Dear Boris’s Britain, now you know what it feels like…
I’m in a WhatsApp group with two New Zealanders who have lived and worked in London for some time. On Wednesday, after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s shock decision to suspend parliament, prompting protests across the UK, one posted to the group, “This place is going to the dogs. Hope y’all are registered to vote!” The other responded, “It’s a scene.”
To be fair, they come from a country second only to Denmark (and narrowly so) in a ranking of the least corrupt countries in the world.
As a South African, my reaction was more muted.
About the same time that a crowd was gathering outside Westminster on Wednesday chanting “No-one voted for Boris” while hashtagging StoptheCoup and declaring British democracy dead, opportunistic looters were burning buildings and trying to make off with flat-screen TVs in Pretoria, after taxi drivers had blocked several roads and brought the CBD to a standstill. Now that’s what I call a scene.
Still, my Kiwi friends aren’t wrong in being appalled by Johnson’s decision to shut down parliament for five weeks in the run-up to Brexit. It’s not so much that parliament is being prorogued (to use the technical term). This happens as a matter of course when one parliamentary session ends and another begins. It is that the proroguing is happening for two weeks longer than usual, right before Brexit.
The inescapable conclusion is that Johnson is trying to force through a no-deal exit without parliamentary scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, it is being seen as an underhanded attack on constitutional democracy.
Here too, South Africans have some experience. SA’s constitutional democracy has faced covert and overt attacks from the executive, including in 2012 when then president Jacob Zuma suggested the Constitutional Court’s powers be reviewed.
That’s to say nothing of his contemptuous treatment of both the court and chapter nine institutions set up to safeguard democracy, including the office of the public protector under Thuli Madonsela.
If anything, politics in the West is starting to look familiar.
It’s not just Johnson’s attack on constitutional democracy, mind you. If you thought Zuma was an exception in his penchant for hiring and firing ministers in the dead of night, look no further than Johnson’s July cabinet reshuffle. Dubbed the “midsummer massacre” by British media, Johnson’s latenight reshuffle looked an awful lot like Zuma’s periodic purges.
Indeed, more than half of predecessor Theresa May’s cabinet were fired or resigned, with Johnson naming new appointees to the critical offices of finance minister, home secretary and foreign secretary.
Like the ANC, Johnson’s Conservative Party is fractured and failing to provide decisive leadership at a time when Britain needs it most.
Over in the US, meanwhile, President Donald Trump happily attacks the independence of the Federal Reserve. SA politicians, who, like Trump, demonstrate a disregard for the sanctity of central bank independence, have fired similar salvos at the SA Reserve Bank.
After the recent announcement of a 25-basis-point cut to interest rates by Fed chair Jay Powell, Trump took to Twitter to declare, “As usual, Powell let us down, but at least he is ending quantitative tightening, which shouldn’t have started in the first place no inflation. We are winning anyway, but I am certainly not getting much help from the Federal Reserve!”
This sentiment echoes that of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, whose suggestion that the Reserve Bank’s mandate be expanded to include job creation and economic growth implies the Bank is partly to blame for SA’s economic woes.
Safe to say, SA is far from being the only country, or indeed the only democracy, with a political leadership crisis.
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Ziady writes from London