THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA'S OPPOSITION PARTIES: PART THREE

"When we accuse others, we make rhetoric. When we accuse ourselves, we make poetry." - WB Yeats

Our political opposition revels in rhetoric, whilst being perennially incapable of producing uplifting oppositional poetry. This makes the ruling ANC doubling lucky, despite it being in the worst place now politically in all its history. Firstly, it becomes quickly clear from the rhetoric of the opposition parties that in fact, the only thing the opposition parties hate much more than they hate the ANC is one another. Secondly, the entire internal political culture of our opposition parties falls far short of what the ANC has to offer in terms of its internal "democratic centralist" culture. So the opposition parties are not just weak relative to the dominant ANC. They are also weak when viewed against one another, and on their own individually. These parties are thus unappealing to the majority of the South African voters not just as compared to the ANC, but also when viewed in their own right as well. That amounts to a double-jeopardy weakness, if not a double whammy.

What is more, our opposition parties, who make a living by daily and routinely criticizing the ruling ANC, have a deep dislike for criticism directed at them. This is not just a question of defensiveness on their part. It is fundamentally a matter of an unacknowledged inferiority complex on the part of our opposition parties brought about by their supernumerary nature in our politics (over hundred political opposition parties for a country with 25.3 million registered voters), as well as by their legendary political failures to perform their basic and historic oppositional role to the satisfaction of the black and democratic majority in our country.

Our opposition parties are hardly paragons of correctness and virtue when it comes to matters of their internal party political health. Many of them are in fact self-pathologised in their glaring inability to bring order and stability in their own internal affairs. Chief amongst the political opposition's pathologies is their incapacity to develop consented to, time-tested and predictable rules for party leadership succession.

The greatest political achievement and legacy of the 1871 Paris Commune of Workers was the consecration of the democratic principle of recall of elected officials by those who elect them. As Frederick Engels put it in his 1891 Preface to Karl Marx's The Civil War In France, the Paris Commune "...realized the urgent need to safeguard itself against its own deputies and bureaucrats by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall any time."

It is sad to note that South Africa's relatively new democracy has no recourse to "safeguard itself" from the failing opposition parties, because our democracy lacks the fair dinkum mechanisms to recall leaders of failed, failing and malfunctioning opposition parties, including those splitting along factional lines, in the interest of enhancing the quality of our democratic and multi-party parliamentary system.

Click here to read further.

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter