Students of European soccer will know that at midnight this week Wednesday, the transfer window closes until Christmas. The rumours and counter-rumours, the hyperbole and avarice of players’ agents, the acquisitive hopes and dreams of the coaches and club supporters will cease.
But as one window closes, so another opens: midnight on August 31 is the start of the 15-day ‘floor-crossing” for South African MPs.
Modern-day soccer transfers invariably pivot around the phenomenon of ‘tapping up”. A player is approached by the representatives of one club to induce him to leave his current club. Since this is not permitted under the game’s regulations without the permission of the player’s club, there is a huge element of cloak and dagger.
So, too, with South African politics. In recent months and weeks, surreptitious contacts have been made, inducements laid out, and options considered. Outside Parliament last week, a harassed MP breathlessly told me: ‘I desperately need advice; I have offers from two parties and I just can’t decide.”
In soccer, the clubs invest millions in a player, which is why the rules say that it is the club that ‘owns” him that must determine whether he is sold or not. Free agency, they say, will create massive instability. In South African politics a similar argument holds far greater weight, given that the consequences for a fledgling democracy are potentially so severe.
Voters vote for a party not an individual — the seat in Parliament is owned by the party not the individual — yet for the period of the ‘transfer window” the MP is in effect given the seat and may take it where he or she pleases, notwithstanding the disturbance this may cause to the original electoral choices made by the electorate. For smaller opposition parties — which, since they are all small, means opposition politics as a whole — the effect is potentially devastating.
The case of the United Democratic Movement is a potent illustration. As the window period approached, the party’s leader Bantu Holomisa began to get worried. The first time the law had permitted floor-crossing, in September 2003, his party had been badly stung. Ten of its 14 MPs had abandoned the party, nine of them to the African National Congress.
Holomisa’s parliamentary party was decimated. Somehow, it recovered sufficiently to win almost the same percentage of votes in the general election of April 2004 as it had in its first election in 1999 — about 2%, mainly from the Eastern Cape. Not surprisingly, Holomisa was determined to prevent a repetition. With rumours circulating, he sought assurance from seven of his MPs, including his talented young deputy, Malixale Diko.
Maybe because they were intending to cross the floor, maybe because of outrage that their loyalty was being questioned — and I suspect we will never know the truth now — they refused. Holomisa suspended them. As the suspended seven have argued in the High Court, this was not only a drastic act, but an unlawful one. It looks as if this argument will prevail and their suspensions be lifted just in time for the start of the floor-crossing season.
If they leave, not only will the UDM’s representation in Parliament be vastly reduced, but the party’s coffers — in the run-up to the local government election — will be slashed because the public-funding allocation can be reduced to take account of the changes under a new law.
While some parties will gain — mainly the ANC, because it has the most to offer in terms of patronage — and some lose, the overall effect is to demean politics and politicians. I don’t especially blame Diko or his fellow suspendees. Why should they decline attractive offers from elsewhere — they are professionals, with careers to defend and families to support. Nor do I blame Holomisa for his apparently intemperate approach to this issue. What alternative did he have?
I blame the system and the law. It is rotten. It brings out the very worst in politicians, encouraging short-term, unprincipled conduct. So it is worth trying to recall the original justification for floor-crossing, namely that five years is a very long time in politics and that changes in public support for parties needs to be reflected in representation in Parliament. But it is an inexact science. Where is the evidence that the UDM’s support has not once, but twice, collapsed? There is none. On the contrary, the most pertinent and reliable evidence — votes cast in a free and fair election — suggest the opposite, that the party’s support is very stable: twice it has secured about 2%. Where, too, is the evidence that support for the ANC has increased, sufficient to justify the further gains it will accrue to its already massive majority?
It does not play well in the public mind. We know that from opinion polls. And, if the 10 callers I heard phone in to Tim Modise’s show two weeks ago are anything like a representative sample, then the public is 100% against it. One caller put it especially crisply: ‘Leave my vote alone.”
As politics in the ANC alliance takes a very ugly turn, so too the floor-crossing period will further demean the quality, image and the self-respect of party politics. It is a very unbecoming phase. Thankfully, there are alternative approaches to politics on the horizon, not least with the launch earlier this week of a ‘new UDF”. As parliamentary politics descends into its most rabid period, so the appeal of extra-parliamentary politics increases.
Formal politics beware; it needs to clean up its act. Ending the charade of the floor-crossing circus by repealing the law that permits it would be a very good first step. But, sadly, I am not going to hold my breath and nor should you; the ANC does too well out of it. Instead, for the first half of September, simply hold your nose lest the stench of gutter politics wreak havoc with your reason.