Cosatu+wants+constituency-based+electoral+system,+Sindy

Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, July 23, 2006 //Edition 1//
=Cosatu wants constituency-based electoral system=


 * Rob Amato**

Thursday's launch of the Human Science Research Council's (HSRC) book, Trade Union Democracy: Cosatu Workers' Political Attitudes in South Africa - edited by Sakhela Buhlungu - is evidence that the South African left is finally warming up for a fair electoral fight with the "neo-liberal" Mbeki ANC.

The book has nine riveting and revealing essays that analyse three major worker attitude surveys that were undertaken (significantly) by largely the same group of scholars and researchers, in 1994, 1999 and 2004. This is one of those invaluable "time-series" research programmes that seek to compare apples with apples over time.

I met Zwelinzima Vavi there and learned that Cosatu has "at recent bilaterals" between them, firmly called on the ANC to implement constituencies in a reformed electoral system.

"They've gone off to talk about it and we hope they do something," he said. The ball is thus, as ever, in the cabinet's hands, but this spring may just see the beginning of a rapid democratisation of the election of South African MPs.

Only a determined left could get that done. And if they want democracy they have to get moving for there is little time to prepare candidates and start the necessary deals at constituency levels. The SACP has indeed begun turning its ship of state towards fighting constituency elections. This appears in carefully phrased questions in their discussion documents. One wonders when a real sense of political urgency will set in "the Party".

Will constituencies mean the end of the tripartite alliance? Not necessarily. The left (conceived generally) needs constituency MPs for the obvious reason that it can thereby test and grow its ability to become a new government within, say, a decade.

The governing party itself needs constituencies less, but in the long term it must democratise the legislature or watch it suffer more attrition as a body, which is bad for the country.

In 2004 74 percent of interviewed Cosatu members wanted the tripartite alliance to continue. Vavi confidently told the gathering that it would. But the question that must be asked is what political form the future of the alliance needs to take.

Loyalty to progressive forces does not mean that communists or unionists should not stand against the ANC in selected working-class constituencies. This need not be done in a spirit of enmity.

Parliament (as it is presently constituted) seems by common consent to fail to be the real terrain of politics. The cabinet, or more accurately, the executive presidency, is the only real source, or determinant, of legislation.

Cosatu has called on the ANC to respect and implement section 77 of the constitution, which prescribes that legislation be passed so that money bills are overseen in detail by parliament. To this day this has not been done.

Parliament at present either approves or disapproves ministerial budgets in toto, which means that almost all budgets are passed without modification by parliament. The MPs, poor sods, must just obey their whips when votes are taken.

After a left-contested election the unionists, communists and the more progressive forces in the ANC could re-birth the tripartite alliance as a powerful coalition majority, thus giving the country an overall stability, which is what we need, perhaps more than other countries. We have, after all, seen only two changes of government in half a century.

What is there to stop a very similar (but probably much more politically sensitive and responsive) alliance from re-forming in parliament straight after the next election? What is there to stop tactical alliances of the left being agreed upon in constituencies even as elections are being fought - a classic and valuable practice in multifaceted democracies.

That would be a governing alliance in which differences would be voted upon in parliament on an issue-by-issue basis, analogous, though different, to the case-by-case methods so properly used by the courts. That's what we want.

The present alliance is extra-parliamentary and this is really less than desirable. Remember how divisive "extra-parliamentary politics" racked the country in the 1980s? They rack Palestine as I write.

What we call populism is (again) extra-parliamentary right now.

The usual difficulties of defining "the left" were illustrated at the launch. Buhlungu mentioned that more than 90 percent of Cosatu members are full-time employees and that 20 percent are teachers. His concern as an academic was to show how middle class or elitist the membership was tending to become, and how it represented the casuals, the peasantry and the informally employed less and less. But the response of several vocal unionists at the launch to the statistics was celebratory joy: "So many of us are teachers!" Who is right?

A government formed by a majority alliance of all the left, made after elections rather than before them, would be more answerable to the political patterns in the citizenry.

As things now stand all central issues - for example the basic income grant - are decided in the ANC's national executive council, not by the legislature. And in the NEC, startlingly, there is, at present, not a single trade unionist.

After real democratisation of parliament the long term might see a classic left/right alternation of power, who knows? Meanwhile, all informed political prophets will need to read Trade Unions and Democracy in order to appreciate the many and complicated political attitudes evident in the million-member union movement.


 * From: http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3351348**

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