Marching for Democracy

If the right and the left can find sufficient common ground to coalesce around a single issue, as they are apparently doing with the Unite Against Corruption (UAC) march, then one would surely be forgiven if one were to come the conclusion that the centre is rotten to the core. Enough so to bring together disparate forces against a single contradiction that looms so overwhelmingly in the public conscience that they could put aside their own natural oppositions to unite in opposition to the rotten core.

 But does the convergence of the left and the right provide an alternative?

Well yes and no.

No, because such a convergence is not manageable in the long term and can only be short-lived and tactical. It`s politically a non-starter. Yet this tactic has been employed in various forms and in varying degrees of success across the history of time.

And Yes, because it brings people on to the streets. Change does not come about in the luxury of our armchairs and the strokes on our keyboards.  

The first victory is a democratic one. The act of engaging in political and civic concert represents the kind of democracy that requires and encourages citizens to stand up and speak in an act of original democracy.  As an act of participatory democracy, it is in constant dialectical tension to the type of direct democracy that has become the de facto mode of politics in South Africa today. 

Michelle Williams in her book, The Roots of Participatory Democracy (2008) terms the current tension as “a shift from a democratic theory centred on participation of the people, to a democratic theory based on participation of an elite minority.”

At the heart of the central call of citizens for action from their leaders within both the state and civil society, sits the dichotomy of participatory and representative democracy and its relation to accountability and the rule of law.  

The South African constitution acknowledges participatory and representative democracy as well as accountability and the rule of law as central values of the South African polity. Corruption is a failure of accountability. Where there is no accountability, the rule of law cannot function. 

Corruption Watch reports that “there is evidence that the heart of the problem lies in the lack of accountability for maladministration and corruption”.

While Corruption Watch places the responsibility for the current state of affairs, squarely on the President of the country, I would like to suggest that the problem instead originates in how we organise accountability of the state.  

World politics, has bequeathed to us, a choice between and a combination of, democracy and the separation of powers within the state as the model of an effective state. In South Africa the separation of powers between the executive and legislature on the one side and the judiciary on the other has withstood enormous challenges and has proven to be an important bastion in favour of the rule of law.

The separation of power between the executive and the legislature has been less than satisfactory and instead the legislature, based on the party political system of patronage has proven to be nothing but a rubber stamp of party political class interests that has created a conducive environment for corruption to thrive in the absence of holding the executive to account.

The limitations of the party political opposition movement to hold the executive to account has been graphically articulated by the dramatic, but ultimately futile attempts of the EFF to bring the institution of the legislature to the brink of collapse, in their effort to hold the executive to account.

If the legislature is not willing, nor able as a result of their reliance on patronage, to hold the executive to account, and if the Judiciary, limited as they are in only providing interpretive guidance, then the responsibility, as it is with all social change, ultimately lies with the people.

As Alex Callinicos notes, the `lefts’ complicity with “capital-parliamentarianism”, is merely one form of entanglement with the state from which even the most resolute communists have found it impossible to escape from. Thus it is the disabling effect of an orientation on state power and the corrupting effect of adopting the party form as the means of attaining it that should preoccupy our minds as we consider the issue of accountability and ultimately democratic deficits of our current political system.  

  At every juncture of political crises, government roles out Indabas, Lekgotlas and community meetings to address the challenges faced by our political system. In the mining sector the Mining Industries Growth, Development and Employment Task Team which brings together some of the key stakeholders in the industry was initiated by government to overcome the democratic deficit, or at least to provide a semblance of democratic engagement. The only problem is that this forum represents only vested interests and the voice of communities are absent.

In other industries like the Ocean economy and now mining, government has ploughed ahead with its Phakisa Project, bringing together key invested stakeholders to find consensus solutions to intractable problems. But once again, these initiatives only include the elites of society and exclude the communities.

In local communities like Mokopane and Sekhukune recently or in the 12 451 reported protests over the last year,  where communities rise in anger at their exclusion, hasty efforts are made to gather forums to give communities a false hope of participating in the political processes that shape their lives.

At every level where the state is confronted with a concerted and determined populace, the state inevitably resorts to violence to silence the protest or where the violence fails to quell the demands of people, they divert to the charade of listening to the community.

But what if instead of the state engaging its citizens as a means to silence discontent, it institutionalised direct democracy?

What if the channels of political democracy were not restricted to a preference for representative democracy, but instead allowed and encouraged a more direct form of democracy?

What if, communities who through their own initiative, organise themselves in defence of their interests, were accorded a voice in the discussion of issues that affect them at local, provincial and national level?

Would this not contribute to finding a solution to the infernal problem of elected representatives who act as if they were above the community?

Would the system not be healthier and more responsive if the activists of the community of Bonteheuwel in Cape Town, did not have to chain themselves to the councillors fence to get the council to listen to their demands?

Or would such free and direct democracy not have provided a healthier avenue for the community of Mokopane to influence their issues that directly affect them, instead of having to blockade the roads for 2 weeks? Would 70 people have been arrested and countless shot at?

Would an avenue that allows for direct democracy, untainted by political patronage, and which is driven by community and social engagement, not have insisted that the executive be held accountable and provided the political system with a further reference point?

Not only does the current system of representative democracy feed the monster of corruption through its inherent patronage, but it also forces normally law abiding citizens to engage in acts of defiance that very often leads to their criminalisation.

Such a system, especially one fraught with socio-economic challenges,  which is immune to its very own citizens and which allows citizens to only act once every five years on its right to engage in the political process cannot in all sincerity be called a democratic system.

Thus in our willingness, or unwillingness to march in the United Against Corruption march, we should be mindful that the challenge of corruption can never be overcome for as long as the system of accountability relies on patronage obtained through the party political system.

The UAC march signifies if not in content, then at least in symbolism, the utter failure of the party political system to provide an alternative that would be less elitists and more equalitarian.

 Thus as a parting shot to those faux democrats who bemoan the lack of integrity of the leaders of the march, It matters not so much which fallible men and women will lead the march,  for we are all fallible, but to what end.