'ANC can take vote for granted'
Wednesday April 27, 2005 12:42 - (SA)
By Donwald Pressly
Popular control over political decision-makers in South Africa has been weakened because of a lack of substantive uncertainty - the uncertainty of the outcomes of elections which has eroded leverage over them, an Idasa report has found.
The result of this is that political elites in South Africa have pandered to capital - especially foreign capital - rather than to the will of voters, which they take for granted.
Researchers Adam Habib and Collette Schultz-Herzenberg argue in "Accountability and Democracy" - a chapter of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) study entitled Democracy in the Time of Mbeki - that political uncertainty is the essence of democracy.
Substantive uncertainty is about the perceptions of ruling political elites in a democratic system on whether they will be returned to office. Substantive uncertainty is good for democracy for it keeps politicians on their toes.
However, this is not the case in South Africa, although it has a "democratic" electoral system, with entrenched constitutional checks and balances.
Capital mobility, the integration of production systems across the globe and dominance of multinational corporations has transformed the political and socio-economic foundations of developing nations - including South Africa - changing the relations of power between different constituencies within developing societies.
Governments had made policy concessions to foreign investors "even when it went against the interests of their own citizenry".
The result was the rise of "neo-liberal economies" and the increasing impoverishment of the majority of the citizenry.
Habib and Schultz-Herzenberg argue that South Africa "is perhaps the best example of this pattern".
The ruling African National Congress as the dominant party in the liberation movement had come to office with an "overwhelming electoral mandate".
But its policy concessions in the last decade had been largely owing to foreign investors and domestic capital - both black and white, they argue.
"This was because it has been able to take the citizenry's vote for granted."
The racialised character of South Africa's principal opposition parties - the Democratic Alliance, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the New National Party - meant that the ANC "has not been seriously threatened at the polls".
"The same cannot be said of the investment of both foreign investors and domestic capital," they said.
There had been policy concessions principally in favour of capital, they argue. This led to the abandonment of the Reconstruction and Development Programme and the adoption of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy.
Answering the question as to what is to be done, they say: "If we were to prioritise substantive uncertainty, then the necessity of a different electoral system (which removes the powers of political party leaders over Members of Parliament), the presence of viable opposition parties, a break in the (ANC, SA Communist Party, and Congress of SA Trade Unions) alliance, a more plural civil society and a revised set of labour relations become strategic necessities."
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