South Africa has entered a period that can be characterised as a ‘Second Transition”. It lacks the grand narrative of the first and the international spotlight is not as intense.
There are political, institutional and constitutional implications to this Second Transition. Most obviously, there is a political transfer of power taking place within the ANC. For those for whom a rotation of power is a prerequisite for democratic health, this may or may not provide succour.
For diehard liberals it will not be enough: a rotation of power means more than a changing of the personnel at the top. Rather, it means that a different political party takes over. But such transfers of power on the basis of free and fair elections have tended to be exceptions to the rule in many parts of postcolonial Africa. Conflict of the sort occurring in Kenya is common, whatever the election result and its integrity.
So, for progressive democrats, the change in power within the ANC is a welcome sign that the complacent rut into which those with political power can slide can also be prevented by means other than elections.
As eminent political scientist Adam Habib has argued in the past, political uncertainty is the essence of democracy, with two distinct forms: institutional and substantive. Institutional certainty is desirable because it establishes the rules of the game. Substantive uncertainty about the outcome of the game is desirable because ‘it keeps politicians on their toes and makes them responsive to the citizenry”.
How does this framework help us understand South Africa’s ‘Second Transition”? Polokwane will no doubt be remembered for many things, depending on who you are and from which vantage point you surveyed the scene. So for some the lyrics of Lethu Mshini Wami will resonate loudest. For me, the hand-rotating signal of many of the delegates — mimicking that of the football coach indicating his decision to make a substitution — was the more significant.
It amplified the call for change. The rules of the ANC’s game held firm; they provided the institutional context for a transfer of power. Yes, it is the same party in office, and many of the policies will remain the same. But people matter greatly in politics, and it is a very definite changing of the guard.
Competitive intraparty democracy is a feature of modern democracy that is scantily understood or measured by analysts and scholars alike. It may have a downside, however — and this is the part of the Second Transition whose outcomes are as much a cause for concern as a moment of opportunity.
The ANC as a party is seeking to reclaim authority and control over the ‘ANC in government”. This is the macro-story. And, in doing so, it is introducing a level of institutional uncertainty that could yet create democratic vulnerability and even a constitutional crisis.
Two examples come to mind, which are likely to have very different trajectories. The one is the dissolution of the Scorpions. The other is the idea of a Media Appeals Tribunal that is also the subject of a Polo-kwane resolution.
Both are political responses to the turmoil of the succession battle. The ‘new” ANC — the shadow government-in-waiting — believes the Scorpions did not do things ‘right” — as the new ANC treasurer Mathews Phosa put it, tellingly, on these pages a fortnight ago.
What he meant was that it did not do things the ‘ANC way”. It permitted no fudge; it did not allow itself to be subjected to ‘process management” by the ANC leadership. Instead, it ran around like a bull in a china shop, behaving like, well, a bunch of ‘untouchables” — which was its original branding.
Now it must pay the price. Instead of reform and refinement, retaining the core virtue of the model, it will be destroyed. The baby will be thrown out with the bathwater. If it goes, it is hard to imagine a corrupt police chief being effectively investigated in the future. The impact on policing organised crime may be heavily detrimental.
The problem for the ‘new” ANC is that, while it is certainly true that the South African electoral system is based on political parties who win and thereby control the seats in Parliament, they do so also on the basis of a mandate that is given to them by the electorate at election time in response to a party manifesto.
So the question to which the ANC will have to provide a convincing response to the country is: given that in 2004 there was no manifesto promise to dissolve the Scorpions — in fact, the contrary — where is the mandate for doing so now?
In the absence of a persuasive answer, we will all be entitled to conclude that the decision is the consequence of the need for petty political revenge and nothing more.
Yet, addressing the South African National Editors’ Forum last weekend, newly elected ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe stated that, in the light of the government’s electoral mandate, there could and would be no changes of policy arising from the Polokwane conference.
Into this potential gap glides President Thabo Mbeki, with his no less intriguing announcement in his State of the Nation speech a week ago that there will be an ‘interaction” with Parliament on the Scorpions legislation. That sounds to me like a recipe for a very interesting contest of strength between the two centres of power, and a test of whether Parliament is to recover its joie de vivre as well as its raison d’être.
Meanwhile, the half-baked idea of the Media Tribunal will surely be dropped. Unlike with the Scorpions, the political imperative will swiftly wane as the desire for revenge recedes and the new dispensation comes to appreciate which fights are worth having and which ought to be abandoned.
If it is to prove its merit over the incumbent president, whose cantankerous intransigence began in recent years to encourage uncertainty where once there had been stability, the new ANC leadership will have to show sensible judgement if it is to persuade us that the Second Transition will result in a measure of institutional composure equal to the first.