Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), center right, during a national shutdown protest, organized by the EFF, outside the presidential guest house in Pretoria, South Africa, on Monday. (Guillem Sartorio/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Great National Shutdown is over and done with.
What now?
I am not holding my breath for President Cyril Ramaphosa to resign; the non-working day (until that happens) may give Eskom a temporary reprieve but does not solve the deep systemic problems.
I am opposed to the criminalization of protest but the longstanding debate is how to draw boundaries on what is acceptable. Demanding that protests not be disruptive, for example, is pointless. Protests are inherently disruptive. You can’t even limit it specifically to the legitimate ones. There are many precedents such as the Greenpeace protests where the illegal is justified with “legitimate reasons”.
But there are other, bigger questions to be answered that protest cannot answer. Our society is not healthy and needs remedial care while it is still possible to recover. How do you do it? Complaining about the symptoms is not the cure. The obvious problem, state capture, will not be solved by re-electing the same party. If not resolved, the service delivery and cancellation of the inequality will still fail.
Elections are held next year and we still don’t have a real solution. This is revealed by the fact that the growing number of ANC votes has not translated into increasing the strength of the opposition vote, which remains fragmented. A symptom of this problem is the decline in electoral participation.
Official participation in national elections was 89% in 1994 and has declined in every election since to 66% in 2019. But this does not tell the whole story – voter registration has also declined to less than half the population actually voting. 2019.
If anyone can register a party called Didn’t Vote that is awarded all the votes of people of voting age who did not vote, it will win. This is an indictment not only of the ANC but also of the opposition parties.
Is it broken? Can it be fixed?
My experience in grassroots campaigns is that many potential voters have given up. They don’t trust any politician. They hope they can say and do what it takes to vote and then forget their constituency for the next five years. Whether this is fair or not, it is widely accepted and the basis for this is failed service delivery and false promises such as “a better life for all”.
In September last year, Ramaphosa told a meeting of mayors that “we found that the real capture is happening at the local government level, where certain interests are holding the entire municipality” and as a result the people have nothing to do. The roads are potholed, clean water is unreliable, electricity supply is unreliable even under load and rivers of sewage flow through the roads as well as houses.
After almost 30 years, despite a Constitution that, read correctly, says that black lives matter and the lives of the poor matter, we remain an unequal society. This will continue until we have a functioning government, not the emerging trend of Model C countries – those who can pay extra get services; the poor get nothing.
To find a solution we need to understand that politics as usual is broken. Our electoral system chooses the controlling party because the proportional representation (PR) list is an internal function of the party; except for ward council members, none are self-elected. Therefore, parties are dominated by power brokers or as cult leaders. Since most candidates do not need a public presence to vote, the leader’s personality is likely to be a dominant factor, which makes coalitions fragile and prevents small parties with the same object from joining forces.
We have a strong and standing previous model of a police state that will do anything to dismantle it – the United Democratic Front. The UDF is a coalition of hundreds of small organizations ranging from civil movements and trade unions to business and academic groups. It is organized from the ground up so it is difficult to disrupt the leadership. It began in 1983, when apartheid repression was at its height, partly in response to PW Botha’s tricameral parliament.
The UDF disbanded in 1991 after political prisoners were released and the ban on the organization was lifted. In retrospect, this was premature. A strong civil society organization outside of representative politics would be a useful check on the power of government, especially given the nature of our electoral system.
I raised the example of the UDF as a way to organize politics as an alternative way to contest the 2024 elections, instead of proposing to recreate it in its original form. Since 1991, we have developed a strong civil society; fragility in political representation.
Two things made the UDF successful: the way it was organized did not depend on a central leader and it had a clear goal: to end apartheid.
How to use these ideas today?
The opposition space is fragmented, with leaders unable to work together. Local organizations have no influence with political parties, because the political process is designed to promote leaders. Re-establishing a structure like the UDF based on civil movements and others will build an underground movement where the personality of the leader cannot dominate. It may focus on short, clear public goals such as decriminalizing government and taking on systemic racism.
The constitutional court has ruled that independent candidates should be allowed. But the proposed process would not allow independent groups to pool their votes, so if someone doesn’t get enough votes to be elected, their vote will be lost. The Electoral Amendment Bill that allows this (still awaiting presidential approval) requires that a nominee be supported by 20% of the number of voters needed to win a seat in the previous parliament, a very high bar. So maybe a small organized group can nominate a slate of independents with some chance of winning. But any vote for anyone who doesn’t vote for the seat will be wasted.
Independent nominations are therefore not a good option for such civil movements. However, there must be at least some political party structure to have a reasonable chance of winning seats.
I have learned a few things from participating in new political movements (Agang SA in 2014 and Front Warga Makana in 2021). It is important to have a strong constitution that defines the leadership structure, decision-making powers and disciplinary mechanisms and processes. For grassroots organizations, the constitutional role of these structures should also be very clear. Do they have voting as a structure, or does the new organization need its own branch structure? It is also important to have a strong secretariat and to ensure that all interactions with the South African Electoral Commission (IEC) follow their processes and are properly recorded and conducted.
Some lessons from the past inform that view. The IEC generally acts as a filing cabinet and does not review the content of the documents provided, and expects the parties to handle internal disputes. If there is such a dispute, it should be resolved quickly – ideally internally, but there is no choice but to go to court. Without a clear, well-documented structure and decision-making process, opportunists can easily hijack an organization. The biggest risk is after the election, when the seat becomes a source of gifts and the organization’s coffers are depleted.
Another important consideration is deciding how to create your homework list. At the municipal level, it is possible to top-up the PR list after the election. This makes it an option to nominate a long list of one and decide after the election who really should be in the Council. Grassroots organizations can exploit this to decide based on their performance during elections who should be elected. At the national and provincial levels, this is not possible; any seats that won more than the nominations would be lost, and reallocated to another party. It’s unfortunate that the process of nominating a PR list is not easy to fix. In the case of Agang SA, for example, when Mamphela Ramphele decided not to sit in the seat and there was supposed to be a debate about who should replace her, two of those on the list took the seat and rebelled against the leadership. After that, the two MPs fought until one was removed and the party effectively shut down as the remaining MP was not accountable to anyone.
Once a person is elected, they can only be removed through a disciplinary process that will face a court challenge.
The best overall option considering all this is a strong organization to handle the technical and clerical details such as the IEC process and ensure that the civil organization’s preferences for candidates are properly represented on the PR list. This organization needs a constitution that defines a strict process for decision-making and discipline and a strong leadership team. Any shortcoming will be exploited by opportunists if the resources of the elected office come into play.
Even with the risk of trying something new, we need new options because everything has failed.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect official policy or position Mail & Guardians.