What is making failure harder to explain
One of the more prominent theories about the distinction between democracies and autocracies of different dimensions is the idea that within a democracy elected leaders are still accountable to some structure.
Accountability stretches from formal legal mechanisms that emphasise the equality of citizens before the law regardless of their political standing to the social accountability associated with citizens being able ultimately to invoke the power of the ballot to remove errant politicians.
When the most powerful elected politician and first citizen within a democracy is involved, the essence of accountability is more critical and, regrettably, often superficial. A core element of accountability is that the exercise of public power should not be unfettered, and when presidents gravitate towards acting with impunity, sufficient guardrails should be in place — and hopefully be effective enough — to rein in their conduct.
Across different democracies, one element of the presidential powers spectrum that seems to have been spared the accountability net is the use of the power of pardons and the discretion to sign approved laws with no time frames. In some democracies, the use of the presidential power to issue pardons has predictably led to controversial illustrations of implementation.
SA’s systems of accountability are complicated, and far too often presidents have had to be corrected in their conduct. Jacob Zuma’s attempts to rewrite the rules of tenure at the Constitutional Court, upend the already broken land restitution system by opening up new claims before settling the pipeline of disputes, and the commitment to long-term nuclear deals were ultimately derailed by the legal guardrails.
Cyril Ramaphosa’s attempt to rewrite the employment compact between state entities and their executives was found errant by the labour court in the case of Matshela Koko and Eskom. These procedural processes require the type of balance between decisionmaking and public accountability that few leaders have perfected.
This means when politicians want to get their preferred cause of action to survive scrutiny they have to subject themselves to procedural machinations that are not always responsive to the political hysteria of the day.
Some of the ANC’s longstanding policy commitments — forming a state bank, implementing universal healthcare and doing something different about the financing of higher education — are examples of the glaring gap between popular pronouncements and practical lawmaking.
Rather than translate party policy into state actions as soon as the party issues the line of march, the ANC has often found the process so lethargic and cumbersome that it consumes the entire period between its party electoral cycles.
Questions about how a party in government can continuously fail to translate its wishes into action are consistently raised within the party. A source of anxiety stems from the belief that the party’s policy positions are the best options for its voters and the public. When they get paralysed through processes it becomes difficult for the party to explain itself to its own members.
In recent weeks as it heads for a difficult election, the ANC seems to have decided that procedural meanderings should no longer derail some of its most cherished proposals.
The ushering in of the NHI and Postbank amendment bills through the parliamentary processes, despite spirited and often valid concerns, about the NHI in particular, reflects a new sense of urgency within the party’s leadership.
As the bills stand one presidential signature away from becoming the law ahead of a general election, the ANC is preparing to argue that it has delivered on its members’ mandate. But in the absence of concrete responses to the question of how these will be funded, the new guardrail against the party’s wishes may be the money question.
Unlike political decisionmaking, this isn’t responsive to the sentiment of the day, and may just jettison the policy ideas on the scrapheap of abandoned ideals.