SA ‘needs political accountability’
SA HAS failed to make significant progress in improving political accountability since the end of apartheid, but reforming SA’s electoral system to increase accountability will be insufficient and a “radical change” of political culture is also required, Agang SA leader Mamphela Ramphele said yesterday.
Speaking at a University of SA (Unisa) seminar on accountability and electoral reform, Dr Ramphele said there had been little progress in shaking off a “strongly authoritarian, unaccountable, masculine, political culture” inherited from apartheid.
The Democratic Alliance last month tabled a private member’s bill aimed at replacing proportional representation with a mixed system that is both constituency-based and has a proportional list.
Dr Ramphele had announced at the launch of Agang that changing SA’s proportional representation system to a system where citizens could choose their local MPs directly would be the “first order of business”. She said yesterday that SA “relied too heavily on litigating our way out of disputes”.
Speaking at the seminar yesterday, former minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad said SA’s proportional representation system was still the “fairest and most just” and “there is no wasted vote”.
Dr Pahad said there was no such thing as a “perfect system” and “if they want to argue for a mixed system they must produce irrefutable evidence that it will make those representatives more accountable”.
The African National Congress defence of proportional representation had come after much thought on what was best for the country, not just the party, he said.
Responding at the seminar to Dr Mamphele and Dr Pahad, Unisa senior politics lecturer Prof Dirk Kotzé said that with numerous examples of highly democratic countries with varying systems of government, “electoral systems are not always the complete solutions to problems of accountability”. Accountability was generally the result of the political culture that built up around electoral systems such as “how organised civil society is”.
While he would agree there was something lacking in SA’s political culture, “the question then is who changes the political culture?”