Constitutional Hill

Electoral system

More thoughts on election results

May 19th, 2011
by Pierre De Vos.
90 comments

In the absence of exit polls asking voters why they voted for their party of their choice, it is not possible to explain large swings in voter support with any certainty. In the Western Cape, making sense of the large swing to the DA is further complicated by the fact that the ID did not stand in the 2011 local government election. As the ID is in the process of merging with the DA and fought the election with the DA, one would have to know how many ID supporters decided to vote for the DA and what percentage threw their weight behind the ANC.

In KwaZulu/Natal where the IFP is in decline, the new kid of the block, the NFP, seems to be rising and where President Jacob Zuma’s presence as leader of the ANC has boosted the ANC.

Because there had already been a swing in the Western Cape from the ANC to the DA in the 2009 general election, it further complicates any analysis of the 2011 local government elections. Merely comparing 2006 results with 2011 results and drawing conclusions from that might well not give the full picture.

And of course, what happens in the Western Cape will not be replicated in Mpumalanga, KwaZulu/Natal or Limpopo. For me the two most interesting provinces to watch is the Western Cape (perhaps because I live here) and KwaZulu/Natal (where the IFP seems to be imploding and the ANC seems to be making steady gains).

Did the DA’s largely positive campaign sway undecided voters in the Western Cape? Was there a “Jimmy Manyi backlash” in the Western Cape amongst voters alienated by the ANC?  Did local factors, including allegations of corruption and mismanagement play a role in the swing to the DA in many towns across the Western Cape? Did infighting in the ANC in the Western Cape play a role by dissuading traditional ANC voters from going to the polls? Did voters actually buy the relentlessly punted message of the DA that it was the party that “delivered for all”?

Without exit polls it is really impossible to say. All one can do is speculate.

Taking the Breede Valley (Worcester) election results as an example, it is clear that the DA won a larger percentage of the vote than the DA/ID combined vote of 2006.

In 2006 the ANC won 18 seats with 46% of the vote, while the DA received 33.3% of the vote and 13 seats and the Independent Democrats won 5 seats with 11.4 percent of the vote. Preliminary results suggest the DA won Breede Valley (Worcester) in 2011 with 55.03% (22 seats), with the ANC second with 34.09% (14 seats), while 5 seats were shared among smaller parties.

About 75% of residents of this region is said to be “coloured”, 17% is said to be “African” and the rest is said to be “white”. A further swing to the DA (from 2009) would suggest that the “Jimmy Manyi factor” might have played a role here. But because the IEC website is frozen I could not check the results for this region for the 2009 election. It is therefore impossible to ascertain right now whether the DA did better in 2011 than it and the ID did together in 2009.

At the moment, results in large parts of Johannesburg are also unavailable. It is thus not possible to verify the DA claim that it has made some inroads into traditional ANC voting areas. Ultimately it might well be that the ANC overall portion of the vote would not have dropped as much as some pundits predicted before the election. Because of its success in KwaZulu/Natal, the ANC might well do better overall than some expected.

Whatever happens, the emerging narrative among chattering class pundits is that the DA is the big winner of the election while smaller parties have been the big loser. Money and the organisation it can buy, wins elections. The ANC and the DA had money. Smaller parties had none. Imagine Azapo or the PAC had the same funds as the DA. I suspect they would then have done far better than their dismal performance so far indicates.

Time, perhaps, to revisit the entire manner in which political parties are funded in South Africa?

What about the “Steve Hofmeyer” vote?

May 16th, 2011
by Pierre De Vos.
51 comments

This weekend I watched the DA’s final election rally on ETV-news and it was quite enlightening. The rally was clearly aimed at projecting the image of a party of the future that embraces people from all races and cultures. (The SABC decided not to broadcast this rally live, which probably means it was in breach of the law that requires it to treat political parties equitably during election campaigns.)

I also watched the ANC’s final election rally (this time on SABC) and it, too, was enlightening, as the ANC seemed to want to project the image of a party of the past, harping on about apartheid and what the ANC had done before and saying very little about how it will fix the mess that many municipalities find themselves in.

Tentative conclusions.

The ANC is much better at the razzmatazz of election rallies than the DA and its core voters appear to be more emotional  and enthusiastic – at least on TV. Packing the FNB stadium with tens of thousands of supporters was very impressive and until President Jacob Zuma started his speech, things were going very well for the ANC (with a little bit of help from SABC TV reporters who acted as if they were at a World Cup Soccer match, not at a political rally which they had to report on as neutrally and objectively as possible).

But President Jacob Zuma’s speech was once again a huge disappointment. Helen Zille is a far better public speaker than President Jacob Zuma, whose speech was – as usual – so boring that I was considering painting the walls of my house and watching the paint dry instead of watching him stammer through a list of achievements of the ANC in government that (although impressive) had very little to do with local government and the election at hand. The ANC’s election campaign seems to be based on the argument that the DA is a white apartheid party and that the ANC is not too bad at national level, so let us just forget local government and vote for the ANC in any case.

Helen Zille, trying to get away from the liberation deficit her party suffers from and from the linger perceptions created by past anti-black election campaigns, hammered home the point that the election was about local issues. Ok, there is the small problem with the TV add which turned out not to be entirely true and the claims about service delivery which might have stretched credulity, but she skirted these controversies and stuck to her guns, using three languages in an impressive display of respect for diversity. And she wore a nice purple dress, too, which would have made Lindiwe Sisulu quite envious (and reminded me of the witty slogan of 1989 after the police blasted protesters with purple water: “The purple shall govern”).

Pity about the often hysterical and self-righteous tone taken by DA spin doctors, who often seem incapable of rising above the pettiness and the selfrighteousness that has infected the DA in the past. The stubborn refusal to admit mistakes also remains a big stumbling block for the party and the management of its image. Sometimes logical aruments are not enough: one needs to manage perceptions and one needs to act humble, not only say that one is humble. If only the DA’s spin doctors and advisors could rise to the same level as their leader, quite a few more people would vote for the party.

