by an ANC which championed Jacob Zuma in 2009 as a ‘hundred per cent Zulu boy’. The same election revealed the DA as steadily consolidating its role as the only serious locus of parliamentary opposition. From the 1.73 per cent of the total vote taken by its predecessor, the Democratic Party in 1994, the proportion taken by the DA had increased to 16.66 per cent in 2009, so that today it boasts 67 out of the total 136 seats held by opposition parties in the 400-seat National Assembly. Its achievement has been based on a combination of factors, notably vigorous and astute leadership under Tony Leon and, at present, Helen Zille; absorption of rump elements of the former New National Party (NNP); and its drawing on the long experience of parliamentary opposition of its predecessor liberal parties. Even so, for all the DA’s gains (including those of the recent 2011 local government elections), the question is whether it can continue to grow. This is the challenge that Southern and Southall analyse in their chapter.
They discuss the efforts of the DA to change its profile in order to appeal to more black, as well as to white, voters. The DP’s early mission, they argue, was to establish the legitimacy of opposition, often in the face of ANC liberation movement implications that opposition was illegitimate or disloyal. At one level, this was pursued by adroit use of opportunities in parliament to criticise government policies and to demand answers to awkward questions, a role it has continued to play and in which it outshines all other opposition parties. At another level, it sought to counter numerical weakness by opening itself up to coalition, notably with the NNP when the latter left the Government of National Unity in 1996, and thereby transforming itself into the DA. Later, this alliance with the NNP was to collapse when the latter’s leadership, distraught at no longer having its snout in the trough, moved back into government and collaboration with the ANC (although leaving behind many NNP adherents). From there, the DA has consistently worked to forge working alliances with other opposition parties at both national and provincial level, most recently absorbing Patricia de Lille and the Independent Democrats in 2010. The important corollary of this strategy has been to transform its imagery and personnel by variously securing the election of a handful of black politicians to parliament, campaigning aggressively in black areas among those aggrieved by the ANC and, during the recent local government elections, putting up black candidates for mayor in major cities (notably Johannesburg and Cape Town). Having secured control of the Western Cape in 2009 while simultaneously running the Cape Town metropole, and having won control of some eighteen local councils outright in the recent local government elections, the DA has begun to present itself as a party of power, performance and delivery. In short, the DA claims today that it is increasingly able to offer itself as an alternative to the ANC as a party of government.
Southern and Southall suggest that, despite a performance remarkable in many ways, there are limits to what the DA can achieve. Fundamentally, electoral outcomes in South Africa will continue to be determined by what happens among the ANC’s historic constituency. The ANC’s hold on it appeared to be threatened by the formation of the Congress of the People (Cope) in the lead-up to the 2009 election, but in the end Cope has turned out to be a damp squib. Meanwhile, despite edging closer to social movements, Cosatu remains locked into the ruling Tripartite Alliance and, despite strains therein, seems unlikely to leave to form the core of a party of the working poor. Despite the potential fluidity of this situation, the DA seems an unlikely vehicle to garner the support of that diverse mixture of social groupings which gather behind the new social movements, and which usually espouse a gospel of the left (to which the pro-market DA is unsympathetic). While the DA does claim today to be far more nonracial in composition than an increasingly Africanist ANC; while it may claim increased support from among blacks (across, it says, the class spectrum); and while it appears set to forge a solid alliance across the white/coloured divide around the country, it appears unlikely to appeal to the mass of impoverished African voters whose support is ultimately needed to give any political party a parliamentary majority.
The theme of first-rate policies and poor implementation is familiar by now. It resonates in Janine Hicks’s and Imraan Buccus’s discussion of the state of public participation in policy making in South Africa. They note that the constitution and such legislation as the Municipality Structures Act of 1998 provide frameworks operative at all three tiers of government for open and participatory democracy in South Africa; that a variety of instruments has been devised for citizen input – green and white policy papers, town meetings, largely rural-based izimbizo, petitions, ward committees, public hearings, access to the parliamentary and provincial portfolio committees, and more. Even so, they talk of the ‘significant gap at policy level’, the existence of a ‘democracy deficit’ in the failure of the established representative bodies ‘to link citizens with the institutions and processes of the state’. They feel that while the system is not wholly closed to the views of the citizenry, overall they are disappointed at the limited successes the participatory model has had in improving the accountability and performance levels of governance structures in the post-apartheid era.
They acknowledge that this is not entirely the fault of the state sector. For the model to be more effective in this electronic era requires higher literacy and educational skills levels of the people in general, and a far greater degree of internet access than currently prevails. But Hicks and Buccus show that the system has not entirely failed and that there have been successes where government has been forced to retreat from unacceptable policy proposals and intentions. They cite the campaign against the provisions of draconian anti-terrorism legislation in the post-9/11 era, and the current Right2Know campaign which has forced the state to back away from, and dilute, many of the highly restrictive provisions of the spectacularly misnamed Freedom of Information Bill. We would add, however, that such examples are probably less a case of what the participatory framework can achieve and more a testimony to what civil society can achieve if it can put together broad coalitions and stand firm in the face of government’s intimidatory tendencies and the sometimes overweening arrogance of portfolio committee chairs, not to mention their sheep-like tendency to vote willy nilly for the ANC position. To be fair, however, it is probably true that the Zuma administration is more willing to listen and give ground than the Mbeki government ever was, headed by a man who believed he ‘knew it all’ and was oblivious to the cost in human lives of some of his flawed beliefs. It was often only the Constitutional Court which stopped him in his trail of HIV/AIDS deaths and ruined lives. Fortunately, that historical cul-de-sac is a road less travelled under the Zuma administration.
The final contribution in this section is the only article with a foreign policy perspective. Christopher Saunders’s chapter looks at South Africa’s relations with its neighbours seventeen years into a new era of regional engagement, and at the performance of the regional organ which South Africa opted to join in 1994: the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It is, again, largely a story of promises unkept and of principles conceded. It is impossible to reconcile the Mandela presidency’s promise to put human rights considerations at the centre of South Africa’s foreign policy with the decision to move into alliance, via the BRICS arrangement, with two of the globe’s more authoritarian regimes, China and Russia.
Another of South Africa’s foreign policy promises of 1994 was to give priority to the needs of its regional backyard. This has proved largely not to be the case, even though South Africa was, to its credit, party to a renegotiation of the Southern African Customs Union’s provisions. From lopsidedly favouring South Africa’s interests, the agreement is now more democratic in its decision making and more equitable in the distribution of its tariff revenues but, that said, the Union is now so badly split over its dealings with the European Union that its future may be in the balance. This should not be taken to mean that South Africa has been neglectful of Africa as a whole. It has not. As Saunders notes, President Mbeki’s main foreign policy preoccupation was the continent, with his promotion of an ‘African renaissance’ and ‘his own version of Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-African dream’. To that end, South Africa has been deeply engaged in peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts in Africa, contributing more personnel to peace operations than any other African government. It has also been the key player (on behalf of the African Union) in
