As the Travelgate debate squabbled on, the real politics was taking place offstage in the corridors and rooms behind the National Assembly. Media attention was on the debate. As Speaker Baleka Mbete noted in her speech: ‘Our people are justifiably eager to know what happened.” Yet it was when the debate ended that the really interesting stuff began.
Tuesday August 24 was a potential watershed day for Parliament, not because of the travel scam debate, nor even the implications of the scandal on the institution’s public credibility and integrity, but because it marked the dawn of a new chapter in African National Congress and South African Congress of Trade Unions (Cosatu) relations.
As the debate drew to an increasingly ill-tempered close, ANC members scuttled away — not for many the usual short walk to the buses drawn up outside that whisk MPs away to their bland parliamentary villages, but instead to uniquely timetabled evening meetings of their ‘study groups”. An ANC study group is a meeting of the members of a particular parliamentary committee, who are members of the ANC — a committee caucus. The strangely-timed appointments were with the leaders of Cosatu, 100 of whom had flown to Cape Town from around the country to hold unprecedented talks with the ANC in Parliament.
Thus the 26 study groups of the ANC met simultaneously with the Cosatu leadership to discuss matters of policy relevant to their committee. This was the start of a three-day odyssey through the corridors of parliamentary power that had the exhausted eyes of Cosatu’s parliamentary officials sparkling with pride and promise by the end of the week.
Having pulled off a logistical nightmare, it now remains to be seen whether the investment in time, money and politics will pay off.
For Cosatu, ‘operation parliamentary storm”, as it should have been but was not named, represented a clear shift in strategy and tactics, with both a historical and contemporary aspect.
During the first democratic Parliament (1994 to 1999), Cosatu relied on ‘its representatives” in the ANC. In the build-up to the 1994 election, the movement, in consultation with the ANC, had ensured that a group of its senior leaders would be on the ANC list and, thereby, in Parliament. It was a let-down. By and large, Cosatu was unable to separate its interests from those of the ANC, to which, by definition, the MPs in question had to defer. As the conflict of interest — and the blunder in politics — became clear to Cosatu’s leadership, a parliamentary office was set up under Neil Coleman.
Lobbying Parliament with the unique advantage of having a foot in the alliance, the office has been both prolific and effective, maintaining a bridgehead into government law and policymaking via the national legislature even as relations between the ANC and Cosatu executives hit rock-bottom in 2002.
But with the April general election, Cosatu perceived a further opportunity. Short of money, the ANC resorted to a more classical approach to electioneering, eschewing of necessity an expensive advertising campaign in preference for a ‘get out and meet the people” show. Its success, now writ large in South African political legend, would have been inconceivable without the organisational capacity of Cosatu.
A debt of gratitude was born, at least in the eyes of Cosatu. This was further encouraged by the notion that political space had opened up in the ANC as a result of what its leaders had witnessed while walking the election campaign road. A deeply held belief developed that ground lost in the ideological balance within the alliance could soon be regained.
Habitually the alliance partners communicate in what are called ’10-a-sides” — 10 leaders from the ANC and 10 from Cosatu on each side of the table. Last week these numbers were multiplied by 10.
As a culmination of the three-day political safari, an extraordinary 100-a-side meeting was held in Parliament. Strangely, it went unreported by the parliamentary press corps, although how 100 Cosatu leaders could have wandered the corridors of the National Assembly for three days apparently entirely inconspicuous is beyond me. The ‘hard outcomes” from this engagement remain elusive at the moment. It is far more a question of tone and the whiff of where the power see-saw is leaning.
Certainly, the ANC caucus was impressed by the Cosatu show of strength. Its visitors were quietly amused by the nervousness and ‘family hold-back” trepidation of their hosts. All of which goes to show how much representative politics is one great trick of the light. And not just because the National Assembly debate was a sideshow to the real action behind the scenes.
The idea that a group of people — most of whom the vast majority of South Africans have never met — can accurately reflect the views and interests of citizens is a forlorn hope. Modern politics — or more to the point, modern policymaking — is too complex; the trade-offs too acute; the external factors too intricate and intense. As someone once said about marriage, representative democracy is surely the victory of optimism over reason.
This was a hard lesson that Cosatu had to learn in relation to its own representatives within the ANC caucus after 1994. But it is not one that has been learnt by those people who persist in arguing for something they are not going to get in the foreseeable future, namely constituency representation.
Whether it is columnist Rob Amato banging on about it relentlessly in the Sunday Independent or former Inkatha Freedom Party MP Farouk Cassim at every public seminar, there are some who seem to think that constituency representation is the panacea for all manner of democratic ills.
They are well-intended but deluded fools, which is why they would probably draw succour from what a minister of state from Britain, which has a ‘pure” constituency system and no proportional representation, had to say to me last week — a week when size clearly mattered and power was weighed in numbers. British High Commissioner Ann Grant was boasting that the five-minister delegation from London was the largest-ever muster of ministers to visit these shores.
A bluff Scotsman, which does rather give his identity away (never mind) made it absolutely clear to me that his was an opinion he would relish putting out in public. The minister, curiously, chose to defend his government’s performance (or non-performance, as I would have it) on Palestine by saying that his job was to represent the economic interests of his constituents, none of whom care about the plight of the Palestinians in any case. What if the British Labour Party of the 1970s and 1980s had adopted this approach to the similar plight of black South Africans?
Representative democracy clearly has its limits, as both the Scottish minister’s assertion and the recent, depressingly small-minded offerings of the National Assembly’s debating chamber suggest. Politics has to ascend beyond the mere articulation of narrow interests, which is what the Constitution means by its enshrinement of the notion of ‘participatory democracy”, aspiring as it does to instil a sense of the bigger picture of universal human rights into domestic democratic politics.
It is in the engagement with public representatives, not their representation itself, that is crucial — as Cosatu knows only too well. Admittedly, Cosatu has some distinct advantages when it comes to this sort of participation. It is what happens within the ANC alliance that matters most.
And t’was ever thus.