South Africa has taken praiseworthy steps to ensure that business monopolies do not abuse their dominant position. Two events in Parliament this week the tabling of floor-crossing legislation and Winnie Mandela’s farcical ethics hearing underscore the danger of the same kind of abuse on the political front.
President Thabo Mbeki and other African National Congress leaders have defended the proposed floor-crossing law by arguing that all parties want it and that it will deracialise politics in the Western Cape. There is, indeed, cross-party acceptance for the principle of floor-crossing. But the present initiative, to quote acting KwaZulu-Natal premier Nyanga Ngubane, is widely seen as “accommodating specific political needs arising at a specific time between two specific political parties pursuing a specific political agenda in one specific province”. The ANC’s short-term aim is to disrupt the Democratic Alliance and take the helm in one of the only two provinces beyond its grasp. In the longer term the sweeping discretion the law would give Mbeki to decide when public representatives may defect can be trotted out whenever it suits the ANC. Mbeki is the head of state but he is also ANC head. It is hard to believe that he would sanction floor-crossing in a context where his party would suffer.
Given that the law in its current form and context is widely seen as a self-serving ploy and lacks multiparty acceptance, it is even more worrying that the Constitution is to be changed to accommodate it. Zimbabwe graphically illustrates how respect for constitutional protections can be undermined by cavalier and partisan tinkering. Our Constitution should be changed only after long and serious deliberation aimed at building the widest possible consensus however inconvenient that may be for certain political groupings.
There is another reason why a multiparty process perhaps even another constitutional Codesa is called for. What is really at issue is the whole electoral system, and the extent to which it should be based on the existing principle of proportional representation (PR) and party lists. A straight PR system with anti-defection clauses gives party chiefs inordinate powers of patronage, and should be changed. But floor-crossing only makes complete sense where at least some public representatives are directly elected, and command a support base independent of their party.
The perception that the ANC bends the rules to suit itself has been reinforced by its cynical handling of ethical matters in Parliament. The party ducked the issue of Justice Minister Penuell Maduna’s unparliamentary attack on the auditor general. The ANC majority in the ethics committee sidestepped the question of whether former ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni failed to declare a gift, a requirement of Parliament’s code of conduct for MPs. And this week an ethics committee inquiry into Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s apparently undeclared assets was abandoned for lack of a quorum after ANC members stayed away in droves.
The code of conduct is frequently held out as evidence of the government’s commitment to rooting out corruption. As in other areas, the rules and formal instruments are there, but the political will is lacking. If rules are not applied to everyone, without regard to party affiliation, they may as well not exist.
Knee-jerk Mother Grundys
What is it about nudity and sex that offend us so? In the past few weeks several readers have written to this newspaper to complain about the use, firstly, of the word fuck, and, more recently, of the publication of a sexually explicit photograph.
In the first instance, “fuck off” was used in the sense of “get lost” as advice to Hansie Cronje. “Go to hell” might have been more appropriate considering his revelations about his relationship with Satan and it might have been more offensive.
The still from the film Intimacy upset some because their children might get to see two consenting adults engaged in non-violent sex. Considering there were no penises, pubic hair or (female) nipples in sight, the picture was no more explicit than what can be seen on prime-time television on any South African channel and considerably less explicit than what can be viewed daily on the Big Brother shower hour. Are our children more likely to be corrupted if they see a photograph in a publication than if they see the same image on TV?
And why is the protection of our children always the reason cited? A prudish society is no guarantee of children’s rights: just ask any poor child born in Victorian England.
Another outcry broke out later this week about the publication of images of dead bodies (from a local murder and the war in Afghanistan). The outrage was not against the perpetrators of the carnage, but against the media for showing us. We don’t mind seeing the guns, but please don’t show us what happens when those guns are fired.
Our knee-jerk response is to be offended by the word or the image, not the context. We can buy Soldier of Fortune at any newsagent, but not Hustler. A lot has changed, but we’re still a nation of Mother Grundys.