Institutionalised, representative democracy in our country is in trouble. This is not because the African National Congress’s sizeable electoral victory supposedly heralds the imminent arrival of a one-party state. Neither is it owing to the generally pathetic showing of the rest of the electoral opposition. It is simply because, only a decade after the introduction of a universal electoral franchise in South Africa, just more than 50% of all eligible voters participated in the formal process of representative democracy.
Amid the plethora of post-election commentary, the most meaningful realities (and message) of South Africa’s third national election have been buried.
Only 56% (15 806 380) of all eligible voters (27 438 897) cast their ballots.
Just less than seven million people eligible to vote did not even bother to register.
Of those registered to vote (20 600 000), nearly five million chose not to exercise their vote.
Just 38% (10 877 302) of the entire voting population voted for the ANC.
There were 250 871 spoilt votes.
The national voting turnout has gradually decreased since South Africa’s first, one-person one-vote election. In 1994 19,5-million people voted; in 1999 just more than 16-million voted; and in 2004, less than 16-million (remembering that the country’s voting population has grown substantially over the past decade).
If we adopt an honest and unequivocal assessment of the election based on these realities, then we must reject the widely accepted notion, energetically pushed by the media in particular, that there was a ”huge turnout” — the elections were rejected by nearly half of the voting-age population.
It is evidence that South Africa has already entered into the terrain of a low intensity and commodified democracy.
There is another side to this coin though. It would be naive to think that the call of more radical social movements, such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) and the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), for the casting of spoilt ballots and/ or an election boycott was responsible for the massive electoral ”stayaway”.
The lack of participation confirms the huge potential that exists for South Africa’s social movements, alongside the rank-and-file of the organised working class, to fill the political vacuum and build a viable and radical people’s power alternative to the ANC.
While it has taken several (post-independent) decades for comparable popular social movements to emerge in other developing countries, South Africa witnessed the rise of such movements less than five years after the democratic victory of the liberation struggle. The increasingly devastating effects, on already poor South Africans, of massive job losses, privatised service delivery, market-led land policies and the pursuit of cost-recovery mechanisms has seen tremendous growth in the membership and support base of the social movements.
Only formed in 2001, the LPM is now a nationwide social movement with a membership/support base reaching into the tens of thousands. More provincially based movements such as the APF (Gauteng), the Concerned Citizen’s Forum (KwaZulu-Natal) and the Anti-Eviction Campaign (Western Cape) collectively command similar membership or support levels. The new social movements constitute a sizeable and potentially powerful social and political constituency.
They comprise a diversity of organisational forms ranged across informalised networks, community-based ”civic” associations, issue-specific local/national organisations and more centrally structured, politically oriented forums.
While they have shown an impressive ability to mobilise large numbers of people for more centralised protests, it is through community level activities and mobilisation where the social movements are at their strongest. Scores of informal debates, community meetings, strategic and educational workshops, marches, rallies, door-to-door visits and other campaign activities are taking place on a monthly basis. Slowly, unevenly, a mass base is being built.
In many urban and rural communities, it is through the activities of these movements that an increasingly large number of people experience and practice meaningful democracy.
All of this raises the central question, both inside and outside the social movements, about electoral contestation. As things stand, it is clear that the majority of these movements and their constituent organisations are either discussing contesting next year’s local elections or are already making preparations to do so. While there remains a healthy debate about doing so, it is clear that the social movements must confront the challenge of collectively taking forward their struggles in order to shift existing institutionalised power relations in favour of the poor and broader working class where they live.
Whether the various social movements are able to achieve numerically significant electoral victories at the local/municipal level is not really the point. The main ”test” will be the extent to which these movements can utilise such elections to broaden and deepen grassroots organisation and mass struggle centred on the most basic socio-economic needs of the poor majority. In doing so, the social movements will be taking the next step towards replacing the narrowly configured boundaries and limited choices that presently characterise institutionalised democratic representation.
Dale McKinley is an independent writer, lecturer and researcher. He is an activist within the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Social Movements Indaba. This article is written in his personal capacity