More effective way to having a say in SA
There are ways citizens can influence a democratic government. Writing to an official inquiry is not one of them. By late last week the parliamentary committee examining whether the Constitution should be changed to allow land expropriation without compensation had received some 722,000 submissions, by far the most anyone can remember an official inquiry receiving.
It is a safe bet that not one of these will have a bearing on the decision.
Committee chairman Vincent Smith says many of the submissions simply say that the people sending them are for or against the change. He says these will be ignored, which is good news for democrats. In democracies, decisions should reflect what most people want. How many people send in a submission expressing a view is no guide to that.
There is scope for rigging. The committee has no capacity to check whether people are manufacturing submissions. And even if every one of them is genuine, those who have sent them are less than 5% of the adult population. There may be no connection at all between what most people say in their submissions and what most South Africans think.
Smith says the committee will take seriously submissions that make concrete suggestions. He has to say that and may well mean it. But that does not mean these submissions will really make any difference. The debate over land is not a technical discussion in which Parliament is looking for good ideas — it is highly political. And so the decision will be a product of politics: who is seen to have power and political judgments on what needs to be done to anger as few people as possible.
Those who will decide know whose voices they believe are important. They don’t need submissions to tell them, which suggests that the submissions are theatre, creating the impression that people are participating when they are not. So, if citizens want to be heard and the government wants to hear them, public submissions to the committee are a waste of time and energy.
Despite the room for manipulation, the land submissions probably do show that many people want to be heard on this issue. But citizens who want a voice won’t be heard unless they recognise that getting together with others and using the rights the Constitution guarantees will make far more of a difference than using official committees.
In the early years of democracy here the government set up scores of committees that were meant to give citizens a say in everything it does. None of them actually gave the people a voice. By contrast, people have won school textbooks, or protection from authorities who want to throw them out of their homes, or treatment for HIV/AIDS, by using their rights to make themselves heard on their terms, not those of officials.
At best, official channels for citizens to voice their opinions listen to those who are organised and so would have been heard anyway. At worst, they are fake democracy to avoid the real thing.
People are more likely to make a difference if they find ways to speak to their fellow citizens rather than committees.
If the government wants to listen it must recognise that expecting people to come to Parliament, whether by writing submissions or appearing in person, is an excuse for hearing the people, not the real thing.
If it really wants to know what people think, it will need to ensure that Parliament and the public service go to the people, particularly those who are not organised and most need to be heard.
The people, especially those who are not organised, need a stronger voice. That means more real democracy and fewer imitations.