SA will not be shaped by fork in the road
THE African National Congress (ANC) is in a mess. The recent elections exposed the party’s vulnerability to defeat in metropolitan areas. The organisational weaknesses of the ANC extend from its candidate selection and leadership election processes to its ramshackle membership systems and money-fuelled politics. It has found itself unable to advance coherent economic and developmental policies.
Given how hard it is for political parties to change their character, this raises questions about what the future holds for the country. How will SA change when the ANC’s hold on power is threatened?
Those trying to answer this question have mostly set off down two well-trodden paths. The first scenario is that SA’s “dominant party” political system will “normalise” into something like western European multiparty democracy. One political scientist has described the transformation of one-party dominance into competitive multiparty democracy as akin to “the passage from adolescence into adulthood”.
The second scenario draws on the tragic trajectories of Southern African liberation movements. Roger Southall’s magnificent book, Liberation Movements in Power, charts how former freedom fighters have become corrupt, authoritarian, intolerant of opposition and self-enriching. The liberators in Namibia and Zimbabwe had to fight big settler populations that would not concede power. They became militaristic, secretive and arrogant.
Repeated electoral majorities, combined with prolonged control of government, resulted in a collapse of boundaries between state and party. Nationalist elites stepped into the shoes of departing colonial rulers, adopted their lifestyles and pretensions, and cynically transferred resources into their own pockets under the guise of Africanisation or indigenisation. Which path will SA follow? Neither. There is little reason to believe a stable multiparty democracy in the European mould will emerge in SA in the foreseeable future. It is true that one-time dominant parties in the north — as in Sweden, Canada, Ireland and Italy — no longer enjoy electoral and ideological control in their societies. But dominant party systems can take decades to break down, and there can be numerous reversals along the way. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, for example, came back to power in 2012, just as its terminal demise was once again confidently predicted.
However, the fact that the ANC is a Southern African liberation movement does not compel it to degeneration. Patterns of white domination varied in Southern African societies. The ANC, Southall notes, emerged in “a far more advanced, more complicated, more urbanised, and more diverse society” than its peers, it must work with a larger settler population, and it possesses some ability to fund redistributive programmes because of SA’s larger economy.
Citizens and political leaders have become trapped in an impoverished intellectual universe that allows for only two futures: a “slippery slope” towards authoritarian rule or a “consolidation of liberal democracy”. If we range more widely among the countries of the global south, where most of the world’s population lives, we can find all manner of political and institutional accommodations to the challenges of poverty, inequality and corruption and to the enticements of enrichment and power.
Parties in middle-income countries on other continents preside over relatively advanced and urbanised economies such as SA’s, in which statebusiness relations are complex and there is a large middle class and powerful trade unions.
Political parties such as Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, Taiwan’s Kuomintang, and Malaysia’s United Malays National Organisation offer compelling evidence that dominant parties in competitive political systems can avert, or even come back from, defeat — while democracy deepens.
Political leaders, moreover, are not merely passive observers of history. If they can learn the right lessons from a wide range of societies, they can become capable not just of surviving in a competitive party system but also of thriving in it.
Butler’s Remaking the ANC: Lessons from the Global South, will be launched in October.