Second Codesa — a seemingly attractive idea that does not translate well into the real world

At the weekend, former president Thabo Mbeki again repeated his call for a national dialogue after the elections, with BusinessLIVE quoting him as saying, “The idea that there are some political parties, even the ANC, that have answers to all [SA’s] problems is ... wrong. The people of SA must participate in a process of determining the future of this country.”

He, and many others, have made this call in the past.

They have often been supported. In these pages, Omry Makgoale wrote that it was an “excellent” suggestion.

Many others might agree. They will point to the problems we faced in the 1990s, and how they were overcome through a long process of negotiation.

However, there are many obstacles facing such a process now.

Perhaps the most obvious is, who would do the negotiating? And who would they represent?

In 1990, it was fairly clear the apartheid government had to negotiate with the ANC. To this day, some believe the ANC was given too much power during this time, and that other groups which fought against apartheid were left out.

Of course, other parties were involved, including the IFP and others that still exist.

But, in the end, the Codesa talks used a concept sometimes referred to as “sufficient consensus”. In practice, it appeared to mean that “sufficient consensus” was when the ANC and the National Party agreed.

The situation would be very different now.

There would be no agreement on who should be represented. Not one group represents all black people or all white people. Or any other racial or ethnic group. It would be strange to try to use such a basis for negotiation anyway.

Also, probably the single group (if it can be called that) which needs the loudest voice in the room is the unemployed, who have no opportunity to earn a sustainable income. This group is so large that if all of the people in this category voted for one party that party would probably have a two-thirds majority in Parliament.

But there is no large formal group which can claim to represent them. So how would their voice be heard?

There is another, possibly fatal, problem with the suggestion of a “national dialogue”, which is: what would this process be trying to achieve?

Political analyst Professor Steven Friedman has suggested that while the original Codesa was trying to negotiate a political solution, what is needed now is an economic negotiation.

The elephant in the room

He told SAfm on Monday that for this you “need a negotiation rather than a dialogue” and that “race is still the elephant in the room”.

As he pointed out, while most people might think such a dialogue would occur over several days in a boardroom, in real life it requires sustained work over a long period.

But even if the conversation was confined (probably unwisely) to just the economy, recent history shows how difficult it is to reach any kind of agreement.

In 2017, Cyril Ramaphosa was elected leader of the ANC after promising a social pact between business, labour and government.

When he was elected President of South Africa in 2019, he again promised this would happen.

The complete failure of himself, his government and the National Economic Development and Labour Council to bring this about over the last six years shows how nigh impossible it is.

There is another huge problem, which Mbeki did not appear to address in his public comments: once such a process of a “national dialogue” is under way, would there be any undertaking that the government of the day would not simply veto the result?

While this threat also hung over the Codesa negotiations, the fact is that the moral weight of the ANC was simply too great for the apartheid government to bear. It had to give way.

Moral legitimacy

The same would not necessarily be the case now. Any government wishing to veto the result of such a process could simply claim that it had the moral legitimacy to do so because it won the majority of votes in an election.

It could even argue that an election result would be more legitimate than any process of negotiation involving just a small group of people.

This factor is one of the reasons such “national dialogues” are very rare around the world. They tend to happen only once every several generations.

In most cases, they come after a period of conflict, such as war, or a war for liberation from a colonial power, or after the collapse of an authoritarian government.

The US for example, has arguably not had such a meeting since 1789.

(One could arguably peg that date to 31 January 1865, when the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. — Ed)

Perhaps the biggest reason for this is that democratic countries tend to contain within themselves the ability to manage change, and thus for reform. In other words, the very system of democracy allows voters to ensure their country changes direction when it has to.

(Of course, that is just the idea. In practice, it does not mean voters do not make irrational decisions that are against their longer-term self-interest.)

What is clear is that South Africa faces crises that are so deep that many people believe our current system and our current politics are not able to resolve them.

When a former President from the party currently in power makes a call for a national dialogue, it is a demonstration that they believe the system is failing.

This call has its dangers.

Many people might put time and energy into calling for this “national dialogue” that will not be ultimately productive. They could rather be putting that time and energy into trying to resolve our problems.

Instead of pushing for an event that will never happen, it would be better to focus on using the tools we have, through our democracy, to ensure that real, positive change occurs. DM