Consider Ben Turok.
Here is a Communist Party veteran who was present at secret discussions among Party members shortly after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 which led to the founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe; a member of Umkhonto from its first days, for which he served a prison sentence following conviction for sabotage; a man who helped to draft the Freedom Charter and was an organiser of the Congress of the People in 1955; the secretary-general of the Congress of Democrats (COD), a partner of the ANC in the Congress Alliance from its inception in 1952 to when it was banned in 1962; a fellow-accused of Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu in the Treason Trial, and editor in exile in London for a time of the ANC magazine, Sechaba.
At over 80 years of age, when he was the oldest ANC member of the National Assembly, he nominated Kgalema Motlanthe on 25 September 2009 as the ANC's preferred candidate to succeed Thabo Mbeki as State President.
And yet....
Consider what it says about South Africa's system of party-list appointments to elected bodies, when a man of Turok's pedigree is nevertheless not empowered to vote according to his conscience should he not agree with his party leaders on a matter of principle - in this case, the Protection of State Information Bill.
Consider why he should have had to skulk away from the chamber in the National Assembly like a naughty schoolboy, rather than vote for a measure in which he did not have confidence.
As reported in the press, Turok "slipped out of the chamber just before the voting started on Tuesday [22 November], returning later".
The next day he stated on Radio SAfm that on becoming an MP, he had taken an oath to be loyal to the country's Constitution. That, and his position as co-chairman of Parliament's ethics watchdog, the Joint Committee on Members' Interests, involved, he said, "an examination of ethics across the board."
This resulted in him becoming the "focus of the ire of furious ANC MPs, some of whom on Wednesday [23 November] demanded that a special caucus meeting be held on Thursday and that swift action be taken against the party stalwart." The outcome was that he "could face disciplinary proceedings by the ANC."
The ANC national spokesman, Jackson Mthembu, stated: "The conduct of comrades like Ben Turok in raising their objections by abstaining and using the media smacks of ill-discipline and will be handled internally by the ANC."
Mr Mthembu was born in 1958. He was two years old when Professor Turok joined Mandela, Sisulu, OR Tambo, Ruth First, Vuyisile Mini, Lilian Ngoyi, Yusuf Dadoo, Ahmed Kathrada, Nkosi Albert Luthuli and others in the Treason Trial, and he was age three in the year Ben Turok helped draft the Freedom Charter.
Yet in terms of South Africa's Electoral Law, Turok can be expelled from Parliament at an instant at the whim of a cabal of party functionaries, nearly all of whom have not shown a fraction of his political commitment; and it was thought suitable he should be chastised in public (for "ill-discipline") by an unelected party official many years his junior in terms of service to the ideals of the ANC.
I wonder if many ANC members do not feel an element of ill-ease, not to say shame, at this.
The extraordinary pointedness of this episode is that Turok himself provides a vivid insight into the source of South Africa's compromised democracy, and his own humiliation, in a crucial passage from his autobiography. In Nothing but the Truth: Behind the ANC's Struggle Politics (Jonathan Ball, 2003), he describes his entry into the National Assembly, at the very start of his work as an MP, as follows:
"I was allocated to the Paarl Constituency and opened an office in Mbekweni, a typical African township seven miles from the town centre with few transport links. I struggled to be accepted in thetownship and even by the ANC leadership who would have preferred a local representative. Instead they were faced by a white intellectual parachuted in unceremoniously." (p271)
These words state frankly that in South Africa, the overwhelming bulk of political representatives - MPs, members of the provincial legislatures and half of all municipal councillors - are "parachuted in unceremoniously" to this or that community of local people, following their election to legislative bodies. It is their position on the party list, elected according to proportional representation, which decides, not the choice of local communities. The fact that at Mbekweni even local leaders of the party "would have preferred a local representative" counted for nothing. The representative (representative of what? of whom?) is simply "allocated" to this or that anonymous, faceless collection of people - a stranger, not of their own choosing.
The power of decision as to who is to represent any local community does not lie with that community itself. The community is powerless. It must simply accept a decision made by a higher authority. In the same way, the same community - let's say, the people of Mbekweni - has no power to "de-allocate" the person who has been so imperiously "allocated" to them, if this MP or member of provincial legislature or appointed ward councillor should turn out to be corrupt, or arrogant, or lazy, or a drunk, or unsuitable in any way whatever.
