs would be close to voters: the constituencies would be too big to allow the sort of MP accessibility we find in some pure constituency systems. But it would mean that MPs were responsible to someone other than their party leaders. Even if that meant that elected legislators listened to bigwigs in their area rather than grassroots people we would have greater independence from MPs and, therefore, a greater chance that Parliament would deal with a wider spectrum of views. But that will not be enough in itself. We now know that a constituency system is no guarantee of representatives who are independent, still less in touch with local interests. Local government, which does have a ward system, is also the sphere of government in which voters have least trust and in which representatives are most often out of touch with voters.
Why? Because the control of party leadership is again at issue: parties have tended to see local nominations as a reward for loyalty, not for local support. Repeatedly, candidates with a record of local activism are passed over. The lesson is clear. Until party leaderships starting with the ANC’s relax their insistence on strict internal discipline, Parliament will be doomed to remain interesting chiefly to those who serve in and write about it, rather than those it is meant to represent. Nor is this a wild-eyed appeal for idealism: none of our parties, least of all the ANC, would lose if party discipline were relaxed. On the contrary, it and other parties would probably gain. Our parties are, in the main, reflections of people’s identities who they feel they are. This means that, on the issues which separate parties, members tend to think alike. There is no need for measures to ensure that representatives vote the party position on, say, affirmative action. So party leaderships need have no fear that MPs would ignore them on the “big picture” votes. It could well be in the interests of party leaderships to allow differences on other issues, such as those mentioned earlier, to surface in Parliament. The result may be heightened loyalty to the party by voters who are sure to find someone in it speaking for them. And more vigour in Parliament would also increase loyalty to the system, making the country easier to govern.
So we can have a Parliament whose opening would really excite us because we would feel that our representatives were about to thrash out the full range of issues and views in the society. But only if the ANC’s and other parties’ leaders recognise that a bit of independence and diversity within parties is a tonic, not a disease.