THE Independent Electoral Commission’s report that more than 100 political parties have registered for this year’s elections has again stimulated discussion about our electoral system. Since the first democratic elections, we have heard complaints about the proportional party list system we adopted.
Perhaps it was inevitable that in a country that borrowed and employed the British constituency system even in the farcical Bantustan states, political commentators and some parties would feel more comfortable with the procedures to which they were accustomed.
Driven by different considerations, the critics of our electoral system complain that it distorts the people’s democratic will. Some say the list system disempowers MPs because it makes them accountable to political parties, rather than to voters.
Others argue that our system disempowers ordinary citizens, who have no identifiable personality to whom to turn for relief regarding government failures. The heat that attends many urban protests, they contend, is an expression of such frustrations.
We have also heard the claim that, by encouraging voters to support parties rather than individual candidates, the list system is responsible for the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) domination of South Africa’s political landscape. A party like the ANC, which commands a heroic record, so the argument goes, can fill its benches with MPs of indifferent quality because the system offers no space for the evaluation of individuals.
Yet the UK’s recent political history should alert us to the faults in a system that has been in operation since 1660. Its two-party constituency system has smothered local nationalism, which has begun to assert itself in potentially disruptive ways in Scotland and Wales.
South Africa, unlike the UK, is a 20th-century confection created by force of arms and bringing together ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse communities under one political authority. In negotiating South Africa’s democratic future, the parties had to strike a balance between the potentially centrifugal and the centripetal features of our society.
During the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), it was easy to identify two broad political streams. One was strongly federalist and represented by the National Party, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the Democratic Party. The second — led by the ANC and including the Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party and one or two of the homeland parties — favoured a unitary state.
The first and most important challenge negotiators had to wrestle with was devising a system that would be representative. Codesa itself was an attempt to create as inclusive as possible a national convention so that all South Africans could take ownership of its outcome. Though everyone knew it was not so, the parties that had operated the homelands system, or participated in the coloured and Indian chambers of the tricameral parliament, were given a status equal to that of parties representing huge constituencies. Unrepresentative cliques of ethnic entrepreneurs who had profited from apartheid were accorded undeserved dignity to facilitate a stable transition.
Codesa finally arrived at a consensus about the objectives that our electoral system should aspire to attain. After the talks had broken down twice, federalists and unitarians agreed that the system should attract even the smallest body of political opinion to engage in the political process. To achieve that effect, it should stimulate the participation of small parties. Proportional representation has that singular virtue, provided the threshold of entry is sufficiently low.
Emerging from a past characterised by deliberate exclusions based on race and class, a consensus that the system we chose should encourage coalitions also grew. The experience of mature democracies suggested that proportional representation made it difficult for one party to become dominant. Consequently, most countries that had adopted it were usually governed by coalitions.
The delegations that were most apprehensive about one-party dominance persuaded the others that a proportional lists system would temper the ambitions of the bigger parties and ensure that no one party could govern on its own terms.
Those with good memories will remember that wannabe spoilers such as Constand Viljoen were persuaded to abandon the harebrained military projects of the far right by such arguments. Viljoen registered the Freedom Front as a political party immediately after his failed intervention in Bophuthatswana. The IFP, too, after a reckless game of brinkmanship played until the 11th hour, was convinced to participate.
After 20 years, perhaps it needs revisiting, but its one great merit is that our electoral system makes it relatively easy to launch new parties. Agang SA and the newly minted Economic Freedom Fighters very likely will win parliamentary seats because of its inclusive design. On May 7, the voters will deliver their verdict.
• Jordan is a former arts and culture minister.
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