In any case, as I was watching Helen Zille trotting out her best Xhosa and Afrikaans and the DA faithful dancing and singing for all they are worth, I was suddenly struck by a question which has not really been raised in this campaign. Would the DA lose some of its traditional support amongst right-wing white South Africans because it has been aggressively courting the vote of all South Africans – also those who are not white?

Will some of the “Fight Back!” and “Stop Zuma” voters (the Steve Hofmeyer’s of this world who are deeply racist and have given their vote to the DA because they perceived the DA to be fundamentally anti-ANC and anti-black) desert the DA and vote for the Freedom Front Plus, or will they stay at home, crack a Castle and put a tjop on the braai while they complain about the country going to the dogs?

I have no idea how such voters will react. I do know that quite a few white voters are deeply racist and might be put off by the DA’s inclusive new image. If I was a DA strategist I would not worry about this possibility.

Those people belong to the past. Like Steve Hofmeyer, who is famous for singing Neil Diamond cover versions (I mean, he was not even hip enough to choose Abba) and for singing an apparently autobiographical song about a Pampoen” (“pumpkin”), they represent a small minority with little political clout.

After all, if one ever wished to be politically relevant in South Africa, one would be advised to distance oneself from these people. But if these people fail to vote for the DA or vote for the Freedom Front Plus, it might shave one or two percent from the DA’s vote. Instead of 20% the DA might end up with 18% nationally, say.

I for one, will be watching the results to see if the Freedom Front Plus has been boosted by the DA’s turn to the centre of the political spectrum in South Africa. Once again, before the results start flowing in, I would not make any predictions about the final tallies.

Notes on the “toilet election”

May 12th, 2011
by Pierre De Vos.
89 comments

Because no accurate public polling data is available in South Africa to measure the voting intensions of members of the electorate, it is impossible to make any meaningful predictions about the outcome of the local government election, which will be held next Wednesday. In the past, available public polling data had consistently underestimated support for the African National Congress (ANC) and had overstated support for the Democratic Alliance (DA), so even if polling data had been available this data would have been less reliable than similar data in the USA.

I will therefore refrain from playing the ignorant pundit by making any predictions about how well the various parties will do in the upcoming election. In any case, as a middle class white person living in Cape Town, I do not have sufficient information about what is happening in various communities to make any sensible comments on the outcome of the election. Nevertheless, I will venture a few preliminary thoughts about the manner in which the election was fought — based on the manner in which the media has reported on the campaigns and on the election debates broadcast on radio and television.

(I make no comment about the nature of the practical aspects of the campaigns and the efforts made by political parties to get their voters to the polls, something that might be crucial as a low voter turnout by traditionally ANC supporters or DA supporters might well make a huge difference to the outcome of the election in various municipalities.)

Bearing these caveats in mind, the following aspects stood out for me.

  • The DA has run by far the best election campaign of any political party in terms of formulating a simple, positive and coherent message, ensuring that everyone in the party stays on message and managing the media aspects of its campaign. Whether one supports the DA or not, one has to admire the discipline of the DA team and the manner in which it has managed to begin the long and difficult process of repackaging itself as a party for all South Africans and not just for white elite interests. I have seen more pictures of Helen Zille with scores of black supporters in blue DA T-shirts in the last two months than in the previous 10 years.
  • The ANC, on the other hand, has not run as good an election campaign as it has shown itself capable of in the past. It lacked a coherent and simple positive message and often came across as desperate and, hence, it failed to dictate the terms of the campaign as it has done in previous elections. It is unclear whether this was because of divisions within the ANC, weak leadership, or because it is faced with the challenges inherent to any party who has been in power for a long time. The fact that — for the past two years — we have been bombarded with so many stories about ANC corruption and misgovernment, which have created a narrative that was difficult to change, might also have made the task of the ANC in this election more difficult than before.
  • Judging from the media, smaller parties have almost completely disappeared from the electoral radar screens. This election was presented in the media as a two-horse race between the ANC and the DA, which probably benefited the DA (whose stature was enhanced by being treated as being in the same league as the ANC) and for obvious reasons disadvantaged the ANC.
  • More generally, I have been disheartened by mind-numbing superficiality of the way in which the political parties have generally engaged with very serious and important local government issues. It seems to me that there are several structural problems with the way municipalities are organised and run in South Africa. The tax base for many municipalities are so low that even if they were governed efficiently, they would not be able to deliver on their mandates. The “pay-as-you-go” principle for the delivery of services (which is implemented by both the ANC and the DA run municipalities) are fundamentally anti-poor and the band-aid solutions currently in place do not address the larger question, namely that the very poor can often not afford to pay for the basic services like water and electricity which municipalities are constitutionally and legally required to provide them with. Yet, we all seem to be obsessed by open toilets and by election stunts such as the ANC claim that it was laying criminal charges against the DA for the alleged DA pamphlet which quoted Trevor Manuel’s own criticism of the ANC.

But there is an important matter of electoral design that has also been highlighted by this election. This election campaign has been largely run as a national campaign and has not focused much on pressing local issues. We are often told that one reason why our national and provincial legislatures are not working as well as they should is because of the electoral system which makes those representatives accountable to their political parties and not to the electorate. If we brought back the constituency-based system, so some analysts argue, our representatives would be more responsive and accountable.

But at local government level half of the councillors are elected to represent geographical constituencies, and one would have imagined that those standing in these wards would try to demonstrate to voters in that ward how they would improve the lives of their constituents. Yet, although I stay in a fairly affluent area in Sea Point, I do not have a clue what the names of the ANC or DA representative is who is standing in the election for this ward. I have had no communication from the prospective ward councillors about how they intend to serve me and why I should vote for him or her. All I know is that my previous councillor is not standing for re-election. (Trust me, I was looking forward to see his face smiling at me from the lampposts!)

Which goes to show, even if one has a constituency-based electoral system very little would change as far as accountability is concerned. As long as elected representatives are in effect appointed by political party leaders, they will be accountable to those leaders and not to the electorate.

