Two recent reports show evidence that democracy in Africa is being threatened by private power networks
The ANC has spurts of introspection, usually soon after polls or in the run-up to elective conferences. Sometimes that leads to a hard-headed look at where the party is going and how the voters might feel about it. But seldom does that introspection seem to generate any real organisational change. It appears, rather, to become another leadership battle, but in a different forum.
Recently, ANC leaders have spoken of the need to regenerate the organisation, to renew its links with the people, in particular the poor. Consequently, the emphasis has been on party mobilisation at local level and thus the branch structures. The ANC has been accused of lacking sufficient internal democracy, which is what the supporters of party regeneration would very much like to address.
The internal processes to do with branch-level politics have to be overhauled, party leaders have said. There have been too many battles about list processes and the way people are nominated for key positions.
When these processes and their outcomes are opaque and are seen to be driven from the top down, they fail to assure rank-and-file ANC members – or the voting public – that the ANC is taking people and their concerns into account.
At the same time, the ANC claims to be the sole legitimate voice of the masses. This is a contradiction the ANC has not been able to resolve.
A new plan afoot from the party’s top echelons, which we report on this week, is a good example of the way the ANC gets this part of democracy wrong. It is another instance of leaders making decisions and ignoring the views and opinions of party members or, for that matter, any citizen eager to help solve South Africa’s problems.
The latest idea, which is to decide who the president of the ANC will be in 2017, well before the electoral conference, thus looks very much like another set of proposals designed to protect members of the hierarchy from anyone more than a level or two below them.
Democracy is, in large part, about protecting society from bad leaders. It’s the political countermodel to dictatorship or the rule of a small elite. It offers the general populace the opportunity to get rid of those leaders, if it so chooses, every few years.
But South Africa’s party-centred system does not really give citizens that power: they are voting for a party, not a person, and that person has been chosen by a very small group in the party’s structures. Jacob Zuma is the case in point: at the Polokwane conference, at which he took the ANC presidency, it was on the basis of votes by fewer than 2 500 delegates.
The ANC has been accused of lacking sufficient internal democracy, just as it has been justly accused of failing to develop the mechanisms of democracy in South Africa since 1994 to further empower the people.
Moves such as this plan to settle the leadership contest early, and behind closed doors, as it were, do not encourage the hope that the ANC will get more democratic in the future.