At the heart of the travel scam lies the average South African politician’s penchant for the high life. Tony Yengeni, the former chief whip, moonlighted as a model for Fabiani, the upmarket clothing store in Cape Town, in return for free suits. His political career came to a premature end when he took a huge discount on a 4×4. He could not afford the car on his salary, but was corrupted by his desire to have it anyway.
Now Parliament is being further besmirched by expensive tastes that stretch way beyond the whippery. The former African National Congress MP Bathebile Dlamini reportedly needed to hire a flashy Mercedes Benz and a 4×4 to drive around Cape Town and her rural constituency because of a difficult pregnancy. Now really!
And the Democratic Alliance’s Craig Morkel has been marched off to the Scorpions by his party leaders to explain why he traded his parliamentary vouchers for a week’s hire of an Audi TT at a cost of R17 000, about half his monthly salary and why he upgraded from the permitted economy class to business class illegally. Like Morkel, several MPs have also been fingered for upgrading their travel vouchers.
The social distance between the governed and their representatives is nowhere more starkly symbolised than in this sorry saga.
When it is said that we need high-flyers in our political leadership, the reference is to top-drawer leadership skills — not the more literal translation our representatives have opted for.
By this week, the wheat had been sifted from the chaff and the number of errant MPs — as opposed to those who genuinely did not understand the system and were not guilty of deliberate malfeasance — had been narrowed down to 23, though the Scorpions do not rule out the possibility that others may be added to the list. It is important that the investigation is quickly concluded so that those who are innocent can get on with their jobs.
Parliament is a vital institution of democracy, but its relevance to ordinary South Africans is slipping dangerously, as Richard Calland pointed out in the Mail & Guardian last week. Only one in three South Africans trusts this alleged forum of the people most of the time, according to the latest Afrobarometer survey, and that trust has undoubtedly been further eroded as details of ‘Travelgate†emerge.
The irony is that the business-class flying and driving of fancy cars took place in the name of constituency work — of which there is little evidence among MPs. One reason Parliament is losing its relevance is its timid reading of its oversight role. None of the failures of governance that MPs should be picking up and investigating in their contact with constituents resurfaces in Parliament. And few policy changes appear to flow from constituency work. What exactly are they doing during the months allotted to them for hard but vital constituency grind?
It is a source of some comfort that the investigation was ordered by Parliament itself, as this speaks to a new spirit of vigilance. One hopes that the inquiry will weed out some of the self-serving and unaccountable in parliamentary ranks. But more needs to happen to close the widening gap between the people and their tribunes. Take a taxi, ek sê, and stay in touch with the plain folk who are forced to do so. Â
Kort but sweet
Before the 1999 election Martinus van Schalkwyk told us the New National Party was a vehicle for whites to engage the African National Congress. When a decimated NNP joined forces with the Democratic Party, the ANC was suddenly race-obsessed, power-hungry and unable to deliver. When the NNP split from the Democratic Alliance, the NNP was once again the vehicle for minorities to influence the ANC.
Now minorities are told to forget the NNP and influence the ruling party from within. Van Schalkwyk hates being called ‘Kortbroek†so intensely that he granted the Mail & Guardian an interview before the past election on the understanding that we should not to use the label in the headline, text or posters. But would a grown-up really flip-flop as helplessly as this political invertebrate, with no guiding light except the imperative of personal survival?
Kortbroek’s political morality and adulthood aside, South Africans have every reason to rejoice over the final demise of the once-mighty National Party. Like the electoral decline of the ethnically based Inkatha Freedom Party and the easing of tensions in KwaZulu-Natal, it can be seen as an aspect of liberation deferred, an apartheid distortion that survived into the democratic era. It is surely preferable for coloured people in the Western and Northern Cape to vote for the ANC than for the NNP, given that their electoral support for the former party of apartheid flowed from a ‘ja baas†deference to whites and racist fear and contempt of Africans.
The NNP has been fragmenting and melting down with agonising slowness since 1994, its life articially prolonged by backward-looking voting behaviour and the career ambitions of its leaders. As it no longer represents whites and has shed most of its coloured support, its demise has nothing to do with racial reconciliation. But it is an important transformation landmark. From next year’s local government poll, voters in most of the country will essentially choose between the ANC and the DA, post-apartheid parties with a defined role in South Africa’s new order.