The Multi-Party Charter for SA and an opposition that is desperate and clueless

22 August 2023

This week, I have been invited to a workshop on ethics, parliament, and the elected representative by the Institute for African Alternatives, which is focused on the defence of our constitutional democracy and asking the pertinent question: what can we expect from our elected representatives?

I was thinking about the seriousness of this question in light of the newly formulated Multi-Party Charter for South Africa, where a few opposition parties have clubbed together to offer South Africans a “new deal” supposedly and they also claim to be defending the Constitution and all the principles undergirding our constitutional democracy.

I was reflecting on all this and just wondering, what is it about this opposition pact that offers the people of South Africa any new hope and how different will the conduct of the elected representatives of these parties be, that have just signed this pact? What new thing is this opposition pact really bringing to the South African body politic and voters specifically? Is there anything in the messaging and packaging that is so profoundly different that it will potentially be a game-changer with the 2024 elections in mind?

The ANC has been dropping its electoral margins for the past few elections in the country and yet this has not translated into voters necessarily turning towards any of the opposition parties en masse. In fact, as voters have expressed disappointment in the ANC by not turning up to vote on election day and dropping the ANCs margins as a result, they have also been expressing their profound disappointment in the opposition and its offerings by refusing to vote for the opposition, even as they punish the ANC.

So, as far as the South African voter is concerned, looking at the previous elections in the country, the opposition has actually been a huge disappointment and been profoundly underwhelming in its attempts to convince and woo voters, so, what exactly about this Multi-Party Charter for South Africa is going to be appealing to and appease the same voters who have not been impressed and persuaded up to now?

In his book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, Emory University’s professor of psychology and psychiatry, Drew Westen through a study of American presidential election results (so, this is not a Third World phenomenon that arises because of an uneducated and unsophisticated electorate as many so-called analysts would have us believe), concludes that even supposedly mature western democracies like the United States of America, are characterised by voter behaviour which is more based on emotions and feelings than reason and rationality. To quote him verbatim, “In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins.”

At their essence, electoral or campaign politics remain about moving and persuading the electorate through touching them emotively (their hearts) and not just their heads (reason). It is in the marketplace of emotions and feelings that election campaigns either fail or succeed and it is here where the opposition has been a continuous failure in the past few elections, despite the ANCs faux pas, and it is for this reason that one can legitimately conclude that this Multi-Party Charter for South Africa is nothing but a gimmick, a red herring by an opposition that is increasingly desperate and clueless when it comes to wooing the average South African voter, which is bound to lead to more disappointment and failure.

As Drew Westen explicitly puts it in his book, there are three things that actually influence voter behaviour and it is in getting things wrong at this level that the opposition in SA has shown itself to be clueless and ultimately desperate: feelings towards the political party and its principles, feelings towards the candidates and finally, their feelings towards the party’s (candidate’s) policy positions.

In a party-based political and electoral system like South Africa, the failure of the opposition to appeal to the hearts and not the minds of the SA electorate necessarily, continues to be their biggest Achilles heel and no Faustian pact of a Multi-Party Charter between them is going to change that reality. To make things even worse, the failure of opposition parties to bring about greater stability as well as improvements in governance and service delivery at a municipal level through the coalition arrangements that have become the norm since 2016, has given the South African electorate a healthy scepticism when it comes to juxtaposing the governing capacity of opposition parties (even when they work together) with that of the ANC.

Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government, He is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He writes here in his personal capacity.