DA’s gagging of candidates for party leader boggles the mind

Ihave long held the view that there is something suspicious about political parties that hold their primary leadership elections in secret, hidden from public scrutiny and from the voters who give them power and position in the first place.

Often the false principle of party elections being an “internal matter” is held up as the reason for this, usually with great loftiness and pomposity, and most often by those least likely to survive examination in a competitive electoral process.

My conviction has its roots in my own experience, running for leader of the parliamentary opposition in 2011, when I was actively discouraged from disrupting the “tradition” whereby parliamentary caucus elections were governed by internal back-scratching, secret deals and electoral choices that had less to do with the public good than with internal factional arithmetic.

Any political party that preaches openness and transparency in public but practises the opposite in private is guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy, and I had no interest in participating in such shenanigans. I felt strongly that our MPs had a duty to be able to look the voters who elected themin the eye and openly justify their choices based on what they said in the public arena; not simply to offer the paternalistic argument that the matter was an “internal” one.

Ours is a democratic state founded on the values of “a multiparty system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness”. Political leaders participating in this system represent not only card-carrying party members but also the voters who elect them.

Dodging voter accountability by using “internal processes” as a justification for shutting primary elections from public view seems to imply that openness is at odds with some other imperative identified by those on the inside of the political organisation. This tends to be anything from a predetermined outcome to bribery and “jobs for pals”, as opposed to a legitimate political contestation with an unforeseeable outcome.

For years — especially since Polokwane in 2007 — opposition parties have moaned bitterly about how 5,000 or so party delegates at ANC conferences effectively get to choose the next president of SA, without the public being able to scrutinise the offers made by the respective candidates — whose election (or not) could be the difference between government by a capable state and the decline presided over by a failed one.

Given all of this, it really does boggle the mind that SA’s largest opposition party, which positions itself as a champion of openness and transparency in democratic processes, would in 2020 place a gag order on its candidates for party leader, effectively banning them from debating publicly their respective visions for the party and the country.

This, paradoxically, is in stark contrast to the governing party, which in 2017 opened up its internal conference election for party president and senior office-bearers to public scrutiny and engagement for the very first time. Electoral slates were announced; party delegates and senior cabinet ministers alike declared their affiliations openly and publicly via social media; panel discussions and debates were held; and songs of support for the competing presidential candidates were sung in every corner of the country.

Whether or not you support the DA or the ANC, it stands to reason that these two parties have an outsize impact not only on their members but on all the people of SA. The ANC arguably followed the DA’s example of open contestation in 2017, only for the official opposition to shutter its own electoral processes less than three years later. Today, the party that for many years has called for a series of public pre-election debates between party presidential candidates can no longer legitimately make this call in the coming polls because it has abandoned this very principle in private.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope for democratic accountability outside of the vicissitudes of party politics: the pending amendment to the Electoral Act ordered by the Constitutional Court earlier this year will allow independent candidates to contest seats in the National Assembly and the provincial legislatures for the first time in the 2024 general election.

Under the right systemic arrangements, direct elections will dilute the power of “jobs for pals” within the party system, because for the first time party candidates will have to face off against independent candidates with no stake in their internal, factional battles. Emerging parliamentary candidates will be able to campaign publicly, uncensored by party processes and internal rulings.

At the same time, brave leaders in the existing political parties who understand that election to national party leadership is not a decision to be taken in secret, but rather by a broad coalition of voters and supporters inspired by the possibility of transforming our society, should continue to battle the internal forces that wish to stifle openness and accountability in their own organisations.