Because the ANC is not going to win this Sea Point ward (like most wards in South Africa, my ward is dominated by one political party), the DA leadership has in effect decided who will represent me and that leadership will also decide whether this councillor will serve another term after the next election.

Changing the electoral system will therefore probably not make provincial and national legislative representatives more accountable and effective unless the voting patterns of the electorate changed dramatically and the elections in most wards or constituencies became far more competitive. Even then, as long as party leaders in effect had the right to impose or remove candidates representing the party, the accountability might not be as strong as one would wish.

Predictions? Nah – I will leave that for the professional pundits.

Where’s the helicopter, I am going to miss my deadline?

May 10th, 2011
by Pierre De Vos.
18 comments

Sometimes even chartering a helicopter will not allow you to meet an important deadline – with disastrous results. Ask the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), whose candidates will not be able to take part in the local government election for the Umzumbe Municipality near Durban because it failed to submit the required documentation to the local office of the Electoral Commission as required by the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act.

Maybe there is a lesson in there somewhere for politicians who turn up hours late for an event, for students who want to hand in essays and assignments after a deadline has passed and for Public Works Minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde who – two months after it was issued - is still “studying” (yeah right) the Public Protector’s Report which basically found that she had flouted the law and had acted unethically if not unlawfully.

In the case of Electoral Commission v Inkatha Freedom Party the Constitutional Court, in a judgment written by Chief Justice Sandile Ngcobo, today granted the appeal of the Electoral Commission against the judgment of the Electoral Court which would have allowed the IFP to take part.

The relevant Act states that a party can only contest an election in a municipality if it lodges the requisite paper at the local office of the Commission in that municipality before the prescribed deadline. On its face the Act therefore required the IFP to submit its election documentation to the Umzumbe office of the Commission by 17h00 on 25 March 2011.  It did not do so. The reasons for this failure are set out in the judgment and it makes for somewhat bizarre reading.

Mr Bean meets Basil Faulty:

Despite [IFP officials] having “double checked” the documents destined for Gauteng, once in Gauteng, it was discovered that documentation that was destined for Cape Town and Umzumbe had been erroneously included in the Gauteng bundles. This was discovered at “around 10am” on 25 March 2011. Arrangements were made to send the stray documents to their respective destinations by courier. Those destined for Umzumbe could be sent to Durban only on a 14h00 flight that would arrive at King Shaka International Airport in Durban at approximately 15h00. A helicopter was chartered to fly the documents to Umzumbe from Virginia Airport. This would have taken approximately 20 minutes. But a storm in the mid to late afternoon in Durban grounded the helicopter. At approximately 16h25, the IFP was advised that the helicopter had been grounded by the weather and that it would not be able to take off.

The IFP then requested permission from the Commission to lodge the documents at the Durban office of the Commission, but this request was declined. The IFP approached the Electoral Court, which found in favour of the IFP on the basis that in 2006 in the case of African Christian Democratic Party v Electoral Commission and Others, the Constitutional Court had interpreted almost identical provisions which required parties to make election deposits to the Commission at the local office of the Commission to allow for some leeway.

However, the Constitutional Court distinguished that case from the present one, arguing that the previous case had dealt with money, which was fungible, and that there was therefore no central legislative purpose for requiring that deposits be made at the local office of the Electoral Commission.

There are, however, very good reasons why the Act required parties to lodge their papers at the local office of the Electoral Commission. That purpose, argued the court, is to promote the efficient processing and verification of election documents in order to ensure the fairness of an election.

The documentation required to be submitted under the Act would, by its nature, be more efficiently processed at the local level. It makes administrative sense, stated the court, that the processing of documents and checking whether all the required documentation has been properly filed would be done more efficiently in a decentralised manner.

In effect the court argued that there could easily be administrative chaos or gridlock if parties could lodge their papers at any office of the Electoral Commission. One of the benefits of a decentralised system of local document processing and verification is exactly that local offices can expeditiously process documents submitted in relation to the elections they are required to manage, and can coordinate, as necessary, with local parties and candidates to ensure that documents submitted comply with the provisions of the Act.

As Justice Ngcobo put it:

Having parties submit documents in those local offices where they intend to contest elections prevents uneven and unpredictable application flows and resultant pressure in local offices. This helps to avoid uncertainty on the part of the Commission as to how it can best allocate its financial and human resources between its various offices. It therefore prevents the severe administrative burden that would no doubt follow if parties could freely submit documents in the Commission office of their choosing, regardless of the proximity of that office to the location of the election to be contested.

The Court also trotted out an argument which it claimed clinched the deal. The rule, it said, “pays deference to the necessarily local nature of the democratic process in the context of municipal elections”. By providing for the local processing and verification of election documents, the submission requirements of the Act promote participation and transparency in the democratic process “at the very heart of where the democratic process is going to have its effect”. Voters’ perception that elections have been undertaken in a free and fair manner requires that democracy be seen to be done at the local level and these requirements would enhance that perception.

I am not sure I buy this argument. Surely very few voters would know or care where documents are submitted or processed. The symbolic importance of this rule is therefore, at best, overstated by the Court.

Surprisingly, given the rather bizarre circumstances under which the IFP failed to submit their documents and given the length it had gone to to try and meet the deadline, the Court also refused to entertain an argument that an exception should be made in extreme cases like this one. The Act just did not allow for this, it said.

Yet, identical provisions of the Act was interpreted in the ACPD case to allow for just such a flexible approach, albeit regarding the payment of deposits. The big difference was that here – unlike in the ACDP case which dealt with rules that were applicable to all parties – the IFP had requested a special dispensation which was frowned upon by the Court.

It is necessary that the integrity of the electoral process be maintained.  Indeed, the acceptance of the election as being free and fair depends upon that integrity. Elections must not only be free and fair, but they must be perceived as being free and fair. Even-handedness in dealing with all political parties and candidates is crucial to that integrity and its perception by voters. The Commission must not be placed in a situation where it has to make ad hoc decisions about political parties and candidates who have not complied with the Act. The requirement that documents must be submitted to the local offices of the Commission does not undermine the right to vote and to stand for election. It simply gives effect to that right and underscores the decentralised and local nature of municipal elections.

