We’ve never had a democracy in SA, just a blank cheque for a clique

The demise of apartheid and the emergence of a new order is a story often told with great excitement and gusto, accompanied by a fair amount of chest-thumping — the first and peaceful all-race elections, a miracle transition, a shining constitution and all that.

If there was an award for bragging, we’d win it at a canter. We certainly have a system that is, at last, thankfully shorn of apartheid oppression — but we don’t have a democracy. We never had. It’s about time we disabused ourselves of that notion. What we do have is an arrangement neatly concocted and packaged by a small clique to serve their own parochial interests. The rest of us are simply extras in what has turned out to be a horror movie.

It’s a real stitch-up. And every five years for three decades we’ve been invited to participate in elections to legitimise this confidence trick. We will again faithfully do our duty on May 29. They’ll pocket their blank cheque and then vanish into the sunset — and we won’t see them for another five years.

It’s a surprise that this deception has gone on for so long without provoking any protest or backlash. Because this democracy is now not what it’s cracked up to be. But it’s easy to understand why. The end of apartheid has been sold as the beginning of a new era, one of democracy. But the removal or absence of oppression does not in itself amount to democracy.

It goes back to the very beginning. The fight has always been characterised as an anti-apartheid struggle, and not a struggle for democracy. And thus we had anti-apartheid — not pro-democracy — leaders and movements. The emphasis was always on getting rid of apartheid; that overshadowed everything else to such an extent that the general belief was that defeating the system would either be an end in itself or deliver the much sought-after democracy.

Various documents such the Freedom Charter, African Claims and others charted the way forward, but they were never the focus. They were waived or deployed whenever required. The attention was on slaying the dragon of apartheid.

But South Africa was not alone in its singular focus on the immediate yoke of oppression to the detriment of what comes after. Just about all colonised people identified or characterised their fight for freedom as an anti-colonial struggle. Africa, especially, paid dearly for this inattentiveness. As a result, as soon as their colonial masters had departed, military dictatorships — some even more ruthless and murderous than the colonists — took over and maimed and plundered.

Many of these countries have yet to emerge from that nightmare. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. Though South Africa avoided a military dictatorship, it has nevertheless had a de facto one-party state since the fall of apartheid. And a fact that is often overlooked is that the people who met at Kempton Park to discuss and decide on the new dispensation had no popular mandate.

For obvious reasons, there was never any plebiscite or measure to elect representatives of the people to Codesa or gauge citizens’ views on the issues discussed. Some of the individuals at the talks were hardly recognisable to the people they claimed to represent. The ANC, for instance, came back from almost 30 years in exile to claim its God-given mantle as the true representative of the people. No wonder, therefore, that such an undemocratic gathering saw no fault in crafting an electoral system that required minimal, if any, scrutiny of the so-called public representatives by the electorate.

Without public accountability, parliament has thus been turned into a madhouse crawling with crooks and charlatans, with no fear of being taken to task by voters. MPs are appointed or removed from parliament without any say by the public or voters. Party leaders hand out positions as favours or rewards to friends or acquaintances. It is an outrage, an obscenity, which is allowed under the current system.

It’s akin to loan sharks and dove merchants doing business at the temple. Unfortunately for us, nobody is available to kick over the tables. The president, who wields enormous powers to appoint members of his cabinet, judges, premiers, army generals and, if need be, to wage war and the like does so without any public mandate of his own. He is elected by MPs who have themselves not been chosen by voters. No wonder that in our short history of democracy we have had the good fortune to choose a school dropout as president.

In 2023 President Cyril Ramaphosa signed an amendment to the Electoral Act allowing independent candidates to take part in elections. It’s stunning to think that, after 30 years of a democracy serenaded as among the best in the world, it’s only now that people without affiliation can participate in an election. Even then the government only reluctantly passed it after a Constitutional Court judgment.

But the amendment still either doesn’t go far enough or has got the wrong end of the stick. The burning question is not how to allow candidates to participate in elections (though that’s important), but how to devise the most effective method for voters to choose their representatives, and, having done so, to hold them accountable.

We need to get to a situation where a person can hold public office only by virtue of a direct election by voters. Most of our problems stem from the fact that we have a political elite that is unaccountable to those it claims to represent. And most MPs are freeloaders without any particular use to the public, just to their party. The only way to know what kind of an electoral system the public would prefer would be to consult the public. A referendum would be ideal to resolve the issue.