Sensible compromise or "fatal concessions"?
Ngoako Ramatlhodi, the Deputy Minister of Correctional Services, is a loyal cadre of the national democratic revolution and a former Premier of Limpopo, redeployed after a tender scandal. The NDR is the life blood of the tri-partite alliance which governs all provinces except the Western Cape, all cities except Cape Town and most towns in South Africa. The NDR is what some struggled for and, for some, the struggle still continues, despite calls for the scrapping of the NDR by Prof Kader Asmal shortly before his death.
Advocate Ramathlhodi has recently complained that the ANC made what he calls "fatal concessions" in the process that led to the abolition of apartheid and parliamentary sovereignty and the establishment of our multi party constitutional democracy under the rule of law in the early 1990s (see here). It is not clear whether the fatality refers to the NDR, in which event he is right, or the country, in which event he is dead wrong.
These "concessions", so he says, tilt the Constitution in favour of "forces against change", "while immigrating substantial power away from the legislature and the executive and vesting it in the judiciary, Chapter 9 institutions and civil society movements." Without once mentioning the main goal of the NDR, which is the control of all levers of power in a hegemonic fashion in a one party state, the advocate reveals a worrisome attitude toward constitutionalism in general and the checks and balances on the exercise of power that it entails in particular.
His views are informed by the deeply unconstitutional tenets of the NDR and they are subversive of the rule of law which brought respect for human dignity, the promotion of the achievement of equality and the enjoyment of the freedoms guaranteed to all onto the statute book.
Deeper than the usual "corruption, cadre deployment and capacity constraints" analysis is the sad truth that the current paralysis in our politics is due to the presence of two conflicting value systems in the body politic of the land. On the one hand there is the humane and compassionate ethos of our new constitutional order, brought about as the product of the national accord negotiated over a period of years and culminating in the adoption of a supreme Constitution under the rule of law in 1996. On the other hand there is the value system of the NDR