GHALEB CACHALIA: Change voting system and ditch politics of allegiance

We have just witnessed an election characterised by fear, identity, populism, ragged rurals, urban lumpens, the legacy of liberation and a misplaced dollop of hope. The intelligentsia has barely moved the needle.

Ideology and identity, fear and fealty — against a background of an increasingly dysfunctional society, mired in a shrinking economy and a system that embeds ineptitude and corruption — remain the order of the day.

The results bear this out; the horse-trading has begun. Still, politics, despite its imperfections, is indispensable for maintaining a free, stable society, involving the art of compromise and negotiation, enabling those with conflicting interests and values to coexist peacefully.

The telling and despairing reality however is that the compromised and battered ANC, with the unscrupulous elements that splintered from it, now account for almost two-thirds of the vote, and that’s where the real negotiations will happen. President Cyril Ramaphosa will be the patsy in the room and the non-ANC opposition is, sadly, simply fluff. Another possible but unlikely scenario is a government of national unity but this would be to the chagrin of MK and the EFF, who see themselves as kinsmen and kingmakers of choice.

Ideally politics is the art of the possible — the art and practice of governance and power — requiring leaders to balance ideals with the practical needs of their societies. It requires a willingness to work together and an ability to understand the words of Yeats, attributed to Parnell on an emergent Ireland: “Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.”

The reality of Parnell’s Ireland in the 1880s is precisely what we face here, about 200 years later — a shrinking economy, a Gini coefficient reflecting the highest global inequality in income distribution, an official unemployment rate of 31.9% and a 45.5% joblessness rate among young people. And yet the scene is set for a coalition of the corrupt while the masses “still break stone”.

To overcome this, politicians face the uphill task of breaking with the conception of any single criterion of a particular unit of population enjoying its own government. The opposition also needs to understand the futility of pursuing, with indecent haste, the desire to be part of government at all costs. Time, as they say, is longer than rope — realignment and building needs to take place.

Appointed team

Enter you and me — beyond simply voting in the cycle of five-year electoral circuses. Here, the words of former president Nelson Mandela serve as an evocative reminder of the responsibility we all bear: “Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires the active participation of the people to flourish.” It is therefore incumbent on us all not to simply be spectators. We need to be active — and educated — participants in a discussion that holds the key to our democracy’s evolution.

In 2002, the then-minister of home affairs, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, appointed an electoral task team to undertake the process of reviewing the current electoral system. The task team, chaired by Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert, was provided with terms of reference to examine the current electoral system and determine if it required any changes and amendments.

Reformists on the task team argued that “the closed list [public representation] system has served us well but there is a need for it to be changed to improve on accountability” and that it is necessary to move away from politics of allegiance, which forces MPs to toe the party line on every issue, to the politics of opinion where MPs speak their mind on issues.

Now is the time to resurrect this endeavour, which was shelved for more than 20 years to put in place a system to improve the accountability of MPs without undermining the other values of the electoral system. That’s how you counter the stranglehold of the corrupt — by making them accountable — not by shouting or begging, but by fomenting structural change.

• Cachalia is a former DA MP and public enterprises spokesperson.