http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A744397
09 April 2008
Actions to secure future of freedom
Steven Friedman
AS MANY of us hope anxiously that the will of the Zimbabwean people will finally be heard, some South Africans wonder whether our neighbour’s current travail is our future.
Fears that we too might have to contend with a governing elite that digs itself into power are sometimes based on a crude prejudice that insists that black-run countries cannot be democratic, despite much evidence to the contrary. But not all are — people on the left have been known to talk about the “Zanufication” of the African National Congress (ANC), particularly under its old leadership.
These concerns are prompted by a real problem. National movements that lead a successful fight for democracy are usually assured of winning elections for several decades. This can insulate them from the people they are meant to represent and convince them that they are entitled to govern forever because they alone represent the people.
The test comes when the movement faces a serious threat of losing at the polls — usually because a section breaks away and forms an opposition party with enough credibility to challenge for power.
It is not inevitable that the national movement in government will then resist democracy. While Zimbabwe’s leadership has done this, Zambia’s, under Kenneth Kaunda, lost an election and accepted the will of the people. India began much as we have: with a national movement that led the fight for freedom and was guaranteed, for three decades, of winning elections. When the Indian National Congress faced an opposition capable of winning elections, India made the transition to a robust democracy.
So our future is not predetermined. At some point, the ANC will face a challenge from an opposition at the polls. It will then either accept that the people have a right to vote it out of office — or resist.
ITS response is likely to depend on the precedents which are built between now and then. If we are able, in the time before the ANC faces that challenge, to establish that leaders can be removed by those they lead, we are likely to move relatively smoothly to a more vigorous democracy in which governments may regularly be removed from office by voters.
As this column has argued before, Polokwane was, in this context, a major advance, not because it necessarily elected better leaders but because it may have established a pattern in which the removal of one group of leaders by another in a free vote is considered normal, not a betrayal of the national struggle.
But Polokwane has not yet placed us on an irreversible path to a working democracy. First, it will do so only if the precedent it sets is sustained — if ANC leaders continue to be reminded that they remain in office only as long as their constituency wants them there.
Second, the vigorous democracy the ANC delegates enjoyed must be available to all. Activists sympathetic to the Durban shack-dweller movement Abahlali base Mjondolo have compiled a dossier that lists a series of police actions designed to prevent it and its members from exercising their right to speak and to act. Abahlali is not part of the ANC camp; it insists it is politically independent: our democratic future will not be secure if freedom to hold power to account is the preserve of elites — or ANC activists — only. The more the rights of grassroots people are protected, whatever their politics, the better able will we be to face the democratic test.
Third, our institutions will have to survive the contest between ANC camps. If we do not emerge from the current ferment with an independent media and courts, we will find it far harder to move to a more robust democracy.
Despite the doomsayers, who believe we cannot build a working democracy, we are in much better shape to pass the test than we were last year. But we need to set more democratic precedents if we are to prove them wrong.
# Dr Friedman is a research associate at Idasa and visiting professor of politics at Rhodes University.