Voting is not Enough!

“[O]ne does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation—the process of humanization—is not another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it. (Freire, 1968)

On the eve of the 6^th General elections in South Africa, The Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) confirmed that the growing number of unregistered voters in South Africa has increased to over 9.8million eligible voters or 25.5% of eligible voters (IEC, 2019).Add this to the 30% ( or 8 million voters) registered voters who may not turn up at the polls and the legitimacy of the system starts to look rather precarious where 18 million or 50% of the 36 million eligible voters do not participate.

According to the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), this is an increase of more than 2 million unregistered eligible voters over the 7 million reported during the 2014 election and 3 million more than reported in the 1994 election. (Schulz-Herzenberg, 2014). The increased numbers of unregistered voters between the 2014 election and the 2019 election raises several concerns when considered in conjunction with the rising tide of protests which have characterised governance issues in South Africa.

Various studies, including research such as Rebellion of the Poor (Alexander, 2010),The Smoke that Calls (Van Holdt, et al, 2011), South Africa: the transition to violent democracy (Van Holdt, 2013) and Frequency and Turmoil, South Africa`s community protests 2005-2017 (Alexander,et al, 2018) have pointed to the connection between the rise of violent protests and the exercise and experience of democracy by vulnerable citizens.

These connections are widely recognised by government and awareness within government circles have been improved through research reports and other interventions such as the South African Local Government Association`s (SALGA`s) research report of 2015 entitled Community Protests, Local Government Perceptions, which appears as a direct response to the rising tide of protests and the research mentioned above.

While there appears to be a growing awareness in government circles of the connections between rising protests and the need to “Improve public consultation and communication processes so that communities are engaged in their own development” (Steyn, 2015), these are still mainly imbued and steeped in a deeply paternalistic form of “governmentality” (Foucault, 1978) inherited from our colonial past in which democracy is reduced to the way in which power is administered by government and in which democracy is reduced to shallow election exercises at regular intervals. This reduction of democracy, to what Giorgio Agamben calls; Western Democracy`s two primary meanings, namely; “of what and how the body politic is constituted and [executed] and techniques of governing and administering the political community” (Reddy, 2016).  

Democracy in South Africa, given the historical violent subjugation and exclusion of the vast majority of South Africans from participating in their own governance and having been denied the opportunity to participate in the re-imagining and re-development of the body politic post 1994, and especially considering that the liberation struggle of the late 1980`s to early 1990`s was characterised by the promise of a new political future envisioned as “Peoples Power”( the governance of society from the local level up, using street and area committees, described at the time by the UDF as starting to create a new society based on the Freedom Charter now, and not at some time in the future) (Seekings, 2000), but which through negotiation among the elite, was reduced to the question of how best an elite was able to govern on behalf of the people.

The turn to the conception of democracy as the prerogative of the nationalist elite, despite the popular democratic ethos of “Peoples Power” which was framed as a direct challenge to apartheid state power and seen as the intended outcome or goal of the struggle for liberation (Seekings, 2000, p. 169) , and which had blossomed in the immediate period preceding the turn to negotiations, marked the moment in which the elites conclusively adopted the Western Liberal Democratic framework which defined the majority of people outside of the governance paradigm.

The democratic transition was conveniently juxtaposed between the options of elites and negotiations versus the masses and violence and laid the foundation for a particular political rationality that took it as self-evident that the masses were under the control of the elite even if the emerging political subject had different ideas about the characteristic of the political change. (Reddy, 2016)

If James Madison, one of the drafters of the American Constitution, was correct when he said that “knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives” (Madison, 1822), then it appears as if the South African political elites have only taken the first axiom to heart and have imbibed the seductive notion that their status and position within the body politic imbues them with a knowledge and thus a right to govern the ignorant.

In this sense the idea of who  holds a monopoly of knowledge and power feeds into an approach to governance which can be related to Freire’s Banking Concept of Education which we will refer to as a “Banking Concept of Governance”  where  those in power bestow on community members the privilege of engaging duty bearers from the top down or as Paulo Freire so aptly captured; “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression.” (Freire, 1968)

The inherent paternalism of governance structures, at all levels of government, but specifically at local government level, is reinforced by the manner in which the governance systems are set up through the Municipal Systems Act, which in Section 16(2), legislates that despite the Constitutional  and Legislative requirement that municipalities must develop a culture of community participation, that this injunction  “must not be interpreted as permitting interference with a municipal  council’s right to govern and to exercise the executive and legislative authority of the municipality”. (Act, 2000)

The inherent contradiction of promoting participatory governance on the one hand while denying that participatory processes have any right to assert the sovereignty of the people on the other, stands as a stark reminder that institutional design matters and participatory institutions must have the power to take real decisions to be effective. (Piper,L;Von Lieres,B, 2016)

The contradiction between a political and constitutional system which propagates an inclusionary participatory type of governance and members of society who become disillusioned by their exclusion from participating in decisions that directly affect them has become a key feature of democracy in South Africa today.

As we pause to reflect on 25 years of democracy, the growing disillusionment of so many South Africans must be a cause for great concern. The lessons from around the world, where governments, both left and right of the Neoliberal Western Democracy framework, have found that citizens are no longer content to be pawns in a game of musical chairs in which the elites rotate access to our collective resources.

The past 25 years has shown that we may have freed the markets, but we are yet to start the process of “authentic liberation” of the people, what Freire calls, the process of humanisation. It is only when elections of representatives are not celebrated as the sum total of democracy, and when the people are allowed to enact their sovereignty through the praxis of participation in their governance, that we could hope to say that we have started on our path of transforming our world