Democracy is the Problem


Across the world, representative democracies produce varying versions of pugilist contests that sometimes end in bloodshed and but most often, in farcical viral videos.

We, the public, far removed from the elite club of representatives who trade punches and insults are the unwilling, yet, darkly consuming, spectators.

From Taiwan to India, from South Africa to Europe, the spectacle of representative democracy has become a political version of “The world`s funniest”.

What happened at the State of the Nation Address (SONA) yesterday in Cape Town, besides a comical addition to the World’s funniest, must surely rank as one of the most public displays, since Marikana, of the descent of the dark cloud of the Police State upon the “miracle” of the New South Africa.

No doubt, this too will fade into the murk of our everyday struggle to survive the vicissitudes of our neoliberal existence, only to resurface later, in a frenzy of outrage and hope.

In our haste to make sense of the spectacle that unfolded before our eyes…even though intermittently, as the Parliamentary TV service experienced the unfortunate technical problems that prevented the “paying” public from “enjoying” the full value for their “money”, we often are constrained in the way that we make sense of events that play itself out, like a dark Shakespearian drama in the Amphitheatre of our media manipulated lens.

Despite the obvious deficit of legitimacy (by this I mean the virtue of the political institution that creates an elite political class) of a system that is so far removed from the realities of poverty and despair that defines the lives of the majority of our citizens, we find ourselves trying to find solutions to the display of democracy rather than the practise of democracy.

Commentators wax lyrical about the electoral victory of the ruling party without ever considering whether the representative democratic process of creating an elite political class is part of the solution or part of the problem. It is dogmatically assumed that representative democracy and its elite political culture is the only option, and thus the analysis that follows seeks to rearrange the deck chairs rather than to plot an alternative path.

The ultimate cause of the sinking of the Titanic was the failure by the crew of the Titanic to adjust to the warning messages. The warning messages of Ship SA are flashing but no one at the helm seems to be paying attention. Instead what we have is a court of analysts and supporters who are urging the Captain to rearrange the deck chairs and to sail on despite the looming iceberg and the inevitable destruction it will cause.

South Africa, if it wishes to avoid the Iceberg in its path, must address the democratic deficit.


Creating a political class that, in its own self-serving interests, continues to claim its own legitimacy in the face of poverty and exclusion will inevitably be faced with an iceberg of cold distrusting anger that will subsume the banal theatre of parliament and the lie of representative democracy.

For all its blustering and self-righteous hubris and subversion of the parliamentary system, the EFF itself continues in the tradition of political elites who abrogate to themselves the agency that should rightfully belong to the people. It is no secret that the EFF lacks a democratic ethos and its violent disruption of Andile Mngxitima`s press conference hours before the disruption of SONA is inconveniently lost in the meta-political constitutional imposition of a police state by the ruling ANC.
 
Like a merry go round, we may increase the speed, and introduce new riders, but the destination remains the same, unless we take intellectual courage and heed the warning signs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Selling the Family Silver: Power, Extraction, and the False Promise of Balance in South Africa’s Political Economy

Image
  Introduction: Davos , Washington , and the Pedagogy of Humiliation There is something quietly revealing about South Africa’s annual pilgrimage to Davos. There, amid the rituals of elite networking and the theatre of global consensus, South African leaders encounter the realities of power stripped of ceremony: conditional access, asymmetrical bargaining, and the expectation of compliance dressed up as partnership.  It is an experience uncomfortably familiar to those lower down the domestic hierarchy; mining-affected communities, the working poor, and those whose lives are shaped by decisions taken elsewhere and justified after the fact. The irony is not that South Africa is treated poorly at Davos or in Washington, but that its political leadership appears perpetually surprised when it is. When President Ramaphosa travelled to Washington and was treated as an inconvenience rather than a partner, some commentators rushed to frame the moment as an aberration, a function of Donald...
Read more

The Madlanga Commission Must Not Ignore the Billion-Rand Smoking Gun.

Image
    A billion-rand policing operation may have been guided not by crime intelligence or public-safety imperatives, but by a government apparatus whose strategic orientation has become increasingly indistinguishable from the corporate mining lobby and criminal interests. When MACUA submitted evidence to the Madlanga Commission raising serious concerns about the evidence that had emerged in the Madlanga Commission about Operation Vala Umgodi and the deaths in Stilfontein, the Commission acknowledged receipt, but its hearings have yet to reflect any engagement with the issues raised. Instead, the inquiry has focused almost exclusively on the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) and the Ekhurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department . To an extent, this is understandable. The Commission was established in response to allegations by General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi that the PKTT had been disbanded due to improper links between senior politicians and criminal syndicates. The inquiry was b...
Read more

South Africa Must Defend Its Sovereign Wealth, Before It’s All Sold to the Highest Bidder

Image
  When Anglo American Plc announced its plan to merge with Canada’s Teck Resources and relocate its holding structure to Vancouver, it was not merely another corporate transaction. It was a seismic act of capital flight, the slow-motion exit of one of South Africa’s most historically powerful corporations, taking with it a century’s worth of accumulated wealth, expertise, and control over our national mineral assets. As economist DumaGqubule outlines in his recently released report, The Anglo–Teck Merger: A Global Power Play , this deal is not about efficiency or synergy; it is about jurisdiction. It is about where wealth will be controlled, where taxes will be paid, and where accountability will end. It is a reminder that, despite our constitutional commitment to economic sovereignty, South Africa still lacks the institutional and legislative backbone to protect its sovereign mineral wealth from transnational looting disguised as “global investment.” While Canada has built ...
Read more