The 10-year season is over. It was not all party time. A rhythmic pattern of celebration and scholarship emerged, spawning a mini industry of endeavour and entrepreneurship.
What is striking about the five main studies of the past 10 years that sit on the table is the conspicuous absence of a consensus about the full range of challenges that will confront democracy over the next 10 years. Instead, the consensus is limited to two issues — the one so broad, and so blindingly obvious, as to be almost meaningless, the other so narrow and transient and yet so elusive to the reach of scholarship as to be a source of almost demented frustration.
This became apparent at a recent symposium hosted by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), which brought the editors of the five studies together to compare notes.
With the exception of Idasa’s own as yet unpublished study, The People Shall Govern! — which measures the quality of democracy against a 100-indicator Democracy Index — the other four offer varied and, at times, rich tapestries of empirical and qualitative assessment — from the Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC) State of the Nation to Interfund’s The Real State of the Nation, edited by Vincent Maphai and David Everett.
Goolam Aboobaker, head of the policy unit in the Presidency and the chief architect of the government’s own Ten Year Review, offered a presentation of the landscape from the government’s perspective that was as calm and reasonable as the report itself.
This is not untypical of what I perceive to be a new attitude within the heart of the government. It is as if, reassured by the warm glow of its massive electoral victory in April, the African National Congress is learning to relax in power. Perhaps it was happening anyway. People getting secure in power, after 10 years getting used to using it, gaining confidence with their growing executive dexterity and competence. And with so many of the trickiest political issues now done and dusted, long-held insecurities are set aside, at least for the time being.
So when Aboobaker told the symposium ‘the left is feeling more comfortable with the government”, I suspect a subconscious slip of the tongue. The government is getting more comfortable with the left is what he may also have meant.
The context was a conversation about the relationship of the so-called social movements with the government — this in the immediate aftermath of the very welcome furore caused by the home truths offered by the editor of this newspaper about the coherence and strength of these social movements.
So although it was a timely discussion there was little agreement as to whether they are likely to be a part of the problem or a part of the solution. This was just one of a surprisingly long list of what I would describe as small to middle-sized problems that sit on the horizon, along with a mixture of the nebulous and the not so nebulous. How can people participate more? How can citizens be more effective agents of change? How can private centres of power be persuaded to exercise their power for the public good?
The length of the list might ordinarily be a cause for genuine concern. But I found it strangely encouraging, for three reasons.
First, from a democratic perspective, there are no major black clouds threatening. It is not as if the ANC’s victory has unleashed a tidal wave of fears about a ‘one party state”. Yes, there are concerns about the overlap between state and party, as much as there are about the fusion of state and capital. The notion of the ‘captive state” — a democratic state constrained by the interest groups over which it is mandated to rule — cannot be so easily dismissed.
But, second, it suggests that this pot-pourri of problems is as much a reflection of the normalisation of democratic politics as anything else.
And third, there are distinct voices in the arena of the public intellectualism that reject the ‘technocratic paradigm” and invite solutions from a more expansive school of thought about democratic life.
I can hear the clamour crying ‘complacency, complacency!” in the background. And, of course, complacency is not an option; eternal vigilance being the price of freedom and all that. But the fact is that South Africa’s democracy fits not the well-worn and unidimensional path of 20th century political history, but the baffling post-modernism of the here and now, a point that is most vividly captured by Voices of the Transition, edited by Edgar Pieterse and Frank Meintjies.
So, what were the two clear, if flawed, points of limited consensus? The first, the blindingly obvious one, is that chronic poverty and inequality threatens democracy. It sounds so obvious now, but it was not such a clearly recognised fundamental part of the democratic discourse even five years ago.
Second, the narrow, transient one: The Succession. It would be premature, and therefore inopportune, to add to the ill-formed and ill-informed speculation that has passed for political commentary on this subject so far. The process and the political scenarios offer a far riper source of consideration. There is no chosen or anointed successor, unlike 1994 with Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. That is the starting point.
Nor has a front-runner emerged. Again it is far too soon, and the various power blocs within the ANC have not yet made any real progress towards consolidating support for, or against, a particular candidate. A great deal of time still has to be navigated before the key period in the run-up to the 2007 ANC national conference when the decision will be ratified, and time is the great enemy of career politicians. Like sand, it passes so quickly through the hands and holds so many dangers of events as yet unimagined and unpredicted interfering with even the most carefully laid plans.
I say ‘ratified” because the ANC has not in recent memory ever permitted an election for one of its top jobs to proceed without the outcome already decided. But given that the ANC election operates as a primary election for the actual presidency, timing is of the absolute essence. Go too early with a settled candidate, and the danger for Mbeki is that an alternative focal point of power is created. Go too late, and you invite a torrent of uncertainty and in-fighting that could distract and damage.
Worse, it might provoke a call for a third term for Mbeki. If the relative normality of the trajectory of democratic politics in South Africa is disturbed by an unseemly contest for the succession, the elite compact — to use old-fashioned language — might rebel against the Constitution limitation of two terms.
And that, of course, will create its own self-fulfilling crisis of reputation and democratic credibility for the country. Not because of the absolute, universal sanctity of the two-terms rule, but because it will be an entirely unjustified denial of the depth of leadership talent that lies within the ANC.
If it can’t pluck one of those talented individuals out from the pack at the right moment, then it will threaten the positive democratic trends that to different degrees the 10-year reviews commemorate.