will no doubt go down in history as one of the most important events of the millennium – on par with the French, American, Indian, Chinese, and Russian revolutions. Some of our leading scholars have taken to talking about the ‘maturing’ and ‘consolidation’ of our democracy, and rightly so. But self-congratulation has to be accompanied by a willingness to talk frankly about our shortcomings as well.
There is a foundational flaw in our democracy that goes back to the early days of the transition, but has become a defining characteristic of our political culture. While the political transition itself was the result of mass mobilisation in the townships and villages of this country, the negotiations process was, at times, a secretive affair whose outcome hinged on the bargaining skills of the leaders of the various political parties, mainly the ANC and the National Party (NP).
Having delegated power upwards during the negotiations, we then invested in a number of political and institutional support systems consistent with the overall emphasis on elite decision-making. The centralisation of authority in national leadership; the dominant role of political parties as containers of debate, discontent and disagreement; the party list system; the concomitant emphasis on what Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki would do for us; and the language of delivery, are but a few manifestations of an increasingly top-down political system.
All these developments run the risk of producing a split national identity. The one side would comprise a group of political and economic elites who would, by virtue of their proximate race/class distance from power, become the real, active citizens. The other would comprise a passive population that would be nothing more than what the Indian scholar Partha Chatterjee has called ‘empirical objects of government policy, not citizens who participate in the sovereignty of the state.’
Promises of delivery would become nothing less than ‘the opiate of the masses’ – the only language that the government could use to talk with its constituencies. In less than a decade, we would have gone full circle from the mass clamour for democratic participation to the elite model of democracy normally associated with political snobs such as Edmund Burke and Joseph Schumpeter.
It will, of course, be argued that the negotiated transition was the only way we could have drawn back from the abyss of interminable racial violence. But that’s only half the answer. A full answer would have to suggest how we can build on the progress of the past to deepen democratic participation in the future. As the Yale University political scientist Ian Shapiro argues: ‘The problem with negotiated transitions is not that the institutions are imposed from above, but rather that they are not imposed in a sufficiently thoroughgoing fashion.’
And so, for me, the most important question surrounding our second set of inclusive national and provincial elections is not which party to vote for – since they all operate within the same elite model of democracy – but whether we can start talking about alternative models of democracy in this country. It seems to me that we need to go beyond the conception of democracy as the mere right to choose our leaders – which is a necessary but insufficient condition for democratic participation – to some kind of direct, participatory, and communicative democracy.
As Steve Biko put it in I Write What I Like (1978): ‘In a government where democracy is allowed to work, one of the principles that are normally entrenched is a feedback system, a discussion between those who formulate policy and those who must perceive, accept or reject policy. In other words, there must be a system of education, political education, and this does not necessarily go with literacy.’
Or, as our own great writer Es’kia Mphahlele wrote more recently, before his death in 2008: ‘We are wrong in thinking that because the government is democratically elected, therefore there is democracy. Democracy is about the relationship between the politicians and their constituencies, and the “African renaissance” must therefore go to the heart of the people in making them think democratically.’
Participation is the cardinal principle of democracy – not only because of its intrinsic value, but also because it increases the political efficacy of citizens by giving them direct training in the policies and tools of governance. Almost 200 years ago, John Stuart Mill suggested that this kind of democratic training is best obtainable at the local level, where citizens can make decisions about issues they can immediately relate to, and then generalise that knowledge to the broader, national political system.
The best example of this in this country is the black consciousness movement of the 1970s. Many of our current leaders in the public, private and non-profit sectors received their leadership training through the political education and development programmes of organisations such as Black Community Programmes – even if some of them would now disavow black consciousness politics. But, even if people do not agree with the substance of black consciousness, we can at least go back to the veritable tradition of conscientisation that was the hallmark and signal achievement of that movement.
As the development economist Albert Hirschman once observed, the social energies that are aroused in the course of a social movement do not disappear when that movement does, but are kept in storage and become available to fuel later and sometimes different social movements. Or, as the Brown University social scientist Ashu Varshney has put it: ‘While futures are indeed created, they are not typically created on a clean slate. It is hard for nations to leave their pasts behind. The more pertinent issue is: how does a nation reconstruct its past? Which traditions should be revived, and which ones dropped? The ideological task is to retrieve that which is valuable, and to make this selective retrieval a political reality.’
If black consciousness contributed to our current crop of leaders, we should ask ourselves how we can contribute to the development of future leaders in this country. I doubt very much if such contributions will happen through the procedural view of democracy as showing up at the polls once every five years. A long-term view would suggest a balance between the vertical politics of elite representation bequeathed to us by the negotiations process with a more horizontal politics of direct democracy that comes from deep within our own history.
Can the president fulfil his tryst with destiny?
Sunday Independent, 20 June 1999
‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge.’ – Jawaharlal Nehru, address to the Indian parliament on the eve of India’s independence, 14 August 1947
‘The people have spoken.’ That was president-elect Thabo Mbeki’s humble, dignified and assertive refrain at the ANC’s post-election victory rally at Gallagher Estate in Midrand. While not as exultant as Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ speech, or John F Kennedy’s ‘ask not what your country can do for you’, Mbeki’s words will be remembered nonetheless for their self-assured and declarative message. Mbeki will no doubt interpret what the people have said to mean an overwhelming mandate for the ANC. But I hope he will take a broader approach, as he hinted he would when he described his own inauguration as ‘a festival and a celebration of democracy’.
While there really was no mystery about which party would win the elections, voters kept on saying they were coming out in large numbers to protect South Africa’s young democracy. They stood in queues for hours on end, braving the cold, and jumping through all the administrative hoops to affirm their right to vote. In that respect, this election was a referendum about the condition of our democracy. As Mbeki kept saying, ‘democracy is alive and well in South Africa’.
The policy question, though, is: now that Mbeki has obtained the overwhelming mandate of the people, how will he sustain their interest in democracy until the next elections and beyond? Will he use his party’s dominant position to deepen the roots of democracy? Whether Mbeki can link his party’s interest to the national interest of building a democratic society will depend in turn on whether he can do
