A decision by some of its member organisations to call for a boycott of the national elections has split the Social Movement Indaba — an umbrella of 11 social movements.
The Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) is calling for a spoilt ballot, while the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) is asking its members to boycott the elections. Other social movements have not taken a public stand, leaving the decision to vote or not up to individual members.
Professor Sakhela Buhlungu from the Sociology of Work Project at Wits University says that the decision by some social movements to boycott the national elections but support the municipal elections the following year is contradictory: ”The fact of the matter is that there is a very strong pro-election lobby within these movements. So the compromise was that they will boycott the national elections this year but contest the municipal elections next year.
”What you have then is an uneasy compromise — a win-win situation whereby the hardliners get their boycott and the moderates get to contest in the elections next year,” said Buhlungu.
”The choice of which election to contest is interesting. I would say that the movements stand almost no chance of winning anything in the national elections anyway.
”But they could cause quite a few upsets at the local level particularly through the ward or constituency system. But then the problem is that the movements could undermine themselves and lose credibility by first rubbishing the system and then participating in it only a few months later,” concluded Buhlungu.
Social movement activists say that the decision among some of them to boycott the national elections should be seen as the desire to create a genuinely leftist oppositional party.
”Everybody asks why there is not an official left opposition, but it doesn’t just come out of the sky,” said Dale McKinley, Indaba and the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) spokesperson. ”It has to be built and what we’re saying is that this is the time that we can begin to build those alternatives.”
While social movements have not taken a collective decision to boycott the elections, ”the commonality is that the present political set-up is inadequate and we’re all interested in trying over the long term to build an alternative”, said McKinley.
”The decision by social movements to take a position against the elections is not a knee-jerk reaction,” said Salim Vally, spokesperson for the Anti-War Coalition. ”It has been very carefully debated and thought through.”
But Ran Greenstein, an associate professor in the sociology department at Wits University, says the decision to boycott the elections ”is part of the politics of protest rather than about politics. These movements stand on the periphery and condemn the current system without trying to find common cause with elements of government, non-government or civil society.”
He says that their approach is too purist: ”We need to form alternatives in the country but setting yourself up on the outside as a pure opposition, without getting your hands dirty by forming alliances, is not the way to go about it.”
For McKinley, voting would mean condoning the ”structural characteristics” of the South African democracy, which for the poor would be like choosing the lesser of two evils.
He says that the social movements are not ignoring the elections; rather, they want to convey the message that at ”this stage the vote isn’t going to make much of a difference in poor people’s lives”.
Adam Habib, a political analyst at the Human Sciences Research Council, said that calling for a boycott is ”suicidal in a society where so much of society has been denied the vote for so long — it won’t work”.
However, he said the problem with South Africa’s party political system is that even if the social movements took the alternative ”and favourable” route of supporting a party based on particular conditions, ”there is no alternative to play with to push one party against another. The system doesn’t allow social movements to hold elites accountable.”
The Social Movement Indaba held a national conference on Human Rights Day where the decision to form a left opposition party was taken.