New South African Review 2. Paul Hoffman
popular democracy.
The ANC’s December 2007 Polokwane national conference endorsed Zuma as leader of the ANC and defeated Mbeki and his supporters. This open competition provided a sharp contrast with the national conference held by Zanu PF at the same time and which was a thoroughly orchestrated, top-down affair. The organisational report, for instance, was not discussed; it was not even distributed to delegates. A copy was held up on the podium. ‘Here is the organisational report. Does conference adopt it? Thank you very much.’(Cronin, 2008b). In contrast to the liberal, radical democratic and socialist currents of the ANC, Zanu PF has been almost entirely shaped by a bitter military struggle (in which violence was uncritically extolled and practised) and its politics are still strongly marked by ethnicity.
For three decades, Zimbabweans have been held captive by a nationalist project that has become increasingly bankrupt and incompatible with democracy, while it has been estimated that South Africa averages more protests per person than any country in the world – on average at least sixteen every day (Jacobs, 2008). Peter Alexander (2010: 27) suggests that there were some 34 000 protest gatherings between 2004 and 2008. In 2010, delivery protests reached a record high. These ‘delivery protests’ are a double-edged sword for South Africa: on one level they confirm the existence of a strong culture of protest (of a kind liquidated in Zimbabwe) but they also point towards a crisis of effective governance and place a question mark over the country’s long-term political stability.
Although Zuma was regarded by many as a problematic political alternative to Mbeki at the ANC’s Polokwane conference, it is true nevertheless that Mbeki respected the fact that he had lost the vote and he ceased to be ANC president. Moreover, in September 2008 when he was ‘recalled’ by the ANC executive, he resigned the presidency of the state and accepted the committee’s view. It is difficult to imagine Mugabe demonstrating such respect for constitutional and democratic processes. In this sense it is important to make a clear distinction between the thoroughgoing authoritarian character of Zanu PF in contemporary Zimbabwe and the real but contained and contested authoritarianism of the ANC in South Africa which still exists within, and is tempered by, the country’s broader democratic infrastructure. Just as dominance has an impact upon the strength of a democratic culture so, equally, a democratic culture has an impact upon the character of one-party dominance.
THE WORKING CLASS AND THE TRADE UNIONS
In Zimbabwe, the trade union movement was not involved in the liberation struggle. In South Africa the trade unions are a key component of the Tripartite Alliance. The involvement of Cosatu in the process of liberation and in the current government has no counterpart in Zimbabwe. Nor does the role of the SACP. It is true that the SACP has authoritarian instincts, and like the trade unions (in which it is influential) it played a significant part in bringing the current ANC leadership to power. Both the SACP general secretary, Blade Nzimande, and his deputy, Jeremy Cronin, currently serve in the Zuma government. That said, the SACP has helped to counteract trends towards the type of narrow black nationalism which dominates Zanu PF’s politics and which some in the ANC broad church – particularly the Youth League – might otherwise find tempting. The SACP has championed a class analysis which rejects racism and racial categories, although it is true that the theory of ‘colonialism of a special type’ and the national democratic revolution (each of which the SACP embraced) did recognise the reality of racial division. It has also been a source of significant white involvement in the liberation struggle and its existence reflects the much more urbanised character of the South African struggle. With the trade unions, it will challenge state policies which do not deliver progress for the poorer sections of South African society, although Cosatu is concerned that the SACP presence in government is causing it to mute these protests. The SACP was bitterly opposed to the movement away from redistribution under Mandela and Mbeki and is critical of the neoliberal orthodoxies which investors demand from South Africa. It is also strongly opposed to the Mugabe regime and will doubtless seek to pressurise the Zuma government into adopting a more critical policy towards Zimbabwe.
INTERNAL DEMOCRACY
In a sombre 2009 article, Lotshwao speaks of the ANC as ‘internally undemocratic and highly centralised’ (2009: 912) and fears this could lead to the slow death of democracy in South Africa. The absence of strong interparty competition to provide a check on the dominant party certainly places greater pressure on the ANC’s own internal pluralism to provide a degree of democratic balance, and Lotshwao sees little evidence of this. His argument raises valid concerns but is overstated and requires qualification, given that the ANC has only recently emerged from a process in which it unseated Thabo Mbeki as both party and state president, the rarest of events in Africa. While trends towards centralisation and elitism are real, the aftermath of such important events may seem a singularly inopportune moment to write the ANC off as ‘internally undemocratic’. Our judgement is that such a view of the ANC lacks nuance and subtlety and therefore struggles to explain such a groundbreaking event. It is true that the ANC leadership is still too remote from its membership and from the people at large – Zuma’s more inclusive persona notwithstanding – and parliament still largely serves as a docile instrument of the ANC leadership. The autonomy of ANC MPs is eroded by both the practice of democratic centralism and by the list system of proportional representation, each of which invests enormous power in party elites. Lotshwao argues that when Mbeki was ‘recalled’ in 2008, this resulted from his alleged interference in the prosecution of Jacob Zuma, not from pressure by the ANC membership (2009: 912), although this fails to account for his earlier removal from the ANC presidency which was directly attributable to pressure from the mass membership. Although he argues that the executive is virtually free to act as it wishes (2009: 907) it is at least possible that Polokwane has released a democratic genie from the bottle which the ANC leadership will now struggle to return and Zuma’s room for manoeuvre in the South African political system is greatly constrained when compared to Mugabe’s, even in Zimbabwe’s post-GPA era. Although the ANC has an autocratic character which adversely affects the quality of South African democracy as a whole, it still has a more diverse political base than Zanu PF and a degree of internal pluralism which is wholly absent in Zimbabwe. From a bleaker perspective, however, it could be argued that this plurality is increasingly a plurality of rival factions seeking to access and ultimately plunder the state, rather than a genuine clash of rival ideologies (Suttner, 2008).
CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE LIBERAL TRADITION
South Africa has a strongly democratic constitution which is jealously guarded by its Constitutional Court and compliance with the constitution is monitored by a range of ‘chapter nine institutions’ – the Human Rights Commission, the Public Protector, the Gender Commission – although their autonomy is invariably encroached upon by the reality of ANC dominance. It is revealing that when Zuma (2006) expressed homophobic sentiments some years ago, he felt compelled to apologise and to acknowledge the constitution’s protection for freedom of sexual orientation. The ANC government has also had to accept a number of adverse rulings by the courts, particularly on the HIV/AIDS issue and it has done so without demur although some of the threatening noises made against the courts from sections of the party when Zuma’s prosecution was still a possibility were reprehensible. There is, however, a lack of enforcement of the constitution and the adoption of policies, particularly in the international sphere, that tend to be incompatible with the constitution – for example the position it has adopted on gay rights at the UN and, arguably, its policy towards Zimbabwe. It is also true that there is a gulf between an enlightened constitution and grassroots