As we hurtle towards municipal elections in South Africa in a matter of weeks, the escalating campaign by various parties, including the ruling African National Congress and the official Democratic Alliance opposition (not to mention that dark horse known as the Freedom Front), to make people sit up and take notice seems to demonstrate a fear that apathy has taken hold of our populace a mere decade after the universal franchise was finally won in the wake of a long and bitter struggle.
No big surprises here. The country’s politicians should have long been aware of the phenomenon in neighbouring countries, such as Zimbabwe, where potential voters in both rural and urban areas openly asked why they should bother to vote after the first national elections in 1980 because the ruling Zanu party was bound to come back into power anyway and nothing much had changed. Things were better under Ian Smith, and his proclaimed ‘Thousand Years of White Rule” policy the formerly disposessed black poor were heard to grumble.
South Africa’s municipalities, such as they are, appear to be run by faceless individuals, shuffled around by the central committees of the various parties according to their proven loyalty to the leader. Potential leaders with real, individualistic fire are rapidly sidelined.
No, no, this state of apathy should come as no surprise. But, it is not a problem that is confined to South Africa and Zimbabwe. Democratic Centralism, as it used to be known in the good old days of Soviet Communism, has now been openly embraced, with very few exceptions, across what used to be known as the Free World.
The very idea of democracy as espoused by the heirs of those who invented it, has taken a knock in recent weeks. The sweeping victory of Hamas in the fragmented, non-existent, occupied state of Palestine produced completely hypocritical reactions from Washington and London, leaders of the West. George W Bush’s comments, being incomprehensible in his usual fashion, were immediately forgotten. But Britain’s Tony ‘blah-blah” Blair, looking shocked, ashen, but defiant, said clearly: ‘Hamas has won a democratic victory. But we won’t accept it unless they become democratic.” Excuse me?
The Palestinians became increasingly incensed at this rejection of their expression of free choice under international regulations. It didn’t help that in rapid succession Iran came under fire from the so-called international community for restarting its nuclear energy programme and the simmering controversy over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad with a smouldering fuse coming out of the top of his turban burst into full-on conflagration.
Did nobody get the connection?
I was sitting on the edge of my chair, watching BBC World, with its well-groomed, deadpan presenters, in mounting disbelief and wondering where in the world one might find sanctuary in sanity these days — short of simply turning off the television, which didn’t occur to me at the time.
Thank goodness I didn’t. BBC World’s sometimes irresistable Hard Talk programme, which usually puts pompous politicians in the firing line, pulled a rabbit out of the hat that kept me glued for the next few hours. (I had to watch all the repeats to make sure that I was seeing and hearing what I thought I was seeing and hearing.)
The subject sitting in the hot seat this time was a character who had floated in and out of my consciousness over the English exile years. His name is Nicholas van Hoogstraten and I suddenly realised that he had been personally sent to give me an answer to my question about democracy. His watchword is: ‘I don’t believe in democracy, I believe in rule by the fittest.”
Van Hoogstraten is, as you might put it, quite a piece of work. Among his heroes are Baroness Margaret Thatcher, who, in a sense, he helped to create by being an early example of the benefits of free enterprise and the ‘trash the poor, they’re just lazy sods” view of the world (which he backed up by bombing some of his own properties to get rid of unwelcome tenants); and Robert ‘bulldoze the poor” Mugabe, in whose country he owns substantial land and property (no reposessions by war veterans for him) and whom he speaks of as ‘The President”. He also describes Mugabe as being ‘100% decent and incorruptible”.
You can tell that he has a long pedigree in knowing what it is to be a decent chap. Van Hoogstraten is proud to recount an episode where a nun at his secondary school tried to hit him with a chair leg — presumably, as a judge once put it during one of his many trials for violence and manslaughter, for being ‘a self-styled emissary of Beelzebub”. He seized the chair leg from the unsuspecting nun and hit her back — after which ‘she never tried it on again”.
I am certain that I would never try anything on with Van Hoogstraten if, God forbid, I ever found myself alone in a room with him. I wouldn’t even try to enter into a debate on the finer points of democracy. I am definitely sure that I would chicken out on all of my most deeply felt principles simply to preserve the integrity of my skin, such as it is.
I think it is former American president Teddy Roosevelt who, referring to his country’s approach to international diplomacy, famously said: ‘Talk softly and carry a big stick.”
Staring transfixed at Van Hoogstraten on the television screen (rather than getting on with my work), I began to wonder whether I was looking at him, one of the self-styled sherrifs of world democracy, such as Bush, Blair, Jack Straw or Condoleezza Rice or some other ‘self-styled emissary of Beelzebub”. I finally plucked up the courage to switch off the TV.