Despite his wish for a deeper and richer democracy, the criticism of the principle of representative government by Mzonke Poni - the chairperson of Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape and formerly a leader of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign - is a recipe for dictatorship.
Nowhere in the world has the principle of representative government been overturned in modern, urban society without resulting in a far, far worse dictatorship. Across the world, and in South Africa in particular, the principle of representative government was dearly fought for and should be dearly defended. Whether in the tradition of the African National Congress, which celebrates its centenary in January, or in the non-racial tradition of the Liberal Party of South Africa (1953-68), the principle of universal franchise through the medium of representative government was the main guiding principle in the struggle against the apartheid regime. It should not be forfeited. On this issue, Mzonke Poni and the leadership of Abahlali baseMjondolo in the Western Cape are giving fatal guidance to their members and supporters.
Poni's argument was set out this week in a signed statement headed "Mayor De Lille Unwilling to Meet Backyarders on our own Terms", published on Politicsweb on 6 September (see here).
Poni's statement should be read and studied carefully in light of the history of political philosophy.
He argues that AbM of the Western Cape does not consider public events "at which each organisation can only send three representatives to be genuine participatory democracy. We are committed to participatory democracy, to the co-planning of open assemblies at which participatory budgeting and urban planning can be taken forward.
"The logic of representation at meetings organised in a top down way is the logic of civil society. It is not the logic of popular democracy."
The statement concludes: "We continue to call on the mayor [Ms Patricia de Lille, the mayor of Cape Town] to adhere to the principles of participatory democracy or direct democracy by working with the organisations of the poor to arrange open assemblies where everybody will matter, where everybody will count, where everybody will be equal; where everybody need to be respected and where everybody will be able speak without any fear."
No modern democratic government can take place on this basis.
Participatory democracy of the kind advocated by Mzonke Poni was possible 2,500 years ago in the foundation centre of urban democratic government, in Athens in ancient Greece, at the time of Pericles (c. 495 - 429 BC). All citizens met in the agora, or place of assembly, to decide their laws collectively.
But consider the limitations. The total population of the Athenian state was small by modern standards, though large by the standards of the day in Greece. Above all, the citizen body was only a fraction of the total population. Firstly, it excluded women. Next, it excluded slaves, as well as freed slaves. Finally, it excluded foreign residents (metics). At its highest level, in the mid 5th century BC, the citizen body constituted only about 20 percent of the total population, after which a stricter definition of citizen led to a further decline.
Mzonke Poni's advocacy of direct (or participatory) democracy is yet another species of ideological moonshine in South Africa, whether for the city of Cape Town alone (population over 5.5 million) or the whole of South Africa (49.3 million).
It utopian unreality bears comparison with the programme for a government of workers', soldiers' and peasants' councils in Russia as advocated by Lenin and Trotsky in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. ("Soviet" in Russian means council, so that "Soviet Union" meant a union of these supposedly super-democratic organs of popular self-government). Under this fraudulent programme for a supposedly superior type of democracy, the possibility of representative government - with its accompanying institutions in civil society of an independent judiciary, a free press and protection of the rights of citizens, including rights of property - was wiped out. The so-called higher democracy of the Soviets was the open door to unfettered tyranny by the state, with its secret police and its slaughter and enslavement of millions under Stalin.
In fact South Africa suffers from too little representative government, not too much.
The Interim Constitution of 1993, under which the first democratic election was held the following year, contained an element in its Electoral Law tending towards unaccountable, top-down government at every level, from National Assembly to Provincial Legislature to Municipality: the source of wholesale related evils, not least the country's endemic corruption.
The most cogent short account of this defective introduction of democratic government to South Africa - in reality, government that does not represent, and is not representative - is in the study by RW Johnson, South Africa: The First Man, The Last Nation (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). Johnson points out that the National Party and the ANC agreed in secret discussion on an electoral law "unique in the world's electoral history" (p.208).
In societies such as Britain and the US, a constituency-based electoral system makes each elected representative accountable to a definite set of voters in a particular locality. Local people select that person as a party candidate, and in the same way they can later de-select him or her. Each candidate in each constituency (or ward) has to justify his or her record personally to the local voters, and each one of them can be individually voted out of office by local voters.
The system works in the same way in multi-member constituencies, as in Ireland, and as existed in Britain from the earliest era of elected representation in Parliament until the last multi-member constituencies were abolished there in 1950.
As Johnson pointed out, the electoral system is "the key to the workings of the ... political system and thus the most important item in the constitution." (p.207). The South African electoral law, he argued, is in reality a "scandalous political bosses' charter." With no constituencies at national and provincial level, there is "no possibility for local communities to have any control over their representatives or to choose who they might be". Even when MPs die or resign, there are no by-elections. 400 MPs are elected to the National Assembly on a purely proportional basis from party lists. Any MP who disagrees with his or her party can be thrown out of the National Assembly at a moment's notice by the party bosses, who have the power to move people at will into and out of seats in parliament and the provincial assemblies. (In municipal government, there is a mixture of ward and PR seats on a basically 50:50 divide, but this does not alter the overwhelming weight in favour of the party bosses).
As Johnson argued, this "monstrous" system has "vitiated many of the democratic provisions in the rest of the constitution" (p.208), setting in place a system of unaccountable control from above over MPs, provincial councillors and a majority of municipal councillors. Lack of accountability is stifling the whole country.
In agreeing with Mzonke Poni that South Africa does not have enough democracy, the point is that its system of government is not in fact representative, and it is this that should be remedied - not abolished.
Instead of the opium dream of direct democracy in a state of almost 50 million people, what is needed is a strengthening of representative government by a change in the Electoral Law, along the lines proposed in 2003 by the commission on electoral reform headed by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert.
As was argued in 1984 by the troops in Umkhonto we Sizwe in Angola before their leaders were sent to Quatro prison camp, the original ideals of the ANC have not yet been realised. This is now creating conditions in which the democratic and constitutional achievements of the 1990-1994 period are being put in grave danger, from sources as widely different as the ANC provincial authorities in KwaZulu-Natal who launched a violent pogrom against members of Abahlali baseMjondolo at Kennedy Road in Durban two years ago, to the violent conduct of the Malema movement in the ANC Youth League outside Luthuli House last month, to the call for an end to representative democracy by Abahlali baseMjondolo in the Western Cape.
It is time for clear heads and moral courage.
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