CAPE TOWN - Whether intentionally planned or not, South Africa's dominant party democracy has manipulated itself into a situation in which the maintenance of its current power advantage requires the destruction of the conditions for democracy itself.  At the heart of this problem lies the traditional mode of governance of the ruling ANC, namely "liberation alliance politics" and the "democratic" hegemony that has been established. 

Since the late apartheid period the ANC has prided itself on its character as a "broad church". This is a disarming description of a support-maximising stratagem of combining the appeal of the socialist-leaning but often pragmatic ANC, the formerly white-dominated intellectual "resource partner" the South African Communist Party (SACP), the muscle partner in the form of the trade union federation COSATU, a Women's Movement, a Youth League and a crumbling "civic" movement, together known as the ANC Alliance. 

Within this assembly of organisations, the core ANC has until recently enjoyed comfortable overall controlling authority due to its capacity to contribute not only the legitimacy of its leadership of the liberation struggle against white rule but also overwhelming electoral majorities since 1994. Continental European politicians would probably agree, however, that the co-ordination of political coalitions requires consummate skills in political give-and-take. These skills have clearly been lacking in the ANC in recent years, as seen by intensifying policy disputes between the ANC and both COSATU and the SACP and the consequent rupture in the Alliance that led to the abrupt expulsion of former President Mbeki in 2008.

Now the party is confronted by high-key conflict, along with street violence, between the Youth League and the leadership of the mother party. This has particular resonance at this time of the Arab Spring, in which youth activism has supplied the critical energy at street-level to challenge an assortment of well-entrenched Arab depots.  

The outcome and implications of the incoherent but muscular dissent of the Youth League cannot yet be predicted. But what has already become clear is that the over-extension of the ANC's network of power has profoundly undermined the quality of South Africa's democracy and the ruling party's effectiveness in dealing with critically important policy challenges.

The crippling of democracy

As most informed observers know and the ANC has roundly admitted, there are serious and mounting concerns among most South Africans about the effectiveness of governance, everyday administration and development policy. Suffice it to say at this point that although specific features of this incapacity are varied, they can all be grouped together under the rubric of deficient political will and electoral accountability, to which the following features of the ANC's rule have all contributed:

1. The neutralising of voters' right to political choice

ANC supporters cannot claim to know who or what they are voting for. A vote for the ANC in most constituencies is tantamount to a blurred mixture of support for African nationalism, for one of the world's last remaining Communist parties outside of China, for rowdy youth activism, for the pervasive and incautious restructuring of society known as transformation, for grandiose commitments to a "developmental state" and for efficient service delivery, which has been rapidly weakening in the ANC administration.

The ANC has for long conveniently ignored that fact that at its basis democratic accountability rests on voters having the right to know what their votes are intended to achieve and to measure outcomes against this yardstick. This has become impossible with the ANC wrapped into a messy and non-transparent accumulation of "tendencies", "sentiments" and solidarities within the alliance.   

2. Avoiding necessary hard choices in government

Most governments face uncomfortable choices with attendant political risks. Effective governments face up to these choices and prepare for the consequences. It is clear that in respect of the two most important policy challenges, the ANC has shirked this responsibility.

One dominant need among its own supporters is to raise the level of employment in communities in which only around 40% of adults are able to work. The hard choice here is between the currently virtually unprecedented employment security for unionised workers, which discourages employment expansion in the competitive economy, and allowing hiring and firing on the basis of production needs, which may temporarily reduce the security of unionised workers while a more productive economy picks up the slack and eventually overtakes the previous levels of employment.

Another critical need is to improve the effectiveness of education, because by now virtually all ANC supporters know that even the minority of school leavers that earn school-leaving certificates find that with the exception of a small minority with university entrance level passes, the certificates have such low utility that they are virtually a guarantee of rejection by employers.

The hard choice for the ANC is between persisting with a failing system or imposing strict discipline on the currently cosseted and mediocre teachers but who are members of a powerful trade union that firmly rejects assessments of teacher performance. The ANC has shirked this hard choice, and international assessments place South Africa's massively expensive mass education system as among the worst in Africa.

Both these sets of choices have been shirked because the trade unions in question are within the ANC alliance and the mother party does not have the political autonomy or will to act without Alliance support. The voters pay the price and the quality, accountability and ultimately the viability of democracy is compromised.   

