Clawing back on principles

In January this year, a member of the mayoral committee of the City of Joburg was fired following a forensic investigation which found that he had breached the city’s code of conduct and veered dishonourably into the conflict of interest.

According to media reports he is yet to dispute, the politician enriched his friend by facilitating lucrative tenders.

After his axing, he disappeared from the public scene into the wilderness as quickly as his entry into the political terrain had been. However, in July, the politician reappeared, armed with a cellphone and internet connectivity. He announced, on Twitter, that he had defected to another political party.

With the characteristic enthusiasm of a new convert, he excoriated his former political home as nothing but a basket of deplorables, the sort of stuff which excites the media into emptying barrels of ink and culling forests.

For their part, the media covered the gentleman’s political reincarnation as a factual happening with no greater significance: the one political party’s loss was the other’s gain, type of thing.

But that innocuous and normal act of the exercise of the fundamental right to associate and disassociate by a citizen such as the politician in question, contains within it a poisoned chalice, not only for the recipient political party, but the country as a whole.

In our party electoral system, nothing stops his new party from fielding him as a public representative in any of the legislatures of the three spheres of government in the next election or, for that matter, replacing another representative with the newly acquired member between now and the elections.

Make no mistake, ilk of this hue is adept at artful manoeuvres which secures it a seat in the front row sooner than anyone notices. So, if – and God forbid – the politician evades both scrutiny and protest and returns to government in the future as a public representative with executive authority, no one can guarantee that he will not continue to abuse the public trust vested in him by benefitting himself, with his friends acting as proxies.

The incident is, in a sense, a microcosm of the many wrongs about South African politics and political parties. It begs many difficult and controversial questions about the distance between parties’ expressed commitment to and the promotion of the public good, in word and in deed.

Perhaps the simplest but most fundamental of these questions is whether any of our political parties should admit, as members, those expelled or who otherwise ran aground in other parties for betraying the trust of the people and defeating the ends of social justice, worse still when their misadventures are, as in the case of the Johannesburg political grasshopper, enumerated in forensic reports.

Needless to add that the politician in question sees no contradiction in joining a left-leaning party – his new political home – while at the same time clutching for dear life at a membership card of the far right AfriForum. In fairness to him, perhaps a left-leaning party which expediently embraces a member of AfriForum as one of its own has itself a lot to explain.

And since expediency resides in happy neighbourhood with much of our political practice, the question about the admission of questionable characters into political parties understandably courts laughter and ridicule from fatalistic circles that have accepted the Shakespearean inversion of fairness as foul and foul as fairness, as the standard currency of political trade.

But the thinking sections across the political divide would be agreed on the limits of the short-termism of expediency at best and its destructive nature on political parties themselves, the broader social fabric and national political culture at worst.

We need to look no further than our experience of the past decade for clues about how some trends and practices easily assume a life of their own, eventually coming to hurt everyone, including their progenitors.

So, the question we need to pose and answer is, to the extent that the conduct of all political parties impacts on our national life, how does the citizenry hold them accountable in between elections?

Intraparty mechanisms are, of course, the first port of call, and that is the responsibility of party membership and leaders. Beyond individual parties, one is inclined to think that we require a nonpartisan covenant of principles with which South Africans can identify and rally around.

Modelled along the lines of the National Peace Accord of the early 1990s, all political parties could be engaged to commit to the covenant which would be civil society-driven, with participation of the parties for obvious reasons.

The benefits of such a covenant would be multiple. Firstly, it would privilege reasoned dialogue among the parties. This is crucial at a time when the political space is increasingly becoming polarised, has become a conveyor belt of hysterical binaries, denuding itself of seriousness. It runs the risk of inspiring apathy of the kind in which the ill-intentioned thrive best.

Secondly, it would focus the nation’s attention on issues of principle beyond narrow party-political interests and, thus, serve as an important check and balance against the inclination for the usual political closure of ranks which buys politicians an extra day in office, while offending against the national interest.

Thirdly, it could produce an atmospheric political code of conduct; a compact woven from the diversity of our social norms, cultural and religious beliefs, the values and assumptions contained in our national constitution. Political parties would, over time, hopefully find such a code difficult to breach. It would, in theory, help to inspire a desperately needed statespersonship.

None of this, of course, surpasses the need for an education system which – like all education should ideally seek to achieve – in the words of Chinua Achebe, promotes “a critical intelligence” and patriotism. And he described a patriot as one who “will always demand the highest standards of his country and accept nothing but the best for and from people. He will be outspoken in condemnation of their shortcomings without giving way to superiority, despair or cynicism. That is my idea of a patriot.”

The one political party’s loss was the other’s gain