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What do Brexit, Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and #FeesMustFall have in common? Here’s another hint: the Zimbabwe #ThisFlag movement. Got it? They are all about rejecting conventional authority.
Africa is sick of big-man politics – where the political leader stands tall above everyone else, and grabs everything for his (or her) family and cronies.
The problem is that all these movements do not add up to consistent goals. The Arab Spring movement mostly ended up in disaster – Egypt is a military dictatorship again, and Syria and Libya are home to chaotic bloodbaths. Trump and Sanders arising at the same time makes little sense. Other than being “anti-establishment”, they have little in common. If either were to be elected president, the outcome would be radically different. Sadly, Sanders is now out of the picture, making the US race a whole lot more boring.
What we need as the follow-up to the #MustFall phenomenon is deciding what a #MustRise campaign should spell out.
Back to South Africa. In these elections, conventional politics is playing out against a background of these anti-convention movements. If 2014 is a guide, there will be a big stay-away vote. In the previous national election, there were more people who didn’t vote at all than the number who voted ANC – a first since democracy in 1994.
This time, there is something different – a rising wave of independent candidates. Where I live in Makana, Eastern Cape, five out of 14 wards are being contested by independents. One such movement is Forum 4 Service Delivery (F4SD), which has put up 300 candidates, mostly in North West. F4SD is an umbrella for independents, and has grown out of nothing in a matter of a few months.
There are similar groupings in other areas.
The ANC has shown signs of being nervous about this trend, attacking F4SD as a breakaway of disgruntled ANC members – but this is not accurate, as it represents a range of political origins.
At local level, service delivery requires a commitment to the community. A party that operates on a caucus system and that takes orders from head office cannot be responsive to local issues. A councillor who breaks ranks and criticises the party line is liable to be thrown out – and in our system, if you lose your party membership, you lose your seat (whether at local, provincial or national level). The result is a flawed system of political representation that works against grass roots democracy.
Independents are one solution to this problem. Should a group of independents win in their own right, they could govern, but without a caucus system, each councillor would be in a position to put their own ward’s interests ahead of any external organisation.
Most of the focus has been on whether the DA can win any major metros from the ANC. If that happened, it would stir things up a bit. A large number of independents winning would stir things up even more. And stirring things up is what we need in this country – 22 years without nearly enough change is pretty good reason to be impatient.
#IndependentsMustRise? Let’s see how that goes. The other option has not worked too well.
Machanick is based at Rhodes University and has provided advice to F4SD but is neither an office bearer of nor candidate for any political movement