3. The irresistible political luxury of an enduring "compact majority"

An elementary criterion in the assessment of the quality of democracy is that electoral majorities should not be guaranteed.  "Compact" electoral majorities are those in which ethnic, racial, class, or geographic solidarities impose an automatic and taken-for-granted political "bonding" between a dominant party and its support base. In other words, voters do not respond to the performance of government but to its identity and mission, obviously crippling the effectiveness of democracy.

Depending on the use of political power by the leadership of the majority party, this obviously also leads to a self-reinforcing majority party hegemony and even to "democratically" legitimated dictatorship. Africa has had a full share of these deviant illiberal "democracies".

South Africa has had an impermeable racially dominant ruling party since 1994. This enabled South Africa's President Jacob Zuma to boast fairly recently that the African - supported ANC would rule until "Christ's Second Coming". In the last municipal elections, however, the first serious signs of electoral vulnerability of the ANC appeared, but the party's majority was still over 60%. An electoral defeat for the ANC remains a very remote prospect.

Furthermore, it is too early to predict whether or not the ANC would accept an electoral defeat. The leadership of the ANC has, after all, subtly and ambiguously but effectively sheltered Zimbabwean demagogue Robert Mugabe's steadfast refusal to accept his electoral defeat in Zimbabwe's last elections.

Many observers, here and within the NATO alliance, are not at all certain that South Africa in concert with other African Union leaders, were not playing the same game with respect to Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, although here the South African stance was even more ambiguous and inconsistent, if not amateurish.

The bonding between the ANC and the demographic majority of voters, is zealously protected by constant reminders and celebrations of liberation from apartheid rule, even though fewer and fewer ANC supporters were adults during the scourge of apartheid. For the ANC the horrors of apartheid have been energetically transformed into its most precious political resource.

4. Voters as permanent victims, the politics of dependence at mass level

The luxury of a compact majority is secured by another prominent feature of South African politics. Economic underdevelopment affects the quality of democracy in many ways, but one consequence of poverty is particularly damaging. This is where poverty becomes useful as a political resource for a dominant political party.

Poor people without independent means of survival are easily manipulated or entrapped in their support for a dominant party. The surrounding poverty, furthermore, can give the ruling elite a very plausible rationale for policies that augment its own control over society.

In South Africa an otherwise less than efficient government has done some things very well. Legitimated by the poverty, it collects taxes at very high rates from the middle classes very efficiently, and the largest single use of this tax has been to increase the size of the state apparatus and its employment of formerly disadvantaged people. Hence it has captured a massive electoral market fully under its control.

It has also introduced a most generous welfare system for the poor, with 15 million welfare grants of various types clustered among the poor who are core supporters of the ANC. Only Brazil comes close to South Africa as a developing world "welfare state". 

The writer is a minor partner in a research company and the feedback from fieldworkers is that the most effective electioneering gambit is for ruling party candidates to warn audiences that unless they vote for the ANC, their welfare grants will be withdrawn. Poverty in South Africa, although ostensibly a critical concern for government, has emerged as the rulings party's most valuable political resources.

5. The politics of dependence at middle class level

This formula set out above not only works among the poor, but is equally effective at middle class levels. Increasingly muscular government transformation policies have stimulated the rapid growth of a black middle class. Normally this would enrich democracy by boosting the strength of civil society. But this positive outcome can only follow if the middle class is an independent bourgeoisie with reasonably autonomous judgement. A major part of South Africa's new middle class, however, is utterly dependent on ruling party transformation policies and programmes - once again, a captive support base.

6. The dependency outlined in the two previous points has even deeper implications for the quality of democracy

At its most basic, an effective democracy emerges most readily in an overarching political culture in which, as David Apter (in Rethinking Development, Sage, 1987) puts it, the "society" is the independent variable while the state, government or political power structures are dependent or subservient factors.

In South Africa, during the Apartheid system under Verwoerd in particular, racial dominance was centrally planned and ruthlessly imposed by state authority. Even before his death, however, there were abundant signs that the system would unravel. Today, the ANC government has a similarly comprehensive overarching objective. This ideological objective has Leninist intellectual roots and goes by the name of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), in terms of which, following the analysis of Karl Marx, the "political" transition to democracy in 1994 has to be followed by a "social revolution" or transformation that will eradicate the underlying structural factors in South Africa's neo-colonial domination of a "special type".

