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State capture – colonialism – is a derivative of flawed electoral laws

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Atul Gupta and President Jacob Zuma (Photo: GCIS)
Atul Gupta and President Jacob Zuma (Photo: GCIS)

The future of South Africa hangs on the slates and factions in the governing ANC.

The party’s branches compile slates and mobilise with other branches to have those on their lists become members of the party’s decision-making body between conferences, the national executive committee (NEC).

Delegates elected by the branches will be bribed by powerful, corrupting forces to vote in a particular way at the conferences – as happened at previous gatherings.

The slates castigate and malign comrades who are good, but not aligned with their own side.

Factions emanate from slates and the winning faction elected onto the NEC at the December elective conference will be in a position to allocate tenders, jobs and other opportunities to those who supported it, irrespective of their merit, skills, or integrity.

This system condemns the country to a low-grade, corrupt administration.

Those left in the cold will work together, plotting how to oust those in charge. It becomes a vicious circle with slates removing one another at the expense of the public.

The poor and the nation as a whole lose with such ANC parliamentarians and municipal councillors.

The solution to slates and factions lies in a democratic reform of the ANC’s internal electoral laws. One ANC member, one vote.

This system will allow all ANC members to elect the party’s leaders for the first time in ANC history. It is not feasible to bribe the entire ANC membership, since there is not enough money to do so. The slates will be gradually erased.

There is a strong connection between the ANC’s electoral laws and South Africa’s corrupt political system, leading to state capture, whether by the Guptas or by Vladimir Putin’s KGB kleptocracy in the Russian nuclear deal.

State capture – another word for colonialism – is a derivative of South Africa’s flawed electoral laws.

The current 100% proportional representation system creates accountability of MPs, MPLs and most municipal councillors to party bosses. It provides no individual accountability of politicians to voters.

The Freedom Charter states: “The people shall govern!” But the people do not and cannot govern under this electoral system. Voters have no power over any individual in the National Assembly, provincial legislatures and over half of all municipal seats. We do not vote these politicians into office as individuals whose names we know and trust and we cannot vote them out of office.

Our only power, exercised once every five years, is to vote for an anonymous slate, or party list. This is not democracy. There is no rule of the people.

The party list is compiled by party bosses at various party headquarters and sent to Parliament. Party HQ, not the voters, decides who gets into Parliament. Party HQ can replace any one of its deployees with another at any time.

The result is that when party HQ is captured, MPs are captured. With President Jacob Zuma’s permission, the Guptas process the CVs of would-be ministers – like colonial overlords – and recommend them for appointment.

This was made evident by Mosebenzi Zwane’s transferral overnight from Free State agriculture MEC to minister of minerals and energy.

Similarly, Des van Rooyen had a short holiday in Dubai, allegedly paid for by the Guptas, after his brief stint as finance minister in December 2015.

In the same way, ANC MPs kept mum when the Guptas landed at Air Force Base Waterkloof, a national keypoint, and were given police escorts to their Sun City wedding, as if they were heads of states.

Most of the current ANC MPs are spineless. They are products of stomach politics, with not a grain of integrity.

This is deeply shaming for our society, which resisted centuries of servitude. We need to ask ourselves, was it all for this that our parents, their parents and our ancestors – and many of us – stood up against an oppressive power?

How has our struggle for liberation landed us in this situation?

This shameful mess is the result of the 100% proportional representation electoral laws. It is our responsibility to put an end to this self-destructive electoral system which shames us today in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, where we once stood proud.

If we follow the advice of Frederik van Zyl Slabbert’s electoral task team in 2003 and change these electoral laws to have 75% constituent MPs, these MPs will behave differently.

They will know there is always a threat of their removal, not by party HQ, but by the voters in the constituencies who elected them or the party branches which selected them as candidates. Then it will not be a lie to say that “the people govern”.

Until that time, ANC MPs and ANC branches are powerless, toothless and hopeless and merely serve as voting fodder.

We urgently need to recover our self-respect. Democratic electoral reform is the way to do this.

Makgoale is a rank and file member of the ANC.

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