Cape Town - South Africa should consider electoral reform to directly elect at least some MPs because the current party-determined system was creating problems, former Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) chairwoman Brigalia Bam believes.
“South Africa should look at a mixed system where some people account to the voters, some people remain accountable to the (political) party,” she told the Cape Town Press Club on Tuesday. “We can develop our own system, I’m convinced. South Africans are very creative.”
South Africans cast their ballots for political parties, who decide on their candidates lists in their own internal processes with their own criteria ahead of a poll. The decision to allow political parties to select “suitable people” as their public representatives was taken during the negotiations for the democratic transition, said Bam, and while it worked “very well for us”, it was now becoming a problem and needed to be revisited.
Even before her retirement from the IEC in October 2011, the commission frequently picked up rumours of people going to others asking for deployment. Local government was a particularly tricky area as people unhappy with a councillor must complain to the party head office, which effectively had appointed the person, she added.
While the 2003 electoral reform commission chaired by Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert recommended a mixed system in which between three and seven MPs would represent a sub-regional constituency, then-president Thabo Mbeki did not act on the report.
On Tuesday, Bam described the commission’s recommendations as “too far-reaching at the time”, saying “the proposals came too early for South Africa”.
However, given the challenges, it might now be the time to look again at electoral reforms, Bam said.
Asked about the legitimacy of one party coming to elected office through another – a reference to the SACP, which through its alliance with, and dual membership in, the ANC has obtained positions in Parliament and the executive – Bam said there was nothing in law to stop this, and that alliances were “a South African peculiarity”. However, if that party decided to campaign itself, Bam said, “it will be the moment of truth”.
The comments and question came just days after a special SACP congress agreed to establish a committee to look at fighting elections under its own banner following a strong push from at least three provinces and the Young Communist League, while national leaders expressed their misgivings.
Bam set aside her planned autobiography to publish Democracy, More Than Just Elections, an account of the IEC and her role as election observer in Rwanda and the controversial 2002 Zimbabwe poll, assisting in elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho and Namibia, and the IEC printing ballot papers for Nigerian elections.
Political Bureau