OPINION: How parties deserted own principles for ‘GNU’s sake

It is common cause that the “Moria” (read: convergence) of political parties represented in the South African Parliament derive their mandate mainly from the people who voted for them. That is the nature of representative democracy as envisaged in our Constitution.

What remains unclear is the extent to which the wishes and aspirations of the electorates are given expression in the decisions taken by politicians after every election. To contextualise, a question can be asked as to whether the current Government of National Unity (GNU) is what the average South African voter would have preferred?

This may sound like a superfluous question especially since the people of South Africa gave no single political party an outright majority to constitute a governments (by which it is meant cabinet) at both the national and provincial level alone. But that is just one side of the coin. The other side is that the absence of an outright majority did not preclude the GNU partners from consulting their primary stakeholders – that is, the voters who put them into power.

This consultation could have been done either through intraparty referendums or online polls to assess the preferences of voters. The fact that no political parties engaged in this process shows the limits of representative democracy and how easy it is under a system of governance for politicians to overlook and sometimes, subvert the democratic wishes of the people in pursuit of narrow selfish interests.

At a very basic level, these intraparty online polls or referendums would have ensured that the current GNU was not just an outcome of backroom arrangement by politicians to secure blue-lights and seats at the dinner table. The values of openness and transparency which form the bedrock of our constitutional democracy would have also been given impetus by such a consultative process.

It’s quite ironic that the GNU partners not only abandoned these values during the negotiations process, but many other constitutional values they claim to have founded the arrangement on. This may seem like an unfair point, but if the GNU is indeed committed to nation building, how does it justify the formation of a government with inward-looking Afrophobes like Gayton McKenzie who seemingly cannot see the world beyond the borders of South Africa?

It’s quite a joke that political parties like the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania which were founded on the ideal of Pan-Africanism see nothing wrong with co-governing with parties like the Patriotic Alliance. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe must be turning in his grave!

Needless to mention, in its current form, the current GNU arrangement seems to suggest that voters would have preferred a vote for the ANC to ultimately become a vote for the DA or vice versa. That, I hasten to conclude, could not have been what the electorates had intended. The Democratic Alliance (DA), for example, has for many years styled and presented itself as a viable alternative to the ANC.

The party has a track record and rich history of opposing almost every policy that the ANC has either proposed or implemented (BBBEE, the National Minimum Wage Act, state ownership of enterprises to name just a few). It would not be farfetched to argue that its opposition of the ANC is primarily the reason why voters have patronised it with votes over the ANC.

For the DA, after receiving votes from the people who rejected the ANC to have turned around and formed a government with the ANC is not only a betrayal of its voters, but a subversion of their democratic wishes and aspirations.

To accept the GNU as an outcome of a legitimate democratic process, we must first accept that the people who voted for the DA would have voted for the ANC without any difficulties or vice versa. If this proposition is not acceptable then it should not be difficult to accept that the GNU is an elitist arrangement that was formed to serve narrow political interests.

On the face of it, the current GNU arrangement seems to be an outcome of a matured political process. Its proponents may also argue that it is not a subversion of the democratic wishes and aspirations of the voters in that, it accords with that aspect of democracy where citizens elect representatives to make decisions on their behalf – that is, representative democracy.

However, the absence of consultation by political parties to the arrangement with their constituency and the abandonment of principles and long-held policy positions leave so much to be desired. At face value, it shows the extent to which politicians will go in order to secure themselves seats at the dinner table and the inherent shortcomings of representative democracy.

Lehumo Sejaphala holds a BA Law and LLB degree from Wits University and an LLM from the University of the Free State. He also runs an online blog platform called the Voiceless and has contributed articles to various media houses.