As election day approaches, political parties are consolidating their candidate lists, chopping and changing who should be included on or excluded from the final lists before they are declared ahead of the election date.
We hope all political parties will place patriots in their candidate lists and discard crooks and fraudsters. In the same way, we hope all political parties will place democrats on their candidate lists and discard racists and bigots.
Parliamentary democracy in South Africa requires better. It urgently needs parliamentarians of integrity.
During the Zuma presidency, with the sole exception of courageous heroine Makhosi Khoza, ANC governing party MPs colluded as South Africa was sold off to the highest bidder.
The reality is, this country’s parliamentary system is not fit for purpose. This was proved under Zuma, while current President Cyril Ramaphosa’s hands remain tied, and we, the voters, are powerless.
Under our current parliamentary electoral laws, unlike experienced parliamentary democracies such as Britain and the United States, we as voters have no way of directly choosing our Members of Parliament, person by person, for ourselves. We have no power over any individual MP, once that person has been placed on the party list by party headquarters. Our one and only right under universal franchise in South Africa is — tick a box to choose a party for the National Assembly.
We are treated like children, as if we are not responsible enough to know whether this or that person is trustworthy or a crook. The governing party since the beginning of the universal franchise, the ANC, behaves as if it is our parent and it must make all the choices of MPs on our behalf. It is as if we are too immature or stupid to choose one person instead of another.
In this sense, every general election expresses not so much our empowerment as our humiliation and lack of power. That is why State Capture and wholesale corruption takes place so easily in our country, and why governing party MPs have been so useless in defending us, the nation.
The fact is, the 100% proportional representation electoral law does not allow us, the voters, to directly choose our representatives. It is a disguised form of apartheid. Before 1994 black voters did not have a direct relation with any MP in the national Parliament in Cape Town, and today, under the new dispensation, black voters still do not have a direct relation with any MP. The only change is that black voters can now vote for a political party of their choice. No more than that.
Effectively, there is still apartheid, or apartness, of MPs from the electorate.
We are not yet a representative democracy, since MPs represent their party headquarters but they do not represent a single voter. It is our powerlessness as voters that enabled State Capture, the Guptas and the Bosasa scandal.
For the white voters, it has been a decline from their apartheid era rights, since under apartheid the white voters could directly vote for their own choice of Member of Parliament, to represent them in their local constituency. In 1948, even the previous Prime Minister, General Jan Smuts, who had governed South Africa during World War 2, lost his seat at Standerton in the general election which brought the National Party to power.
That was the voter power we have been deprived of.
It is unacceptable that we continue to accept this deprivation, dating from the apartheid system. It is true we are living under an “unfinished revolution”. The people of South Africa do not govern, as the Freedom Charter promised, which is why South Africa has an urgent need for electoral reform. We need a mass movement to demand this during the next Parliament.
For the coming general election, however, there is nothing we can do about it — except one thing.
Let us demand a clean Parliament, even under these conditions. But a clean parliament can only be achieved through clean lists of candidates for every political party. It is our right — and duty — to demand a clean National Assembly consisting of MPs with integrity. Every political party should be held to account for this by its voters.
The way to achieve this is for voters to ask to see the candidate list when political parties start campaigning from house to house. Scrutiny of the candidate lists will show those who are implicated in the State Capture inquiry, those who are on the Bosasa payroll and those who depleted VBS Mutual Bank, the bank of pensioners in Limpopo province.
We must rightfully ask the respective party agents why they have known crooks on their candidate list, and we must demand that fraudsters be removed from the list.
Voters deserve respect, but only if we stand up for ourselves. If you accept thieves in your party’s candidate list, so be it — but don’t complain later about corruption.
It is time, and over-time, to take responsibility for the mess that we ourselves, as voters, have allowed this country to fall into. DM