Of course, some of us might argue that if a party is so disorganised and incompetent that it cannot even manage to meet the most important deadline of the election, why on earth would any voter trust that party to be effective in government. Why would we not laugh that party off the stage? Maybe die-hard ANC supporters would have more sympathy for the IFP, given the fact that its NorthWest officials had somehow managed to miss the deadline for registering some of its ward councillors in Potchefstroom. But for those of us who are not party-hacks and who try to face the facts head-on, such balls-ups seem to reflect rather badly on the party concerned.

Come to think of it, why would any political party wait until the last minute to submit its election documents to the Electoral Commission? Surely one would make sure that these documents are ready and that they are submitted days before the deadline to ensure that such last-minute problems do not arise. Although the Constitutional Court could therefore be criticised for a rather literal approach to thew interpretation of the Act, it is difficult to have much sympathy for the bumbling IFP.

So, perhaps insisting – for once – that a deadline is kept is not such a bad thing after all.

On the local government elections

Sep 30th, 2010
by Pierre De Vos.
47 comments

When co-operative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka reportedly endorsed a Gauteng African National Congress (ANC) resolution proposing that all three spheres of government hold elections at the same time, he was criticised by many observers who saw this move as a cynical ploy by the ANC to try and prevent electoral losses at the local government level. Due to the disastrous performance of many ANC-controlled municipalities over the past 5 years (more potholes, disintegrating sewerage works, tardy or absent municipal services, lack of housing delivery), it is widely suspected that the ANC will lose considerable support when local government elections are held next year.

If all the elections were held at the same time, so the argument goes, the ANC would not be punished for its poor performance at local government level because the vast majority of voters would focus on national issues (apartheid=bad, transformation=good) and would vote for the ANC, the party with whom they closely identify – regardless of whether their local councillor had been a lazy and corrupt skelm or a wonderful community activist who really made a difference to the community he or she served.

It is said that in the absence of a national election campaign, the ANC would suffer huge losses because even if its disaffected voters could not bring themselves to vote for the DA or another opposition party, the traditional ANC voters would stay at home in disproportionately large numbers. This would boost the electoral fortunes of the DA, whose energised and angry voters (eager to fight b(l)ack(s)”) would stream to the polls to punish the ANC for the failure of ANC controlled local councils (and for the cheek of being black and in charge). More people might not vote for the DA but less would vote for the ANC, giving the DA a much larger percentage of the votes.

Moreover, as Steven Friedman argued at the time, it is feared that holding local government elections at the same time as those for national and provincial government could reduce these elections to a hollow ritual. Because national elections attract far more voter attention than their local equivalents and because voters in South Africa (still) have strong loyalty to national parties (most notably the ANC), local elections held at the same time as the national ballot would do little more than duplicate national results. Local issues will not be discussed and the local link between councillors and the electorate will be further weakened.

In theory, these arguments make a lot of sense. The only problem is that the election campaign and results of the 2006 local government elections suggest that in practice it might make little difference to the outcome of the local government election whether it was held at the same time as national elections or at a different time. It would also not make much difference to what issues get discussed during the campaign.

It is true that during the 2000 local government elections far more traditionally DA voters than ANC voters went to the polls and the DA obtained 22% of the vote versus the 59% for the ANC. The previous year the ANC had won 66% of the vote while the forerunner of the DA only received 9.5% of the vote in the national election.

The DA did not receive substantially more votes in the local government poll in 2000 than in the national election the previous year, but there was a dramatic drop in the amount of voters who voted for the ANC, suggesting that traditional ANC voters disproportionately stayed away from the polls. (This happened after the DA and the New National Party had their shotgun marriage, which must at least partly account for this huge jump in support for the DA in the 2000 local government election.)

But in 2006, this effect was not repeated. In that local government election the ANC won 64% of the vote and the DA 16%. Three years later at elections for national and provincial legislatures the ANC had won 66% and the DA 16.5% of the vote respectively. The overall results for the local government poll in 2006 and the national poll in 2009 was therefore almost identical. Both traditional ANC and traditional DA voters had stayed at home in droves. (The slight increase in ANC support in 2009 could possibly be attributed at least partly to the Zuma effect, which meant that the ANC had increased the percentage of its support amongst voters in KwaZulu-Natal significantly.)

There is therefore little evidence to suggest, as some pundits have done, that during local government elections traditional ANC voters stay away from the polls in disproportionate numbers to punish the ANC governed municipalities for poor or non-existent service delivery. Far fewer voters voted in the last local government elections (only about 50%) than in the last general election (77%) but the traditional voters of the ANC and the DA stayed away in equal proportions.

I suspect there are at least two reasons for this. First, even during local government elections, candidates representing political parties do not fight localised campaigns about the particular issues of concern to the voters of a specific ward. Election campaigns (both for national and for local government elections) are tightly controlled by centralised campaign managers. Each party usually  has a central message that is sold to the voters with very little adjustment to the local circumstances of a particular ward or city council.

Second, because of the extremely close identification of voters with their party of choice (whether it is the ANC or the DA), voters still vote for the party and not for the candidate or the issues during local government elections. The ANC or the DA could nominate a wife-beating, child-molesting, tenderpreneur and he or she will probably get more or less the same amount of votes as any other candidate which the party might have chosen to represent it. This means parties have very little incentive to put up credible community based candidates and so the possibility for local charlatans and money hungry incompetents to be nominated as ward councillors by a party are rather high.

(During by-elections, this effect is less severe as a by-election is really fought more on local than national issues and in the absence of a national election campaign with a national message and strategy the quality of the candidate can therefore make a marginal difference during by-elections. This is why the ANC probably won the Bredasdorp by-election earlier this year – bucking the trend of dramatic increased support for the DA in the Western Cape – because its candidate was a fisherman whom Gwede Mantashe famously said he could not understand but who could be understood by local voters.)

What can one learn from this?

