Business Day: Whether it lasts is in hands of citizens

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A761632

Whether it lasts is in hands of citizens
Steven Friedman

A FELLOW columnist said in a conversation last week, “You know it can’t last.” Whether he is right depends on what “it” is. An irony of our current politics is that, while doom and gloom have engulfed many in business and the professions, democracy is, in important ways, doing better than it has for a long while.

Parliament continues to hold the government to account more than ever before, most recently by threatening a vote of no confidence in the SABC board. The African National Congress (ANC) now differs with the government on electricity price rises and Zimbabwe, to name but two issues. Public consultation on national problems is about to be revived with an energy summit later this month. And by far the most impressive sign of democratic health is citizens’ action, which prevented a Chinese ship carrying arms for Zimbabwe’s regime from docking here. Just as AIDS activists badly wounded one key blot on government policy over the past few years, workers who refused to handle the ship’s cargo and church leaders who blocked the government’s decision to allow the ship to dock severely damaged another: failure to support democracy in Zimbabwe.

These signs of democratic vigour have not yet filtered down to the grassroots, where people still find it difficult to be heard — and, if the allegations of Durban shack-dwellers are a guide, are stomped on by police if they try. But, if democracy does become stronger, it may become deeper too, allowing opportunities for grassroots voices to make themselves heard.

The vigour is also, as my colleague pointed out, not guaranteed to last. The new atmosphere is largely a product of fluidity in the ANC alliance, which may end after the next election, when a new government leadership takes office.

SO IS democracy’s flourish this year merely a sign that power is shifting from one group to another, not that the people are acquiring more of a say in how they are governed?

The answer depends on what it is that we expect to last. The ANC’s enthusiasm for holding the government to account does not seem likely to endure: it is far more probable that it will rally behind its new leadership after the election — at least in public.

But nor is it inevitable that the election of a new government leadership next year will simply place the lid back on effective action to hold political office-bearers to account. Whether it does will depend not on politicians but on the most important democratic actors of the past few weeks, citizens. If the spirit that led the unionists, church leaders and public interest lawyers to defeat a government attempt to help Zimbabwe’s elite remains alive, democracy’s shot in the arm should endure, whatever the politicians do.

In a letter on the action against the arms shipment, former minister Kader Asmal said that it should not have been necessary for citizens to act because the government should have done the right thing off its own bat. He was making a valid rhetorical point — that the government ought to have applied its own rules. But, in all societies, governments rarely do the right thing unless citizens force them to do it. And so the government after the next election will not account and respond to the people in the way that it should unless citizens act.

It may sound a little tired to insist that democratic government is too important to be left to politicians. But it remains true. Government works for people when they are able to use their democratic rights to make it do what they want, not when they wait for office holders to do the right thing. While differences between politicians have opened up space for democracy to grow, the gains will not last if we rely on political leaders to sustain them. The strength, depth and length of this democratic opening will depend on citizens more than on those who seek to govern in their name.

# Dr Friedman is a research associate at Idasa and visiting professor of politics at Rhodes University.