At the national conference of the African National Congress (ANC) held in December last year, at Polokwane, it was decided that the Scorpions would be dissolved. The matter finally reached Parliament last week. According to the chairwoman of Parliament's portfolio committee on safety and security, Ms Maggie Sotyu, Parliament will indeed dissolve the Scorpions. Ms Sotyu noted that Parliament's job was to ‘implement the policies of the ruling party'.

This has led to the situation whereby Parliament, a body which in theory represents the interests of nearly 50 million South Africans, will instead implement the decisions of the tiny minority who, at the Polokwane conference, decided that the Scorpions should go.

It was reported that Parliament had received petitions with nearly 80 000 signatures calling for the retention of the Scorpions. Ms Sotyu said that petitions which ‘simply say no to the bills are not assisting us'. Ms Sotyu would thus appear to be saying that proposals disagreeing with the dissolution of the Scorpions are without merit.

The chairman of the portfolio committee on justice and constitutional development, Mr Yunus Carrim, said that what was happening was the same as in any democracy, where a party was elected on the basis of a manifesto, and once elected, implemented the promises it had made in the manifesto. However, Mr Carrim fails to note that the last election in which the electorate had the opportunity to have a say in the running of the country was in 2004. The dissolution of the Scorpions was not part of the ANC's manifesto in 2004.

In a letter to Business Day, Mr Carrim stated that the ANC had previously taken positions which were probably at odds with the wishes of the majority of the electorate, in particular the party's abolition of the death penalty, and its support for abortion and gay rights. However, this is a red herring.

The abolition of the death penalty, the rights of homosexuals, and the right of a woman to make decisions regarding her own body, are well-accepted principles in most liberal democracies. The abolition of a respected and popular crime-fighting unit at the behest of a small group of individuals in the ruling party is not.

In Mr Carrim's Business Day letter he writes, ‘If people feel they cannot stop the Scorpions' disbanding, they can still play a major role in shaping a new organised crime unit - and we are keen to hear from them'. Mr Carrim calls on the public to express their opinions regarding a new unit to fight organised crime, but not on their desire for the status quo to remain. Again it confirms the decision to disband the Scorpions has already been made.

Post-Polokwane, there has been such a total change in the leadership of the ANC that President Thabo Mbeki should either have stood down and let Mr Zuma, as new ANC leader, take the reins of the country, or he should have shown some mettle and called a snap general election.

The vast majority of people on the new national executive committee (NEC), the ANC's governing body, are Zuma-ites, and the top six ANC leadership positions were all won by people running on Zuma tickets. A snap general election would have shown how much support the new leadership of the ANC really enjoys within the country, and how much the current round of ANC infighting has annoyed the electorate.

If a snap general election had been called we wouldn't have had the situation which currently exists, where we have a lame duck President in the Union Buildings and an increasingly assertive party leadership in Luthuli House.

The ANC Youth League's call for Mbeki to be recalled and a general election to be held is one of the few sensible things that that organisation has recently said. The current situation which prevails is contributing to a paralysis in governance.

The lack of accountability and the mutation of South Africa into a pseudo-democracy can be traced to two key factors, among various others. The first is that the ANC seems to believe that it has some sort of divine right to rule, and that any criticism of it is either racist or unpatriotic.

Its initial electoral success - in a deeply flawed election and helped by former President Nelson Mandela's iconic status - has probably contributed to this. President Mbeki's refusal to accept that he would lose to Mr Zuma at the Polokwane conference was a microcosm of the ANC's belief in its own infallibility and right to rule.

The second factor is the country's current unsatisfactory system of electing MPs. The country's representatives in Parliament answer to Thabo Mbeki, or Helen Zille, or Patricia de Lille, and not to the average South African, to whom they should be answering.

As Ms Sotyu has demonstrated, the electoral system helps turn Parliament into a tool for implementing the decisions of the ruling party, rather than a vehicle for expressing the policy preferences of ordinary South Africans. Individuals have no real say in who represents them, above the level of ward councillor.

A new electoral system would help counter the emasculation of Parliament. Developing such a system would not be difficult, as much of the thinking has already been done. In 2003 an electoral task team, led by erstwhile leader of the opposition, Dr Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, released its recommendations.

Although the majority opted to retain the current electoral system, a minority report suggested a mixed-member system for the country, whereby South Africa would be broken into constituencies. Each constituency would elect between three and seven members to Parliament, depending on the number of voters in that constituency. The current number of MPs (400) would be retained, 300 MPs being elected from constituencies, and the remainder being elected from national party lists to ensure proportionality.

It may be argued that South Africa's voters would struggle to understand the system, but this insults the intelligence of the average South African. Besides, the system has been used with some success in Lesotho. If it can work there, it can work in this country, with our much larger pool of resources and media tools which can be used for voter education.

However, the current system suits both the ANC and the country's opposition parties. There is no threshold requirement for entering Parliament (unlike the German system which requires that parties receive more than 5% of the vote to gain representation in the Bundestag).

Small parties in South Africa, such as the Pan-Africanist Congress and the African Christian Democratic Party, would have probably faded into obscurity after 1994 if such a threshold had existed in this country. The ANC supports the current system because it helps perpetuate the oxymoronic, Soviet-style principle of ‘democratic centralism'.

The ANC knows that it will win next year's election, probably with another comfortable margin, and that the only people to whom it will be accountable will be the organisation's NEC. Whether the members of the NEC have South Africa's best interests at heart is a matter of debate.

Until such time as the ANC is given a fright at the ballot box, and the country's elected representatives are made accountable to the constituents who put them in their positions of power, this country will continue its slide towards pseudo-democracy.

This article first appeared in SAIRR Today, the weekly online journal of the Institute of Race Relations, August 8 2008