We should be allowed to vote for local representatives answerable to us

I’D LIKE to endorse today’s letter by Barbie Sandler with her insight into possible flaws in democracy in South Africa versus England’s Westminster system.

The truth is we live in an almost ‘democratic-dictatorship’, in that we don’t vote for local representatives, like they do in England, but we simply vote for a party.

As a result, there’s a risk the party leader can end up being dictatorial, by controlling who stays in the party.

It’s a fact that President Zuma oversees the salaries of 60 percent of the ANC national executive committee (128 members). Furthermore, he gets voted as leader by 2 000 delegates. So his primary motivation might be to keep those 2 000 delegates happy, and he could be doing so with patronage.

We have a similar situation on a municipal level in Cape Town, where De Lille controls who stays in her council, and as a result gets little or no opposition to her atrocious abuse of office, when she sells public land to private developers. In doing so, she overrides both local objections and heritage guidelines to favour party donors and selfish developers!

Cape Town specifically, and South Africa in general, desperately needs electoral reform to protect us from abusers of office.

We can start by demanding that, on a municipal level at least, we be allowed to vote for local representatives, answerable to us, rather than voting for party leaders who answer to no one except their inner circle.