Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi wants an electoral system that will make MPs and MPLs more accountable to the electorate and which will penalise them should they become ineffective or lazy.
He was speaking at the start of a two-day review conference organised by the Electoral Task Team which has been tasked by the government with helping to draft a new electoral law for the country.
South Africa’s system is currently based on proportional representation, based on a party list system.
The task team — headed by Dr Frederik van Zyl Slabbert — hopes to finalise and present its report to Buthelezi by November 11.
Buthelezi said a delicate balance needed to be maintained between the powers and prerogatives of political parties and the fundamental functions, duties and responsibilities of elected political representatives.
”In this context, we must also ensure that the accountability to which elected political representatives are subjected, forces their own political, professional and personal growth.
”Too often when political accountability is concentrated only on political parties, political representatives have no incentive to become more competent, effective and efficient, and they tend to only try to please party leaders rather than the electorate.”
Buthelezi, who is also the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, said this was based on personal experience over many decades during ”which I witnessed many elected representatives being more concerned about pleasing me than getting the job done to please the electorate”.
”I have also witnessed people being more concerned about their parliamentary records showing their punctual attendance at meetings and sessions than their having made any significant contribution while they were there.”
Buthelezi urged the task team to promote techniques which would make political representatives more visible, outspoken and independently minded and that they would be penalised in one way or the other if they became ineffective, invisible and indolent.
In a paper delivered at the conference, Dr Wilmot James of the Human Sciences Research Council, said the absence of direct accountability in South African’s current political system had been the source of much soul-searching and gnashing of teeth.
There was a widely held view that party managers held too much power under the current closed list system.
While there was a degree of accountability for elected politicians, this level remained inadequate, James said.
”Elected representatives are unaccountable to the South African people, save for those many, but not enough, moved by personal values and drive to be so.
”This is a critical weakness. MPs on a national level and MPLs on the provincial elected one do not have to appeal to or satisfy voters to be re-elected as individuals subject to typical performance appraisals in the marketplace of politics.
”What they have to do by force of institutional circumstances is satisfy leaders of political parties, in order to stay on all-important lists …” James said the challenge was to create a greater opportunity for individual accountability in the design of the electoral system, without sacrificing the inherited assets of nation building.
However, ANC MP Pallo Jordan questioned the emphasis on accountability.
”Is such a system of personal accountability practical, given the complex society we live in?” he asked.
He also questioned whether there was a system of personal accountability by politicians anywhere in the world. They all had to accommodate their party’s policies and platform and be subject to the whippery.
Jordan also questioned whether South Africa wanted a situation ”in which our electoral law prescribes forms of personal accountability”.
South Africa’s system might be faulted on accountability, but research had not shown sufficient cause for a radical rethink of the current electoral system.
Jordan said the current system’s success lay in its inclusiveness. – Sapa