Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
The ANC and scrapping of the Scorpions
Steven Friedman has written a characteristically thought provoking piece in the Business Day today about the scrapping of the Scorpions, arguing that the ANC is not as democratic as it should be.
ANC leaders are right that they can comfortably win re-election despite scrapping the Scorpions. But they are wrong to say that this means that they are taking democracy seriously. Democracy is a system in which most citizens are meant to get their way, not most activists. Politicians who cynically ignore their voters because they know that they can be taken for granted cannot claim a serious commitment to democracy.
Party leaders have a ready reply. Nowhere in the world, they insist, are politicians obliged to go back to their electorate to check every decision. If you vote for a party but don’t join it, you must expect others to decide for you.
But citizens do not lose their rights because they do not join a party. Of course ANC leaders are not forced to ask their voters what they think. But leaders who insist that the only decision-makers in the ANC who matter are the 6% of supporters who join the movement cannot credibly claim that they are reviving the voice of the grassroots citizen.
Parliament’s task is to do what most citizens want — not what most members of a party want. Unless and until the new ANC leadership show an interest in what most of their voters want, their claim to democratic commitment within the ANC is as tenuous as that of the leadership they have replaced.
But I am a bit ambivalent about this view. Two years ago when Parliament had to decide on the adoption of the same-sex marriage law, most ANC voters were also against this move, yet in the end the ANC dominated Parliament adopted the Civil Union Act. Sometimes a majority party must do things not supported by its voters for the greater good and to implement the values of the Constitution.
Perhaps the Scorpions case is different because it might well be argued that the scrapping of the Scorpions is not based on principle or on a desire of the ANC to expand and protect the constitutional guarantees of citizens, but instead to protect their own members from prosecution for corruption.
Nevertheless, a majority party who believes in human rights may well sometimes act in a way not in line with the wishes of the majority of its citizens. The trick is to know when to do so and when to give way to the wishes of the majority. In the case of the Scorpions the ANC clearly got it wrong.
