I shall never forget how the current South African electoral system emerged. There had been a difficult tense period when we were told that the Codesa negotiators were desperately bolting together what turned out to be the provisional constitution. Then finally, on a single day its terms were released altogether to the press. Many of the clauses has been public knowledge for a while as the Codesa negotiators had battled in public over what sort of constitutional clashes required a two thirds and which a three quarters majority for amendment. But there, tucked in at the end, was the provision for the electoral system. I remember gulping as I read it.

I had, as criminal lawyers put it, previous form for I had spent 26 years teaching political science at Oxford and the Sorbonne and had become something of an expert on electoral systems. Reading what I did that day utterly shocked me for I knew enough to realise that the electoral system there laid out would negate many of the high-flown objectives of the Constitution. There had never been a more extreme PR system in history nor such a party bosses' charter.

The bosses would draw up the lists and anyone who gave them cheek could be immediately "retired" from Parliament or their provincial legislature. In effect voters would be invited to vote for an amorphous notion of party and there would be no personal responsibility to constituency anywhere in the system. All responsibility would be to the party bosses.

The interesting thing was that there had been no publicity at all about the negotiations over this, the most important provision of all. It had clearly been agreed in absolute secrecy and it's authors, obviously realizing the bombshell nature of this provision, had held it back and then only released it amidst the general flood of constitutional provisions. Clearly, they had banked upon the fact that journalistic and political attention would be drawn to many other provisions and, I fear, to the general naïveté of South African journalists about such matters as electoral systems. Their bet, if that is what it was, was wholly vindicated for no one said a word of criticism and when I tried to raise the monstrous nature of the system, even among friends I was met with bored tolerance at best.

I have often wondered why it is that in all the long and tedious accounts of the democratic transition - I cannot understand the fascination with this subject - no one seems to have any ideas as to who exactly is responsible for negotiating this monstrosity of a system. Looking at it with the practiced eye of someone used to studying the politics of the French third and fourth republics and post-war Italy, several things seemed obvious to me. 

First, the extreme proportionalism was clearly an attempt by the NP to rescue the furniture from the burning building. For two years and more the polls had shown the ANC around 65 per cent and the Nats around 20 per cent. For the Nats the big prize was to emerge as the leader of an Opposition bloc of around 35 per cent, and thus able to bloc constitutional amendments. 

Second, it was fairly obvious that the party boss nature of the project was a boon to the SACP which had the problem of having many white, Coloured and Indian leaders who could never possibly be elected by their own ethnic constituencies - but who might also fall foul of Africanist opposition if they were parachuted onto African constituencies. For such Communists the list system was a boon since it meant that Slovo, Kasrils, Cronin, the Pahads and others could simply be slipped into the ANC list in advantageous positions and, as the French say, get "elus dans un fauteuil" (elected in an armchair).

As it happened the American National Democratic Institute and Idasa had organized a series of three NGO conferences all about the electoral system and voter education. I attended the first, held in Cape Town. It was immediately apparent that all the important speakers and organizers were SACP. Astonishingly, American taxpayers were paying, via NDI, for a Communist-controlled conference. I went to the NDI organizer, Patricia O'Keefe, and said do you realize what's going on here ? I knew she was a fairly tough nut because the NDI, in those early Clinton days, was largely a Jesse Jackson preserve, but I was amazed to realize that she understood just what was going on and was happy with it. I resolved just to hold my tongue and observe.

My resolve cracked late on the second day during a talk by some Scandinavian professor expensively imported to tell us about electoral systems. He was, effectively, a man from Mars. Never in his life, he said, had he seen such an extreme proportional system and he could not understand it. He knew the normal thing was for a dominant party like the ANC to insist on a majoritarian electoral system which would exaggerate its advantage. But here was a dominant party agreeing to a system which would allow all minorities some representation. He was, he said, nonplussed and appealed to the audience to explain it to him. At which Essop Pahad stood up and declared, in his most oleaginous manner, that this just showed what wonderful democrats the ANC and, indeed, people like himself were. 

This was too much and I cracked. I stood up and said the whole arrangement only made sense as a deal between the Nats and the SACP, for it would guarantee that the Nats got 20 per cent of the seats with 20 per cent of the votes, and it would also guarantee a far larger number of SACP MPs than any other system would produce. That is, far from being, as Essop had claimed, a monument to his and others' democratic goodwill, it was actually a conspiracy by the two most undemocratic forces in South African life to maximize their own strengths - in both cases at the expense of ordinary African nationalists. As I was speaking I saw many African heads jerk upright in a sudden shock of recognition. Essop was, of course, furious and challenged me to run against him. I said, look I'm not running. But the acid test is, you know if you run for any Indian constituency in the country, you will lose.

I was not surprised to be told that my presence would not be welcome at the next two of these conferences. I was originally told this was because I had initially been down to give a paper myself but there was now no room because of the press of foreign "experts". Informally I was told that the organizers of the conferences had been told that I was unacceptable because I had "been harassing the Comrades". It was a fantastical situation. The so-called foreign "experts" were like our Scandinavian man from Mars, wholly unable to see the schlenter being worked in front of them and I, because I had tried to explain the realpolitik behind the new system, was immediately expelled. And the whole exercise, devised in order to benefit the Nats and the Communists, would be paid for by American tax-payers who would be horrified by both these two parties. I wrote the whole thing up for the National Interest, a journal with a large audience within the Washington Beltway, where it caused appropriate scandal and indignation. 

I have often wondered why we have never been told who exactly was responsible for this appalling electoral system, this bosses' charter. Clearly, we are talking about fairly savvy Nats and Communists. Hernus Kriel and Joe Slovo? Tertius Delport and Arthur Chaskalson? Carve their names in shame.

Later, when my friend, Van Zyl Slabbert, was tasked with a enquiry into the electoral system I told him that I hoped he would bring constituencies -and thus personal accountability - back into the system. Van surprised me by insisting that that would mean the ANC winning every seat for, like most South Africans, Van immediately assumed the only alternative was first past the post single member constituencies. I pointed out that this was a silly assumption and instead recommended the French Fourth Republican system of variable sized multi-member constituencies with, if necessary, a proportional top-up to guarantee that small parties achieved some representation. Van became very excited and said he wanted to have me on the Commission he had been charged to set up. I was not surprised when this did not happen, however. Van had, after all, been tasked by Mbeki to set up this Commission and I was fairly sure Mbeki would have had kittens had he seen my name among the Commissioners. Not that it mattered: the Commission recommended exactly what I had suggested anyway and my assumption that Mbeki was merely fobbing Van off by giving him something to do seemed to be borne out by the way Mbeki dismissed the Commission's findings out of hand.

With that any serious hope that the system might change vanished. It is difficult to believe that Ms Ramphele's decision to put change in that system at the top of her list of demands is going to work. Any pollster will tell you that in a country like South Africa poverty, jobs, housing, health, education and inequality will all come way above change in the electoral system as popular concerns. Indeed, this was one of the clevernesses of those who contrived the present system, for they must have known that, once they sneaked it through, it would be hellishly hard to change. Not just because that would mean getting a Parliament elected on the present system to vote for a new system which would threaten the power of the party bosses and perhaps their own seats, but also simply because it would be so difficult to interest the electorate in voting for a new system that few would understand or care about. In that sense, as in others, Ms Ramphele is merely displaying her naïveté.

Nonetheless, I would still like to know exactly who devised the present system, how they managed to keep this bombshell so entirely secret during the Codesa negotiations, and how far they understood what they were doing. It is almost the only thing about Codesa that really mattered and yet it keeps its secrets still.

RW Johnson

This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.

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