Some key ideologues in the ANC alliance self-consciously pursue this objective but it is not consistently applied in all sectors of government. More importantly, it has already been fatally compromised by its own greed, in the sense that the ANC cadres that have been empowered in corporate business by comprehensive empowerment legislation and regulations are not different to their white capitalist counterparts in anything but aspects of their rhetoric.

They pay themselves at least the same bonuses, hire the same accountants and auditors, are subject to the same rules of business "best practice" and are contributing very significantly to a deepening of overall economic inequality in the society. This is not necessarily good for democracy but fortunately it has all but blown the prospects of a Leninist "second phase" of revolution out of the water.

The Leninism may fade but the structural imperative of state hegemony will persist. It has been recently strengthened by the formal depiction of the state by the ANC as a "developmental state". Although this is unlikely to improve the efficiency of development policies, but it offers a convincing rationale for centralised hegemony, the exact opposite of what David Apter had in mind when referring to the need for "society" not the state to be the "independent" variable. 

7. Vote counting versus rights and freedoms

Finally, a sound quality of democracy implies a necessary balance between "representation" and "rights" in all modern democracies.  While voting and counting votes to determine the composition of government is obviously imperative for democracy, this principle should not override the other categorical imperative, namely that democracy should protect everyone, including minorities of all kinds that lose when votes are counted.

Former President Bill Clinton is reputed to have said to President Thabo Mbeki after a meeting of Mbeki's high-level advisory team, that the viability of South Africa's democracy would depend utterly on how minorities would be treated. 

South Africa gives prominent attention to the rights of minorities, but the favoured minorities are the fashionable vulnerable minorities. Even Bills of Rights guaranteeing equalities of rights cannot protect all minorities if the state decides that some minorities are "more equal than others". Hence there is a contradiction at the heart of modern democracies.

A variety of resolutions to this contradiction have been proposed with very little academic consensus emerging. Chantal Mouffe (The Democratic Paradox, Verso 2000) in acknowledging the inevitability of a contradiction between the two principles of democracy, proposed an acceptance of an "agonistic" relationship between them, but this resolution is subtle and elusive. 

In respect of these contradictory implications, probably the best that a non-devolved unitary democracy can attempt to achieve, is provision for "appeals" concerning minority rights to a second chamber of parliament in which the majority principle is replaced by a pluralist principle, namely equal representation of all political parties achieving above a minimum level of support - a democracy of inbuilt "checks and balances".

However, the ANC within its historically cultivated and support-maximising Alliance, is most unlikely to warm to the idea of pluralistic checks and balances. Only if and when it stands to lose its majority will it take checks and balances seriously.

Hence South Africa faces the prospect that its democratically elected super majority will continue to strangle the quality of its own democracy. Only the voters at large can prevent this from happening. What is the likelihood of the mass electorate exercising independent choices?

In recent years we have taken the opportunity to ask voters in representative empirical research about their motivations for choosing political parties to vote for. In one extensive group depth interview, for example, we asked a cross section of ANC voters what attracted them to the parties they chose. Their answers were that the promises that parties made were most important.

When the interview facilitator then reminded them that earlier they had complained that candidates seldom kept their promises, a respondent replied to loud acclaim from others "Ah - but the promises show us that they still love us!" Listening to these group discussions left me with the impression that the majority of these voters: 

• Strongly identify with the ruling party just as devout fans identify with their soccer teams, whether the teams win or lose. 
• Have deep misgivings about the quality and integrity of local leaders of the self-same party.
• Feel socially remote from any opposition party - because they are seen as parties of strangers.
• And hence live politically off scraps of recognition and signs of sympathy from "their" party.  For these generally poor people, recognition and sympathy are almost as important was material relief.

This is part of the political "bonding" that I referred to earlier in section 3. Poor people that feel neglected do not necessarily respond rationally to their political choices. Dominant party collapse in South Africa will take a long time. Rational political choices based on the quality of policies offered cannot be expected of voters who feel trapped by their own dependency and vulnerability. The consolidation of democracy in the developing world, therefore, will be a long slow process.    

Lawrence Schlemmer is former Vice President of the HSRC and professor, now an executive director of a research company, MarkData.

This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.

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