The ANC guide to truncating democracy

What is happening to the ANC? Raw power politics has replaced principle. Where are the women and men of heart and reason to raise their voices within the party now? Too few; too overrun by a new brand of leadership that has tasted state power and wants more of it, unfettered.

Maybe this is why the ANC still likes insisting that it is a liberation movement engaged in a “national democratic revolution”, rather than just another political party. This insistence is a final grasp at the mythology that many of us believed about the organisation when it was still banned.

As tales of the real ANC in exile emerge, it is sliding seemingly irrevocably into exactly the same morass of expedience, patronage and power-mongering that has led citizens from the United States to most of Africa to disengage from politics. Indeed, when questioned about unsound practices, the response from ANC spokespeople has sometimes even been: “So what? It is done elsewhere.” Did we not, as South Africans, set a higher bar for ourselves than what exists “elsewhere”?

In the beginning of the 2000s, I wrote a column about my disappointment with the ANC — much to the dismay of my conservative media colleagues of the time. I complained because there had been a downward shift in the lives of a substantial number of black people.

According to the US-based Economic Policy Institute, 1995 marks the year when South Africa overtook Brazil as the most unequal country in the world for which statistics are available. Inequality worsened thereafter. Recently the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and the South African Institute for Race Relations both confirmed the exacerbation of inequality in the second half of the 2000s.

Apart from the continuation of apartheid’s economic legacy, there were a few other warning signs: Thabo Mbeki’s Aids denialism had become obvious and his government’s evasive policy towards the crisis in Zimbabwe had kicked in.

But even before that, as most of us have since realised, the ANC-in-government lost its innocence with the arms deal. Some of the details of corruption have since emerged, but more can be expected. To prevent being caught out, the leadership took drastic measures to manipulate the inquiry into the arms transactions.

This was the moment when Parliament went from representing the will of the people to becoming an institution of complacency that only springs into action on command from the executive.

The loss of Parliament as institution of oversight over the executive was accompanied by its derogation to a mechanism to dispense patronage to those loyal to the party line, as set by the ANC leadership. The system of proportional representation makes this possible as party lists compiled by party leaders — and not voters — determine which individuals get to Parliament.

The sorry condition of Parliament means that the decision to disband the Scorpions — oops, I mean “to amalgamate them with the police”, as the official line would love us to believe — will pass without resistance in Parliament. In fact, even more so because MPs will be keen to prove their pliability to the new leadership elected at the ANC’s Polokwane conference.

The emasculation of Parliament went mainly unheeded — economic growth was picking up, so the white and black middle class didn’t notice. But it represented a blistering blow to our fledgling democracy, delivered a mere six years or so into post-apartheid South Africa.

Seen from this angle, another explanation emerges for the appeasement of Zanu-PF. The executive’s treatment of Zanu-PF constitutes a high level of tolerance for dictatorial behaviour. Its treatment of Parliament is that same tolerance taken a step further to safeguard not just party interests but also particular individuals’ positions in power.

From here it is a small skip to the disregard of democratic principles as witnessed in the open warfare between Mbeki and Jacob Zuma during the past couple of years. The first hint of the coming power struggle appeared in the early 2000s when the latter made a public declaration that he was not interested in succeeding Mbeki.

This was a peculiar statement that came out of the blue. It has since emerged that the ANC Youth League had touted Zuma as successor and that Mbeki subsequently set out to derail the league’s plans. Thus the next step in the truncation of our democracy is the moment when the issue of succession arises. (Sounds depressingly familiar, non?)

We know what happened: Zuma was dismissed; intelligence head Billy Masetlha was dismissed; National Director of Public Prosecutions Vusi Pikoli was suspended to block the prosecution of police Commissioner Jackie Selebi; Gerrie Nel of the Scorpions was arrested on trumped-up charges. The separation of powers and the rule of law received more blows; the principle of equality before the law was flouted. In between it all, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge was dismissed for being honest about the health crisis in the country.

Because, lest we forget, while the elites are rolling around in the dust to see who will get the state next, most South Africans still remain dependent on a health system that is becoming more decrepit by the day. Similarly, young South Africans are risking their lives at schools where textbooks have not been delivered and teachers have long ago lost interest (some have, however, not lost interest in sexually abusing the pupils they are supposed to be teaching). The list goes on.

But the Cabinet under Mbeki has approached all of this in the same way as the electricity crisis — with an attitude of arrogance and dismissiveness. Which is partly why a new leadership was elected at the Polokwane conference.

Whatever burst of optimism might have occurred because of this rare display of democracy in Africa where a sitting party leader is deposed internally has dissipated quickly. Because here we go again: the Scorpions will be closed down. The real reason can only be their effectiveness in combating organised crime, whether or not ANC high-flyers are involved. The dominant position within the ANC seems to be that only some suspects may be prosecuted — not those with ANC positions.

While the Zuma group’s argument for scrapping the Scorpions has been that the unit’s prosecution has been selective — that is, only of people regarded by Mbeki as threats — this does not justify disbanding it. If the allegations against Selebi are true, we are sitting with a situation of corruption right to the top of the police service. This would never have been exposed without the Scorpions being in existence. It shows we cannot do without an institution outside the police to act as counterweight when the police themselves are compromised. If anything, restructure the Scorpions to halt political interference.

But, as the Mail & Guardian recently showed, about 33% of the newly elected national executive committee of the ANC have had a brush with the law — or is having a brush with the law as we speak. For example, the parliamentarian appointed to drive the disbandment of the Scorpions, Nyami Booi, has been entangled in a court case due to the travel-voucher scam exposed by the very Scorpions that he seeks to have scrapped. And then there’s the case against his leader … It is not in these people’s interest to have an effective crime-fighting unit in the country.

The transparency of the motive behind the anti-Scorpions campaign, and the impunity with which this motive is being pursued, is perhaps scariest of all.

Our democracy withers.