Minorities don’t have the benefit of their interests officially being taken care of, writes Koos Malan When the Democratic Alliance was formed last year, some believed, rather optimistically, that South Africa was firmly on its way to a fully-fledged two-party system. This development was supposed to place South Africa in the company of the best functioning democracies in the world. The requirements for success of these democracies are genuine competition for governmental power between approximately equally strong political parties; regular changes of the government; political involvement of all segments of the citizenry; and, since one party never governs too long, only a minimal risk of the governing party acting as if the party and the state were one and the same thing. This optimism has now subsided. The New National Party is in an alliance with the African National Congress, there is no real prospect of the Democratic Alliance developing into an alternative government and the ANC has gained an almost improper amount of political manoeuvrability. But perhaps the most important facet and political commentators appear to agree on this is the growing political apathy among the country’s minorities, particularly the Afrikaners. The NNP has clearly lost faith that the new constitutional order can offer it or any other opposition party success at the polls. Due to the racial patterns of South African politics a contest dominated by the politics of identity there is no chance of the NNP attracting significant black support from the ANC and so posing meaningful opposition to the ANC. Hence the NNP’s manoeuvrability is limited to joining the so-called mainstream that is, annexing itself to the ANC. By doing this the NNP reduced itself from a true opposition party to a parliamentary lobbying group. Unlike a true opposition party, the NNP is therefore no longer in a competitive power relationship with the governing party. True to the lobbyist’s role, it can do no more than use friendly liaison to try to influence governmental decision-making. The diametric opposition to the government that characterises true opposition is exchanged for that of a satellite whose orbit is determined by the magnetism of the centre. For its part, the DA is an administrative opposition without any material interest or ideological differences with the government. As such the DA plays the role of an acrimonious ombudsman whose quarrel with the government is limited to bitter indignation over the conduct of the state administration.
The DA’s election prospects are also weak. During the 1999 election the party benefited from a considerable Afrikaner protest vote. The DA is, however, now running the risk of losing much of that as the need to contend with the ANC compels the DA to change its character in an attempt to make itself more attractive to black voters. But the DA’s aggressive “fight back” profile, which repels black voters, is so strongly established that the prospects for its winning meaningful black support are very slim. Moreover, after the NNP move to the ANC, the DA is bound, more than before, to be pilloried as a reactionary affluent English-speaking party that still cherishes its old “Prog” character. The deterioration of the opposition is symptomatic of the incapacity of South Africa’s Westminster-like constitutional dispensation to deliver a genuine democratic dispensation. A seven-year period of incubation during which the unrealistic opposition hopes have been dashed and settlement euphoria has exhausted itself covered up this constitutional defect. But that incubation period is now over.
South African politics, as in many other dispensations for heterogeneous populations, is cast in the mould of group dynamics and interaction in which one culture (or language or religious group) constitutes a permanent majority while another culture makes up an equally permanent minority. The ANC is the liberator and political vehicle of the black majority. Its political and legislative programme is sharply focused on the empowerment of the black majority. Transformation legislation such as the Employment Equity Act and the Promotion of Equality Act consistently seek the advancement of the black majority as a particular segment of the South African population; through the use of the concept of “designated group”, minorities, and specifically the Afrikaner minority, are excluded. This transformation legislation produces discriminatory results: while rendering statutory support for large-scale black business enterprises, the requirement of representivity brings about the statutory proscription of similarly conceived Afrikaans ventures. Thus, the ANC is a typically sectional political movement, catering primarily for one sector of the population. The fact that this sector is the majority, however, makes it possible for the ANC, using neutral terminology such as transformation and representivity, to hide its sectional character under a broad and seemingly national veil. On the other hand, minorities such as the Afrikaners are relegated to the disempowering role of being a sort of permanent opposition. Afrikaners have distinct cultural and linguistic interests, which are not accommodated within the majority. On the contrary, these interests are an obstacle to the government’s Anglo-Africanist programme of nation building. Afrikaners are, therefore, compelled to accept that the system condemns them (owing to their lack of numerical strength) to the quagmire of permanent opposition. Unlike the majority, they do not have the benefit of their interests officially being taken care of. Their interests are accommodated only when it pleases the majority or when their interests coincidentally correspond with that of the majority. Against this background, political apathy, cynicism and insular migration are evident among Afrikaners. The central defect of the South African majoritarian Constitution is that it introduced simplistic procedural democracy but failed to secure substantive democracy. Hence, even though universal adult suffrage formally treats everyone as equal, it still produces unequal and so undemocratic results. The same rules apply to everyone. Everyone can engage in politics on an equal basis and every individual vote weighs the same. Yet the same winners and losers are pre-determined. The losing Afrikaner minority therefore does not have a stake in the system that is equal to the victorious majority’s. This defeats one of the central objectives of the democratic ideal, namely to secure civil equality for the entire citizenry. It is quite easy to achieve equality within a relatively homogeneous society by simply providing for the same formal rules applicable to everyone. In such dispensations, majorities and minorities are continuously alternating, and the composition of minorities also fluctuates in accordance with the issue in question. In heterogeneous societies, however, there are material interests that are closely related to particular communities. Afrikaners, for example, have specific durable interests relating to language, culture and education in exactly the same way as other minorities have distinct interests that other groupings do not share. If these interests are to be decided by the majority, its numerical strength places the majority in the position to negate the interests of the minority. The result is that the system eventually only addresses common and majority interests but not the interests of the minorities. In this way the unequally treated minority is, in the words of the liberal political theorist John Stuart Mill, reduced to a plea from outside the door. The cure for this constitutional defect is a formula of proportional power allocation. Under this approach common interests are determined and decided by all on the basis of mutual discussion and eventual majority vote. But on matters related to the distinctive interests of a particular minority, decision-making power vests in that minority: decisions are taken by majority vote within that minority after due deliberation. This approach, rather than the Westminster variation we now have, will not only promote democratisation; it also promises inter-community peace. When political power is monopolised within a single power centre as is the position in a Westminster dispensation and in South Africa’s current constitutional order it follows structurally that there will be an acrimonious struggle to control that single locus of power. It is precisely for this reason that the Westminster order is described, appropriately, as a conflict model. This is also one of the reasons for the peculiarly bitter relationship between the ANC and the DA. The inherent cohesion of a homogeneous society can sustain conflict of the kind the Westminster system induces. In a heterogeneous society such as South Africa, however, the tolerance necessary to cushion that conflict is absent. Here a mere administrative difference between the ANC and the DA is enough to unleash the race issue; political competition triggers racial tension.
The adoption of the 1996 Constitution resolved the problem of illegitimate minority rule. However, it did not dispense with all South Africa’s constitutional ills. On the contrary, we are now beginning to grapple with a new set of constitutional defects caused by the Constitution. Dr Koos Malan is a constitutional jurist and a member of the Executive Committee of the Group of 63, a new-generation Afrikaner intellectual movement