I suspect the ANC and the DA will take different lessons from the tentative insights provided above. For the ANC, it would probably be a good idea next year to fight a national campaign with a strong central message (“give us more time”; “the DA is racist”) – just as if it was fighting a national general election. In the Western Cape, where the ANC is a minority party, it would probably help the ANC to fight very localised campaigns addressing very particular issues that resonate with potential voters (by, say, highlighting the open toilet debacle in Cape Town.)

I suspect the DA would be better off fighting very localised campaigns in which its candidates in each municipality identify the hot button issues for its potential voters (especially issues that would galvanise voters to go to the polls). The DA may want to stay away from campaigning on a national platform (stop Zuma! stop Malema!) and may want its candidates to address local concerns (the water is not being purified; the ANC councillors are stealing our money; the sewerage is not being cleaned).

The problem is that localised campaigns are more expensive and more difficult to run. And with the DA there is always the danger of “rogue” candidates displaying racist tendencies (as Julius Malema might say) or making gaffes if they are not strictly supervised by Helen Zille and her team. This the DA cannot afford because the ANC will exploit such gaffes to rustle up votes and motivate traditional ANC voters to go to the polls to vote against the “racist-apartheid-loving” DA.

It might be that things have changed since 1996. If the percentage of votes cast for the DA shows a significant rise, it might give an indication that ANC voters have finally begun to lose faith in their party, either by staying at home in larger numbers than DA voters or by switching votes. But if the DA receives less than 20% of the vote nationally, it would mean nothing much has changed in the electoral landscape.

In any event, on the available evidence it is far from clear that synchronising the elections for all three spheres of government will assist the ANC and be detrimental to the DA.

Princess Sisulu = 1 : Nyami Booi = 0

Sep 16th, 2010
by Pierre De Vos.
73 comments

This was all rather predictable. For a while it looked as if Parliament’s Defence Committee would stand its ground against the Minister of Defence, Lindiwe “Princess” Sisulu, who has steadfastly flouted the Constitution by refusing to produce certain documents to the Committee as she is required to do in terms of section 56(a) of the Constitution. It was something of a miracle that Nyami Booi and the other members of the committee had taken on the Minister in the first place. But yesterday they raised the white flag, indicating that they would not insist that the Minister respect our Parliament and adhere to the Constitution.

The move came a day after the African National Congress (ANC) gave its full support to Sisulu and cautioned committee chairperson Nyami Booi that his ultimatum to her to release the report within 30 days bordered on “ill-discipline”. In our system, when an MP has to choose between following the letter and spirit of the Constitution or the dictates of his or her party, the party will almost always win – unless the MP wishes to be redeployed as the town clerk of Putsonderwater or Lusikisiki or was planning to go into business and has lined up some lucrative government tenders.

There are many reasons why Booi and his committee were never destined to win this fight.

We have a closed list electoral system of pure proportional representation for members of the National Assembly. This means we vote for political parties and not for individuals. (Although we make our cross next to the smiling face – Botox optional - of a party leader, we are really not voting for him or her but for everything the party stands for – which should make it rather difficult for anyone with a a social conscience to decide which party to vote for.)

Parties compile lists of candidates and decide where on the list each person will feature – often through a quasi-democratic process  that are tampered with after so called “democratic” input from members of that party. The higher up one is on a party list, the better chance one has of becoming an MP. Obviously, if one is at number 50 on the ANC list, one is guaranteed a seat in the National Assembly. If one is at number 50 on the Azapo list, one should not give up one’s day job.

This electoral system is said to be fair because every party is allocated more or less the same percentage of seats in the legislature than its percentage of the national vote. First-past-the-post systems, where one candidate wins an election and represents a constituency in Parliament and the losing parties get nothing, can lead to distortions and will favour bigger parties and eviscerate smaller one’s who might get up to 20% of the vote but no seats in Parliament.

While the system is fair, it is not working very well in South Africa at the moment – as the defeat of the Defence Committee clearly  illustrates. In this system, the party leadership has enormous power over individual MP’s. If one falls out with the party leadership one can be “redeployed” or – in extreme cases if one refuses to be redeployed - can be expelled from the party, in which case one automatically loses one’s seat in the National Assembly. This power of party bosses is further enhanced by the apartheid era culture of strict party discipline, which our post-apartheid political parties have enthusiastically embraced (in line with political parties in other Westminster-inspired systems in post colonial Africa).

If one reads the ANC Polokwane resolutions on the “Political Management of Governance”, it is clear that the ANC believes that MP’s are accountable first and foremost to the party leadership and not to voters. But other parties also impose strict dicipline on MPs and once a decision has been taken by the party, all MPs have to toe the party line – unless the party has decided to allow its MPs a free vote, which happens very seldom.

Because the President is not democratically elected (but elected by the only democratically elected national representative body, the National Assembly) and because the President can be fired by the members of the National Assembly, our system appears to invest bigger powers in the legislature than the executive. But because parties and their leaders, rather than individual MP’s, are really in charge and because the President and his or her cabinet are also the leaders of the majority party in Parliament, the real power lies either with the President (as was the case under Thabo Mbeki) or with the governing party leadership (as seem to be the case under Jacob Zuma).

A junior MP must either be very brave or very stupid to defy senior leaders of his or her party by trying to hold them to account. I don’t know what came over Mr Booi. He should have known better and should have known that he was never going to win a political fight with Her Royal Highness.

At the moment we also have a one party dominant democracy with one party – the ANC – receiving almost two thirds of the votes. This means party leaders are less likely to worry too much about what particular voters or communities want. As a result we get decisions like the incorporation of Khutsong into the North West and Matatiele into the Eastern Cape.

It also means that there is even less incentive for the top 250 MP’s on the ANC electoral list to listen to demands from voters to hold the executive to account. Because they are more or less assured (or so they think!) of being returned to the National Assembly after the next election (if by then they had not secured any lucrative government tenders or found eager business partners to exploit their proximity to power), it is in their self-interest to obey party bosses and not to listen too much to what the voters want if this contradicts what party leaders demand.

