2005-11-10,+Why+SA+needs+a+strong+ANC,+Butler,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 09 November 2005 = Why SA needs a strong ANC = Anthony Butler

THE African National Congress’s (ANC’s) electoral majority has grown over 10 years of democracy, from less than 63% of the national vote in 1994 to 70% last April. Strict internal discipline, party-list control, and activist “redeployment” have allowed the ANC to translate its popular support into executive power, and to spread its influence across chapter nine institutions, nongovernmental organisations, the courts, and big business. Together, these electoral and political achievements have prompted many analysts to view SA’s post-1994 politics through the lens of “one-party dominance”.

Scholars have viewed the ANC’s dominance both positively and negatively. On the one hand, supporters of a strong ANC have celebrated a decade of political stability as a contribution to the longer-term entrenchment of democracy. SA has confronted immense political and developmental challenges in a context marked by profound inequality and social division. The ANC has contained conflict, defused racial and ethnic tension, and — so far — controlled potentially antidemocratic leaders.

The ANC has demonstrated a unique ability to stabilise a complex and divided society. It is indeed hard to see how conflicts of interest and opinion — between trade union organisers, black entrepreneurs, and rural traditional leaders — might be reconciled through any other set of institutions. Champions of a dominant ANC have likened its benign effect to that of the Congress movement that unexpectedly entrenched democracy in postindependence India.

Critics of ANC dominance, on the other hand, have argued that the ANC has exploited its dominant position to close down opposition and to lay the foundations of a new authoritarianism. Democracy, in this view, depends on a strong opposition that can defend liberal institutions against ruling party control, and offer electors a credible alternative government. ANC leaders, by contrast, have confused their party with the state, and tried to subordinate Parliament and the courts to the ANC’s will. A dominant party, critics claim, will abuse its influence over the state broadcaster and electoral commission to ensure re-election.

Proponents and enemies of ANC dominance have been polarised mostly along partisan and racial lines since 1994. However, their arguments are not mutually exclusive. When taken together, they provide a stark clarification of a central dilemma facing SA’s new democracy.

SA cannot afford a fragmentation of the liberation movement now. Our political institutions are not robust enough to manage the conflicts that the society can produce. On the other hand, the longer the ANC remains dominant, the harder it will be for checks and balances to restrain liberation movement elites, and the more confused the boundaries between party and state will become.

Formerly polarised supporters and opponents of ANC dominance have been given food for thought by the current turmoil surrounding former deputy president Jacob Zuma.

Many opponents of ANC dominance in the Democratic Alliance and academia now recognise that the liberation movement’s electoral success and internal discipline are not merely a surefire path to Leninist authoritarianism. Rather, ANC leaders have used their power benevolently to wrestle with three exceptionally dangerous tendencies, the most important of which is “careerism”.

As President Thabo Mbeki recently observed, some ANC activists seek office “on the basis that when they get elected, they will use their government positions to extend material benefits to those who supported them”. As Mbeki notes, some cadres see membership of the ANC “as a stepping stone to access to state power, which they would then use corruptly to plunder the people’s resources for their personal benefit”.

A second threat is SA’s continuing potential for ethnic mobilisation. A recent ANC discussion document observed that some activists “engage in low-intensity tribal mobilisation, including in order to lobby support for positions in the ANC and in government”. Alluding to this danger, Mbeki has proposed that such “sectarian manipulation” will “split our movement into hostile factions that would both destroy our movement and render it incapable of leading the masses of our people in the continuing struggle to achieve the objectives of the national democratic revolution”.

The third challenge to which internal discipline has been a response is the popular reaction against poor public service delivery. Civil unrest is growing in many of the country’s poor municipalities. Meanwhile, the ANC’s growing electoral majorities have been accompanied by a precipitous fall in the turnout of eligible voters, a development that presages political instability.

In the face of these profound challenges, former critics of ANC dominance have begun to realise that they have no real alternative remedy to offer for these social ills. Parliamentary debates, criminal investigations and upstanding judges cannot on their own turn the tide against patronage and corruption. Contested elections in a fragmenting party system will engender ethnic division and the unproductive politics of protest.

Liberal institutions are unable to stop the populist bandwagon politics that has propelled Zuma close to the presidency. Even if Zuma does not succeed, our democracy remains vulnerable to populist, ideological and ethnic coalitions. Liberals realise the new SA remains a tentative settlement rather than the stable democracy set out in the constitution.

Many crude supporters of ANC dominance have meanwhile come to recognise that the liberation movement cannot guarantee political stability on its own. ANC leaders are increasingly uncertain that their great tradition of reconciling diverse interests in the pursuit of “national democratic revolution” can survive generational change and the fading away of the morality of the struggle.

While they still understand liberal democratic institutions as impositions of western ideology that entrench the privileges of the property-owning white elite, they now recognise them as more than just that. Constitutional democracy is also a historically informed, if fallible, effort to make citizens less vulnerable to the abuse of concentrated power.

In these circumstances, the best scenario may well be 15 or 20 years of ANC dominance — creating a period of stability during which liberal institutions can entrench their authority. Government will face a real, but unrealised, threat of defeat by a credible opposition. Meanwhile, citizens will use other mechanisms of accountability to limit the abuse of executive power. When the ANC eventually begins to lose its electoral and organisational power, liberal institutions will by then be robust enough to cope with the immense internal strains generated by a more fluid political system.

A new consensus may be emerging out of the Zuma struggle. South Africans need a strong ANC more than ever. Liberal institutions and elections alone cannot address careerism, populism and ethnic factionalism. But the ANC also needs liberal democracy — a free press, effective courts and legislatures, functioning oversight bodies, and nonpartisan checks on abuse of political power.

‖Butler teaches public policy at UCT and is the author of Contemporary South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2004).

From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A110469