None of these is the case with Ben Turok. But suppose that he had not "struggled to be accepted" in Mbekweni at Paarl, as he reports. Suppose he had behaved differently, confident of the support of the higher authority that had "allocated" him or her. There we have the true picture of South Africa's system of supposedly democratic, supposedly liberated political representation. The voters are helpless.
This is an insulting parody of democratic choice. In this crucial sense, the people do not govern. In the matter of their right to choose the individual in whom they have most confidence to represent themselves, the system of political enfranchisement bequeathed to the people in 1994 in the name of liberation turns out to be...a system of dis-enfranchisement. The people may not choose their own representative, and they may not get rid of him or her if they are dissatisfied.
In this crucial respect, the Electoral Law of the "new" South Africa is as humiliating and insulting to the great mass of the people as was the apartheid regime. In one sense, it is worse. The apartheid regime was more honest about disenfranchising the black majority of the people, though it too created fraudulent fictions of enfranchisement - the Bantustan assemblies.
In this sense, the National Assembly from 1994 up to now is more like a Bantustan assembly than a real representative body, since the individual MP does not represent any community of local people who have chosen (and can sack) this particular person to represent their interests in the highest law-making body of the land. The MPs of the ANC, as the overwhelming majoritarian party of government of the past 17 years, are like dummies in a shop-window. The fact that an MP on the ANC party-list has been "allocated" by the party bosses in Luthuli House to make a connection with zone X or Y or Z in the country does not make it a real, authentic connection. The real connection of ANC MPs goes upwards, to Luthuli House, not downwards to communities of voters.
For this reason, the MPs of the governing party behave slavishly, often exhibiting the worst qualities identified by Steve Biko as the mark of a subject people. If the party whips say "Jump!", they jump. If the whips say "Sit on your hands!", they sit on their hands. That is why Ben Turok's act of integrity on 23 November is so rare, even though it was expressed by him slipping out of the chamber rather than standing up boldly to vote against a measure which he felt compromised his conception of ethics, the Constitution, and the ideals of the ANC. Neverthless, the old ANC of the Sixties (which Thula Bopela recalled, in his article "Something greater than oneself") spoke through this old veteran, now in his eighties, rather than in the harsh voice of his younger colleagues who shamefully rained down anger against him when he should have received their respect and praise. It was an incident that recalled the worst of the Bantustan assemblies.
In this matter of the freedom of conscience of the individual MP, South Africa's Parliament was shamed by a very different quality of behaviour only one month previously, at Westminster, in London, on 24 October. There, 81 MPs belonging to the senior party in the coalition Government defied a three-line whip ordered by their Prime Minister to demand a referendum on Britain's continued membership of the European Union, now in serious crisis. Two junior members of the government resigned their posts rather than compromise their integrity.
As one MP, Adam Holloway, stated, on resigning his government post: "Here's our opportunity to show people that actually the system can work, that representative Government does actually continue to function in the land where it was nurtured and developed, that patriotism, putting your country rather than your own interests first is not foreign to this House."
The point is, there was nothing his party bosses (in this case, the Conservative Party) or the government could do about it. MPs in Britain are protected by being selected individually by their constituency parties, and continue to be protected so long as they act on behalf and in the interests of their constituents. Proper discussion of a most serious constitutional subject was able to take place freely in the House of Commons.
The integrity of the individual MP, and thus of the political system itself, is protected by the constituency, which alone has the power to "allocate" MPs, and to replace them. The same system operates at national, county, district and municipal level. In this way, elected representatives are made accountable. The system would operate just as well with large multi-member constituencies (permitting representation by different parties in a major urban area such as, say, Soweto, or Cape Town) as with smaller single-member constituencies, as in Britain.
The shameful fact is that whites in South Africa enjoyed this more authentic system of political representation under apartheid, but that blacks (and ethnic minorities) were deprived of it after liberation. It was good enough for whites, but not now for blacks!
This is the point I wished to make in my article on 29 November, "The virus of self-aggrandizement", in which I argued that South Africa's Electoral Law facilitated corruption.
I'm afraid that in his response of 1 December, "Paul Trewhela misdiagnoses the problem", Thembinkosi Zondi does not address any of the argument I make above.
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