Sometimes this is a good thing. Would our Parliament have passed the Termination of Pregnancy Act, the Civil Union Act and the Domestic Violence Act, if individual MP’s worried too much about what voters really think? Would they not all have clamoured for a re-introduction of the death penalty, the killing of all criminal suspects by the police – preferably in highly publicised shoot outs -and the torture of anyone caught watching pornography (although they recently seemed to have made moves to address that latter two issues).

It is often argued that we should change the electoral system to a mixed system in which half the MP’s are elected in constituencies in a first-past-the-post system and the other half proportionally to ensure that smaller parties are also fairly represented in the legislature. But we have such a system at local government level and it has not really made individual councillors more accountable to the electorate. Friends without qualifications are still appointed as financial managers, money stolen, roads remain untarred, houses unbuilt, potholes unfilled.

There are many reasons for this, including the electoral dominance of the ANC and the manner in which individuals are selected for “deployment” to city councils. We do not have a fully democratic system through which potential candidates have to take part in primaries where members of the party in that constituency can then decide who should stand in the general election against individual candidates of other parties. This means that people are in effect “deployed” to local government level and they are thus more likely to obey the dictates of the party (and act in ways that would advance their interest in the party – given the internal party politics) than actively serving the community by making some decisions that might anger party leaders.

One suggestion is to change the electoral system, but not to stop there. Why not also adopt legislation that would regulate the manner in which candidates for public office are selected by parties? A law that requires that free and open primaries should be held to allow party members freely to select their candidates for each constituency, so the argument goes, will go a long way to make individual councillors and MPs accountable to voters instead of to party bosses. If one has to have one eye on re-election in a party primary, one will take the community’s views far more seriously and will be more accountable to the community. 

But there is a small problem with this argument. As the Republican Party in the USA is finding out, individuals who become members of a political party and actually make the effort to vote in primary elections are often more radical and extreme in their views than the ordinary voting public. For example, on Tuesday a far right wing candidate was elected by Republican voters in Delaware to stand as that party’s Senate candidate in the November election. But because she is so extreme in her views, she is probably not going to get elected in a relatively moderate state.

If one introduces primary elections in South Africa, chances are that the DA will field more pro-death penalty, shoot to kill and bring back the good old days candidates, while the ANC might field more mini-me Malemas. Potential MPs who have technical skills or are thoughtful and progressive are likely to be squeezed out by the lunatic fringe candidates preferred by energised and enthusiastic party activists.

Perhaps the present system is not that bad after all – at least on paper. Once the ANC fails to secure 50% of the vote and is required to govern in coalition with other parties (something far more likely in a proportional representation system than in a first-past-the-post system), Parliament will be in a far stronger position to hold the President and other cabinet members to account. Coalition governments weaken the power of party bosses and strenghten the hand of those legislators who wish to hold the executive to account.

But, of course, for that to happen a credible political party either to the left or the right of the ANC will have to emerge, one for whom large sections of African voters feel they can vote because they believe the party understands them and represents their interest.

Untill that day comes, we are stuck with a system that - on paper – is not bad at all, but in practice does not seem to serve the needs of most voters.

On by-election results

Jul 22nd, 2010
by Pierre De Vos.
91 comments

The most recent local government by-election results (from elections held on 21 July) should at the very least concern political strategists of the governing ANC. A few interesting trends have been confirmed by these results.

First, the ANC’s support amongst colored voters in the Western Cape – even in rural areas – has collapsed dramatically. The ANC has become an African party with very little support amongst members of other race groups. So much for the ANC’s much advertised non-racialism. Whether this has something to do with the embarrassing tantrums and childish rants of a leader like Julius Malema is not clear. What is clear is that the ANC in the Western Cape has completely alienated non-African black voters.

Second, the DA has made modest (but very limited) gains amongst African voters. These gains are more pronounced in small rural towns than in the big cities but remains limited. The DA still has a lot of work to do to convince African voters that it could possibly represent their interests. Even where traditional ANC voters want to cast protest votes they are more likely to cast such votes for independent candidates (or even for Cope) than for the DA candidate.

Speaking of Cope, interestingly, Cope has done surprisingly well in some of the by-elections. This is particularly the case in Cape Town where it gained between 15 and 25% of the vote in constituencies dominated by African voters. This suggests that the voter support for Cope might not have imploded completely despite the dreadful infighting in that party. Maybe something could still be rescued for this sorry bunch of infighters.

Third, some credible independent candidates in certain areas have stolen a large percentage of votes from the ANC while the voter turnout in ANC dominated constituencies where no credible independent candidates were standing, was very low – as low as 25% in some cases. This suggests that the electoral dominance of the ANC – while still very pronounced – is not as solid as it used to be. If credible candidates or parties stood for election, many African voters seem now for the first time prepared to abandon the ANC. This is in line with electoral trends in many other post independent countries, where the party of liberation starts losing its absolute dominance after about 20 years of freedom.

If these patterns are to be repeated in the local government election next year (by no means a forgone conclusion) and if the ANC fails galvanize its traditional supporters to go to the polls, the party will suffer very heavy losses. This will be to the benefit of the DA who might receive almost the same number of votes but a much higher percentage of the votes because of lower turn out.

Lastly, the ANC is continuing to show growth in KwaZulu-Natal at the expense of the hapless IFP. At this rate the IFP would be dead before Mangosuthu Buthelezi is finally disposed of as leader. The IFP is basically dead. The fights about who should succeed Buthelezi as leader is really just a fight about who should oversee the funeral of the IFP.

Of course, these results show clearly why the ANC wants to co-ordinate local government and national elections. In national elections its freedom credentials might still hold sway while elections fought on the failure of local governments (and not on national issues) would make life rather difficult for the ANC – especially where credible alternative candidates come forward.

On by-elections and disillusionment with the ANC

May 28th, 2010
by Pierre De Vos.
99 comments

Please excuse me while I crunch the latest by-election result numbers – I love this geeky kind of stuff. I decided to have a look at the results after the ANC seemed to have gotten a big fright this week, losing two by-election in the Western Cape to the DA.

