Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - Everyone must have had their moment when they concluded that things are broken in our current system of government and require a strong involvement of independent public representatives with no political party affiliation, and here is mine.
The lack of improvement in municipal outcomes over many years was an indictment of the entire local government accountability ecosystem, which failed to act and arrest the decline characterised by poor service delivery.
As South Africans welcome the adoption by the National Assembly on February 23 of the amendments to the Electoral Act that will allow independent candidates to contest national and provincial elections, I cannot shake the many stories of suffering communities.
President Cyril Ramaphosa needs to have signed the bill into law before the February 28 extended Constitutional Court deadline expires on Tuesday.
I can confirm that this is not perfect legislation, as someone who has written a doctoral thesis on the necessity of including independent candidates in our electoral system.
Still, it opens up space for a gradual and incremental enjoyment of political rights and expansion of representation of diverse political causes in our constitutional democracy.
Most importantly, it immediately challenges citizens to implement it, notwithstanding the need to refine some clauses over time.
Doing so will help change the generally sorry state of our country, where the Batho Pele principles, which should ensure a caring and responsive government, are so frayed and torn they are no longer there, and the damage is everywhere.
The political impact of all this damage should be obvious: disaster for the incumbent party that has presided over years of the hollowing out of the public realm, and a boost for independent candidates swelling the opposition base to replace it.
On one level, that is indeed what is happening.
Note the poor voter turnout over the years, the sustained loss of electoral support for the ANC, and the emergence of new political parties successfully contesting elections: proof that voters have looked at the condition of South Africa, the evidence of their daily lives, and lost faith in the corrupt ANC politicians in charge and the ineffective opposition parties unable to hold the ANC government accountable.
But that verdict contains foreboding for independent candidates, too.
Put crudely, the ANC has smashed up the country so badly, and South Africans may well instruct the new credible opposition with their votes to clean the mess up – thereby handing them an increasingly daunting, if not impossible, task.
Suddenly, those piles of unfulfilled election promises will not be simple reasons to support independent candidates: they will be the independent MPs’ duty to fix.
There is a big difference this time.
When the ANC consolidated its political power, the South African economy expanded, and the Treasury was flush with rising tax receipts and budget surpluses.
Now, the country is not merely at a low point in the economic cycle when you might assume an upturn is on the way, but is in a period of structural decline: economic growth projections are lower now than they have been for 25 years.
For example, at 0.9%, the Treasury’s GDP numbers are more optimistic than the Reserve Bank’s, whose growth estimate for 2023 is at a low 0.3% from 1.1% previously.
So independent candidates will come under immediate pressure to convince voters of what they plan to do practically to restore services long starved of cash.
Yet they will struggle to ensure the government spends what it needs to in critical sectors of the economy.
Unless elected leaders adopt a common goal, the depth of the hole independent candidates are likely to get into could swallow them up once they are there.
It will help potential independent candidates to understand the danger and prepare for solution-driven contributions to the election campaign debates meant to improve voter turnout and subsequent decisive government interventions underpinned by meaningful public participation.
This is why, when some were campaigning in various by-elections since 2015, their manifestos used the phrase “long term” several times, spelling out that they could not realise some of their ambitions over a mere five years in office.
In their journey to Parliament and provincial legislatures after 2024, they are already managing expectations, warning South Africans that the damage they see now is the tip of the iceberg.
It will take more than one term for independent candidates, elected in sufficient numbers, to ensure the administration corrects it successfully.
Many citizens will say these are necessary problems. If the current ANC mess ensures an opposition victory spiced up with independent public representatives, they can live with the challenge of the clean-up job to come.
But it may not be quite as simple as that because no win is guaranteed when a large number of the voting population is sceptical, even cynical, about whether the politics of coalition government works.
The appalling behaviour of opposition political parties in municipal coalition governments across the country has reinforced that mood in recent years.
Its impact extends beyond hung municipalities governed by unstable coalitions, and it affects, however unfairly, politics as a whole.
The toxic combination of the conduct and the record of several political parties represented in legislative bodies, from which many independent candidates are likely to emerge, has left people doubting the political parties’ ability or willingness to improve their lives.
That hurts public confidence in many potential independent candidates who believe in and heavily rely on an active, interventionist state to harness independent voices.
In that context, making election promises that are bigger or bolder, as some advocate, might hardly be a solution for winning sizeable electoral support.
It would only expose to voters how disconnected some independent candidates are from the reality of policy, legislation, and regulation implementation.
As a result, all independent candidates’ first task is to make a case for the efficacy and integrity of plurality politics, where all public representatives work harmoniously to better the lives of all citizens.
The aim is to break through the cynicism and prove that politicians who have earned public trust can get things done.
This is the paradox of our current politics: what hurts the ANC helps, but also hurts, independent candidates, and that makes independent candidates’ win more certain in most parts of the country.
More sobering still: when victory comes, the new government will be staring into a hole so deep that many people will doubt the country can ever dig itself out in the first five years of implementing these electoral reforms.
Nyembezi is a researcher, policy analyst and human rights activist
Cape Times
* The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.