On Friday ANC Today pointedly republished an article by Kgalema Motlanthe - headed A two-thirds majority: the new 'swart gevaar' - that first appeared in the Sowetan on May 11 1998. In an introduction the ANC deputy president writes that the article is worth revisiting because it illustrates that the DA - which has recently raised the danger of the ANC of Jacob Zuma receiving a two-thirds majority - remains "locked in the past; stuck in an era when fear and prejudice was seen as a legitimate political platform."
It is worth going back to the context of that article - for it casts on interesting light on the dangers ‘overwhelming' majorities hold for new democracies. What triggered opposition concern at a two-thirds majority for the ANC were statements Motlanthe himself had made to the Sunday Times the week before. The ANC was then in the initial stages of bringing all state organs under party control - including those whose independence was supposedly guaranteed by the constitution.
Motlanthe told the newspaper that if the ANC gained a two-thirds majority in 1999 it planned to use it to review the power held by independent watchdog bodies such as the judicial services commission, the auditor general, the attorneys general, and the reserve bank. The Sunday Times stated, "The call to transform the civil service, an issue discussed at the ANC's NEC last weekend, is the result of growing frustration within the party that, it has been unable to grasp the key levers of power."
In the event, as Motlanthe noted on Friday, the ANC did not change the constitution post-1999 (at least to facilitate this project). But this was not because it had a change of heart on the matter but simply because it was able to simply bypass the relevant constitutional provisions by deploying cadres to head up these institutions (see here.). The mainstream English language press failed to put up any meaningful opposition to this programme at the time.
(It is not quite true that the ANC has never used its two-thirds majority in parliament to change the constitution for nefarious purposes. In 2002 it passed a constitutional amendment to allow floor crossing - something that it did purely to stuff up the opposition. That the DA idiotically went along with that legislation does not negate this fact.)
The lessons of that era are twofold: Firstly, an ‘overwhelming' majority tends to have a quieting effect on civil society, while stoking the hubris and power-hunger of the ruling party. As the political scientist Maurice Duverger noted, if a party's electoral majority is great, its authority is great, "it is not embarrassed by the opposition; it can claim to represent the will of the country." If a ruling party has a two thirds majority this on its own provides a powerful disincentive against going to court to challenge the constitutionality of legislation.