The most interesting results came out of Cape Town in a ward which encompasses the traditional “African” suburb of Gugulethu and the traditional “coloured” area of Heideveld. The DA won 60% of the vote in this election compared to the 38% of the ANC. In the previous local government election the ANC won 53% of the vote and the DA 26%. There was therefore a huge swing towards the DA in the by-election.

There seems to be at least three reasons for this dramatic swing towards the DA.

First, the ANC’s support amongst “coloured” voters in the constituency collapsed dramatically. In the local government election the ANC attracted about 15% of the vote in these traditional working class communities. This collapsed to below 1% at some voting stations this week. The racial nationalism of Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma obviously holds no attraction for coloured voters in the Western Cape.

Second, the Independent Democrats (ID) did not contest the election and its voters did not stay home but voted for the DA. One can probably assume that this means support for the ID is collapsing and that its voters are now supporting the DA. Based on the results of this by-election the DA seems  to have consolidated its support amongst working class coloured people in Cape Town.

Third, many people who voted for the ANC in the previous local government election, decided not to vote at all. At the two Gugulethu voting stations the ANC obtained 3244 votes in the previous local government election. This week only 2214 people voted for the ANC at these two stations. One third of the voters in Gugulethu who voted for the ANC in the previous local government election therefore decided to stay at home.

What did not happen, was a significant surge in support for the DA amongst voters in Gugulethu, where the party made only very small gains. In the previous local government election the DA polled 22 votes – less than 1% – at these polling stations. In the by-election this week it polled 79 votes, which is about 3 % of the votes cast at these polling stations.

This means that the party has not yet managed to convince significant numbers of African voters in Cape Town to vote for it. Faced with a choice between the DA and the ANC, many African voters simply stayed at home. Helen Zille has a lot of work to do to convince “African” voters that the DA is not fundamentally opposed to their interests.

What does this mean for the local government elections next year? Well, it might mean very little, as by-elections are notoriously bad indicators of how voters would vote during an election fought nationally. The Western Cape is also unique in other ways: Support for ousted President Thabo Mbeki is particularly strong here and distrust of Jacob Zuma probably higher than elsewhere. So it would be premature to extrapolate these results in Cape Town and to assume they would be reflected nationally.

But the by-election results this week in other parts of the country do suggest that the ANC is in some trouble and that many of its traditional voters are disillusioned with them and are prepared to demonstrate this. In Groblersdal the ANC candidate lost to an independent candidate who polled more than 50% of the vote. In the previous election the ANC candidate had polled almost 60% of the vote.

In Greater Tubatse [Burgersfort/Ohrigstad/Eastern Tubatse] the ANC candidate won with 65% of the vote but the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania candidate obtained almost 30% of the vote. In the previous local government election the ANC had polled almost 90% of the votes in that district. Only in KwaZulu/Natal is the ANC’s vote holding up well.

If these trends continue and many voters who voted for the ANC either stay at home or cast a protest vote for one of the smaller parties, the ANC could face massive losses at the next local government election in 2011. Although it would probably retain control of most metro councils, it could become a close run affair in places like Pretoria and Johannesburg.

These results suggest that the corruption, arrogance, nepotism and mismanagement that is rife at local government level in Municipalities controlled by the ANC is finally beginning to affect the voting behaviour of the voters who traditionally voted for the ANC.  However, because the official opposition is still perceived as a “white” party who may not represent the interest of the African majority, smaller parties may benefit disproportionately from a protest vote cast by “African” voters.

If the DA slightly improves its performance along with improved performances for smaller parties like the PAC, and if the ANC fails to convince voters to come to the polls and to vote for it (even after spending obscene amounts of our money), 2011 might just be the year in which the ANC gets the wake-up call it so badly needs. That would be a good thing for democracy and for South Africa.

But the ANC has made so much money through crooked tenders that it might yet be able to buy off the electorate this one more time. Only time will tell. 

Privacy? Security? Oh ple-e-ease!

Nov 19th, 2009
by Pierre De Vos.
26 comments

Sometimes a politician says something so daft and indefensible that one cannot but wonder whether he or she thinks ordinary voters are complete and utter fools. Maybe this does not surprise many people because they have come to expect that politicians will lie to them. But being an eternal optimist – one of the few paid up member of the chattering classes in South Africa who seemingly still believe that voters are, as a general rule, not nearly as stupid as politicians believe they are – it really irritates the hell out of me.

That is why the reasons given by National Assembly Speaker Max Sisulu for not releasing a “detailed breakdown” of all MPs travel records to provide evidence that the system is being milked, seem so preposterous. ID Leader, Patricia de Lille claims that MPs with distant homes and constituencies are are allegedly skimming off up to R40 000 a month in travel claims by using their cars for journeys that would be cheaper by plane and requested the details from Sisulu to back up her claims.

Sisulu refused, saying that while he supported De Lille’s attempts to expose alleged abuse, disclosing travel records could infringe on MPs’ right to privacy and “pose a security risk” to them.

He might as well have said: “Yes they are stealing us blind and I do not want to public to know this, so I am not going to give you details of MPs travel records.” At least that would have been honest.

Let us get this straight: we pay MP’s to visit their constituencies to do what they have been elected to do, namely to represent us and to look after our interests. (This, at least, is the theory, but because of our pure proportional representation electoral system, many MP’s do not really represent anyone. I for one would love to know which MP represents me, but even when I phoned the local ANC office they could not or would not tell me and refused to answer any questions about my Parliamentary representative.)

But according to our Speaker we are not allowed to know how much we pay our MP’s to visit us because this would infringe their privacy and pose a security risk. How dare we ask. Next thing we would demand to actually speak to our MP’s when they visit us and this might infringe on their right to privacy and might pose a security risk to them. Who the hell do we think we are!

This is utterly ridiculous.

The Constitutional Court has stated that the protection of the right to privacy could be understood by thinking of privacy rights in terms of an onion. There are layers of privacy and the closer one gets to the inner sanctum of an individual’s life (the core of the onion, so to speak), the more strictly will privacy rights be protected. Conversely, the closer one gets to the public life and duties of an individual the weaker the privacy protection.

