What conception of democracy (if any) animates ANC politics? Eusebius McKaiser ponders the question.
The ANC has a wobbly relationship with democracy. This is an ugly truth at the heart of the protests in Tshwane.
The basic facts that reveal that wobbly relationship are the following. Various ANC politicians in Tshwane, notably Mapiti Matsena (the deputy ANC chair for Tshwane) and Kgosientso Ramokgopa (the current mayor who is not universally loved), were vying to be the party’s mayoral candidate for the city. This led to a competitive political battle that wasn’t allowed to run its course by the ANC. The party intervened by announcing former cabinet minister Thoko Didiza as the party’s mayoral candidate.
At this point, all hell broke loose. There was loss of life, destruction of property, looting, and continuing political tensions in the capital city. The party was caught off-guard, and some party leaders pretended the imposition of Thoko Didiza on ANC members in Tshwane was neither a cause of, nor a contributing factor towards, the protests.
That view isn’t sustainable given the sequence of events in Tshwane and what ANC members themselves have been liberally saying on various platforms. This raises several questions: How interested in internal democracy is the current ANC leadership? And, what conception of democracy (if any) animates ANC politics?
When President Jacob Zuma talks about democracy, he interprets it to mean “majority rule”. This is one of his favourite views to express in Parliament when waspishly dismissing the opposition as losers in a winner-takes-all system of government.
Of course, the democratic model we have chosen when we broke from apartheid minority-rule isn’t the model of democracy that President Zuma thinks we chose. Ours is neither a majoritarian conception of democracy nor a winner-takes-all model.
We have a liberal constitutional democracy founded on the principle of constitutional democracy with a careful normative balance struck between giving expression to the political preferences of the majority while entrenching the fundamental rights of every individual and minority grouping.
That is why we do not hold referenda on every major policy question. Indeed, that is why the ANC itself, for example, compelled its MPs to support gay marriage legislation instead of being led by the conservative and homophobic intuitions of the majority.
But let’s assume, for sake of argument, that President Zuma is right, and that democracy is, as he thinks it is, about the wishes of a numerical majority being respected. If that is so, why does the ANC ignore the political preferences of its members in Tshwane?
If “the people shall govern” is interpreted as doing a head-count of preferences, and respecting a bottom-up approach to decision-making within the ANC, then breaking a deadlock between two mayoral candidates by imposing one from the outside, is profoundly anti-democratic.
What is the point of telling ordinary ANC members, and branches across the country, that their political preferences matter when these can be ignored, without rational argument, by provincial or national leadership structures?
On the other hand, if the ANC, as an organisation, never intended to interpret democracy the way its leader, President Zuma, does (as “majority rule”), then surely it needed to spell out more clearly what the point is of procedures and structures that allow for bottom-up input of political preferences from members on the ground?
Otherwise it was a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it: Pretending to truly care about deferring to the democratic authority of members while secretly not caring for the collective preferences of ANC members.
That is an inconsistency in how the ANC conceives of democracy, and one that needs urgent resolution. How that inconsistency should be resolved isn’t obvious. There are very few contemporary political theorists who think that the most compelling model of democracy is one that simply demands of us to give expression to the preferences of a numerical majority. Might isn’t necessarily right, as that tired old saying rightly goes.
But maybe a good start is that we should distinguish between rejecting majoritarianism (as we have rightly done already at CODESA) in how we define democracy at national political level, from how we think about democracy in the internal structures and processes of our political parties.
Internally, leadership contests must, surely, be essentially a popularity contest. If someone deserves to be a mayoral candidate of any party, they ought to explain and justify their nomination to party members, who in turn should be allowed to decisively express their views about their candidature.
And if some party structure is empowered to have a role here at all (whatever that role), then the party members themselves need to legitimise that party structure as a body to which it agrees to defer.
In the case of the ANC, there was simply a crass disregard for the preferences of ordinary ANC voters in Tshwane. That’s bad for the ANC and for the country because it slows down the process of entrenching democratic habits.
* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma. His new book - Run, Racist, Run: Journeys Into The Heart Of Racism - is now available nationwide, and online through Amazon.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
THE STAR