In terms of this metaphor, the details of MP’s travel arrangements when they travel to their constituencies with our money to represent us can be viewed as the outer skin of the onion. MP’s are exercising a public function for which they are paid with public money when they embark on such travel. Hence there is absolutely no privacy rights involved here that needs to be protected.

There is of course a right involved here, but not the right to privacy brandished by Sisulu. The right here is the right of all citizens to know whether the money we spent on our public representatives to perform a public function for our benefit, is spent wisely, or whether the system is being abused by our elected representatives and whether some of them might not have  committed a crime by defrauding Parliament.

Simple really.

Because Sisulu’s statement is so ludicrous, I will assume that it amounts to an admission that some MP’s have indeed abused the system, have defrauded Parliament and should be tried for fraud.

Electoral system in need of a change

May 5th, 2009
by Pierre De Vos.
29 comments

Tomorrow 400 members of the National Assembly will be sworn in and will take up their seats in Parliament.  They will then elect a new President who – if everything goes according to plan (one never knows!) – will head the Executive for the next five years. These MP’s will swear (or solemnly affirm – accommodating the non-religious) that they will be faithful to the Republic of South Africa and will obey, respect and uphold the Constitution and all other law of the Republic. They will also solemnly promise to perform their functions as members of the National Assembly to the best of their ability.

But in reality the loyalty of these MP’s – regardless of which party they belong to – will not be first and foremost to the Constitution, or even to Parliament. Because they have been elected on the basis of a list system of pure proportional representation, their first loyalty will always be to the political party they belong to and especially the leadership of that political party. Their positions in Parliament are wholly dependent on their good standing within their respective political parties and if they upset the party leadership they might well be “redeployed” as Ambassadors to Tziki-Tzikistan or as second in command of the Putsonderwater sewerage plant.

This, it seems to me, is one of the great weaknesses of our constitutional system. The National Assembly is supposed to be the engine room of our democracy and has a constitutional duty to hold the executive to account and to ensure that the executive serve the people of South Africa and not their own ego’s or the whims of the bureaucrats staffing the various government Departments. Section 42(3) of the Constitution states that:

The National Assembly is elected to represent the people and to ensure government by the people under the Constitution. It does this by choosing the President, by providing a national forum for public consideration of issues, by passing legislation and by scrutinizing and overseeing executive action.

In the past the members of the National Assembly have not always represented the people effectively and have not fulfilled its oversight role in the manner envisaged by the Constitution. How many South Africans even know the name of the MP who is supposed to represent their interests in the National Assembly? How many have approached their MP to help them solve a problem with an often heartless and incompetent bureaucracy or to make their voices heard on the topical issues of the day?

When the arms deal scandal came to light, a majority of MP’s on SCOPA was browbeaten by Minister in the Presidency, Essops Fables, to stop their investigation and to endorsed the whitewash report by the Auditor-General, the Public Protector and the NDPP, which was “amended” (I would say, “doctored” was a better word) after a draft was submitted to President Mbeki.

When then President Thabo Mbeki – under the influence of Anthony Brink and other “dissident” scientists – developed eccentric and highly toxic views on HIV/AIDS, most MP’s remained silent as thousands of South Africans who had no money for medical aid and could not afford anti-retroviral drugs quietly succumbed to AIDS.

Those courageous and principled MP’s who did not agree with these developments – most notably Pregs Govender and Andrew Feinstein – resigned from Parliament because there was apparently no scope in the ANC caucus for expressing dissenting views. Some DA MPs have also quietly resigned after differences with Tony Leon and Helen Zille. Because of the list system of proportional representation they really had no other choice. If they had not resigned, they would have been fired.

That is why a mixed system, in which half the MP’s are elected directly in constituencies and the other half on a proportional representation basis to ensure proportional representation of parties in Parliament, stands a better chance of producing a far more active and responsive Parliament – and this would be good for especially the poor and marginalised South Africans who find themselves without a voice and feel the only way to make themselves heard is through violent protests and boycotts.

Some argue that this system has not produced a particularly responsive crop of local government councilors and that a change in the electoral system will not necessarily improve the way in which Parliament serve the people and the way it holds the Executive to account. They might have a point. Changing the electoral system will not miraculously make public representatives more hardworking and responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens.

After all, there are many reasons why public representatives are not more effective and robust. Many public representatives lack the skills, knowledge, independence of mind and courage to act as true representatives of the people – often through no fault of their own. Parliament should therefore do much more to educate and empower MP’s to do their job properly. Surely all new MP’s should receive intensive training preparing them for their role as servants of the people.

But a change in the electoral system will open a window of opportunity that might improve the performance of MP’s. The role of  MP’s in the national parliament differs from that of councilors and MP’s are potentially far more powerful than their local government counterparts. For example, the committee system in the National Assembly provides a very powerful platform for MP’s to make a real difference by scrutinising draft legislation and by holding the Executive to account.

Even so, a real change will only occur when ordinary voters become active citizens who engage their MP’s and place pressure on their MP’s to do their job properly. South Africans tend to be either passive citizens or, when they do organise and resist heartless and unwise decisions, to do so outside the official channels by taking to the streets in service delivery protests. If at least some MP’s are directly elected, it would make it easier for ordinary citizens to engage their MP’s and to actively take part in the governance of the country.

Sadly, almost all political parties represented in Parliament are not keen to change the electoral system because it will take away some of the power of the party leadership and will devolve some of the power to the constituency level. Party leaders do not like MP’s with an own constituency and an independent bent because this will weaken the party discipline and will make it more difficult for party leaders to force MP’s to follow the Party line.

The system will only change if the self-styled champions of the people – COSATU, the SACP and the ANC Youth League – take up this issue and make a concerted effort to fight for the rights of ordinary citizens to be properly represented in Parliament. I sincerely hope that these members of the Alliance will take up this issue and that they will try and convince the ANC to change its policy when it meets for its next conference in 2012.

Such a move will be good for democracy and good for ordinary citizens. Come on Zwelenzima Vavi, Blade Nzimande and Julius Malema, I know you can…

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