By Steven Friedman
YOU would not think so when you hear the parties debate, but this election could play a major role in deciding how effectively South Africa responds to the global financial crisis.
The reason is not that weighty policy issues with a strong bearing on our economic future are being thrashed out in the campaign. It is, rather, that this election may decide how accountable to citizens government will be over the next five years. And this in turn will determine whether the government responds to the crisis in ways which protect South Africa from its worst ravages.
The New Governance Challenge
While no-one knows just how much damage the financial crisis will do to lives and livelihoods and for how long, its impact on South Africa will be significant – it already is, since many employers have retrenched workers. It also seems likely that it will be with us for a while.
At the very least, reduced demand for South African exports will depress economic activity with obvious ripple effects through the economy. There will be less investment and so less jobs and income. This will make the role of government more important than it has been since South Africa became a democracy.
Over the past 15 years, the government has been operating in an environment in which, if the National Treasury adopted a mainstream economic approach and implemented it well, growth was assured. The effect was probably to reduce the costs of other areas of government weakness – such as the very limited impact of just about all anti-poverty measures besides social grants.
Now, far more will be required from government. It needs to intervene effectively in the economy to stem job losses and its social programmes will need to more effectively cushion people from poverty and to keep economic activity ticking over.
Since it cannot address the problem on its own, it will need to work with the key economic actors. This is happening: a task team consisting of government and private interests has been looking at ways of addressing the crisis for some months. But that is not enough – the government will still need to implement the suggestions which emerge from its dealings with its social partners. And this requires a government which is far more accountable to grassroots citizens: while government ineffectiveness is often blamed on a lack of technical skills, a far more pressing problem is the reality that it has been largely unaccountable to people at the grassroots of society.
The government cannot respond to the crisis in a way which meets grassroots needs unless it knows what they are. Research shows a considerable gap between that which government – and all the organised interests, such as business, labour and citizen organisations – think people want – and what it is people really want. If the government relies purely on the task team, it will ignore the needs of the grassroots because the organised interests do not know what these are. A government more in touch with its citizens is crucial to effective action that deals with poverty.
Governments also do not operate effectively unless they are held to account. Unless politicians and officials believe others are looking over their shoulders, they will become complacent and do what they want, not what citizens want. And, if the only people able to hold governments to account are, say, donor countries and business people, they will mainly do what donors and businesses want. If South Africa is to respond to the crisis in a way which meets the needs of grassroots citizens, its politicians need to feel they are forced to account to grassroots voters. Accountability also has a direct effect on the technical competence of governments – if they know key groups will give them a hard time if they don’t respond well to particular problems, they will be forced to look for the technical ability required.
The 2009 Election and Accountability
This year’s election should have a crucial bearing on how accountable the government will be over the next few years.
The problem is not that South Africa’s leaders have been less sensitive to grassroots people than those elsewhere, but that they have had little incentives to take them and their concerns seriously. While the better off can rely on their organisation and their importance to the economy to ensure that the government has to account to them, the pressure they can exert is far weaker when political office-holders are not worried that voters might reject them. And, for the grassroots poor, the vote is often the only weapon they have to ensure that politicians worry about their needs.
Since 1994, the ruling African National Congress has been assured of a large and always rising share of the popular vote – it is hardly surprising that, as the first flush of democratic enthusiasm waned, the government felt little pressure to account to most citizens. A cynical view would insist that politicians didn’t have to bother about what people at the grassroots felt because they could win re-election even if they took them for granted. A less jaundiced analysis would simply note that politicians whose share of the vote constantly rises assume that they are doing what people want them to do – even when the vote really means that people feel that a party is their political home even if it is not listening carefully to them.
Whatever the cause, the governing party has not believed itself to be under any great pressure to account to grassroots citizens and has therefore taken for granted their support. It is trite to point out that this is not a context in which leaders are going to feel pressure to account to citizens.
The importance of this election, then, is that for the first since 1994, the ANC faces the prospect of a decline in its share of the vote. The most obvious reason is the emergence of breakaway party, the Congress of the People (COPE), which is competing with the ruling party for the support of traditional ANC voters and seems likely to siphon off some of its support. Less obvious but as important is that, even before COPE emerged, internal ANC polls were telling it that it had lost some voter support (probably the result of disillusion with politicians who seem far more concerned with in-fighting than with addressing citizens’ needs, itself a consequence of unaccountability). More specifically, there are signs that many voters in the Western Cape who were classified as ‘coloured’ under apartheid and who moved into the ANC column in 2004, are now planning to move back to the opposition.
This obviously creates pressures for the ANC to listen more carefully to citizens and there have been signs that it knows this: after former President Mbeki’s removal, both the Health and Safety and Security ministers were shifted (and this in a context in which Cabinet changes were kept to a minimum for fear of alienating Mbeki appointees). Both the ministers who were replaced were seen to be insensitive to public concerns. But that does not necessarily translate into a sustained willingness to account, still less into accountability to grassroots citizens. That will depend on the election result – and this is unlikely to send an unambiguous message.
Reading the Entrails: The Election and After
For leaders of the incoming government, the vote should send a message opaque enough to require some interpretation.
It seems likely that the ANC will indeed, for the first time since 1994, lose ground. COPE should draw away some support – so should the apparent swing to the DA in the Western Cape. It could well lose one province and its two-third parliamentary majority. But the bleeding is unlikely to be nearly as profuse as some commentators and opposition politicians expect.
First, COPE is unlikely to get anywhere near the 20% some of its leadership predict – 10% would be a significant achievement and something of a surprise. Because voter loyalty to the ANC’s traditions is likely to remain for at least a decade, no party can challenge it at the polls unless it can project itself to ANC voters as a more authentic representative of the ANC tradition than the movement’s leadership – or at least as enough of an heir to that tradition to convince ANC voters that they can support it without feeling that they are deserting their political home. COPE has failed to do this: to name but one example, its presidential candidate, Rev Mvume Dandala, has no history of ANC activism and so ANC voters may well feel that they can support him only by sloughing off a political identity they are eager to keep.
Second, polls claiming that many ANC voters plan to stay at home or vote against it ignore the reality that, in a society in which party identification is so strong that many voters see the party of their choice as an expression of their identity, the reservations which voters express about ‘their’ party months before the election will dissipate as election day draws near and that many who had considered rejecting the ANC will give it another chance. And so most ANC voters who are disaffected with their party will end up voting for it.
These realities mean that the ANC will not receive a slap in the face – more likely is a muted warning that it needs to listen more. And this means that the reaction of ANC leadership in particular to the results may well help shape how we are governed for the next five years.
Faced with a result in which its share of the vote drops, say, from 69% to 65%, ANC leaders could conclude that all the reporting about disaffected ANC voters was based on fantasy or wishful thinking and that ‘the people’ really are satisfied with their leadership. This will ensure a continued lack of accountability to most citizens. Continued political in-fighting and a tendency to confuse the political elite’s concerns with those of most citizens are the likely result.
But they could also conclude that the drop in its share of the vote is a warning from voters who want to be heard. This would prompt a serious attempt to listen and respond to the grassroots which would foster greater accountability and more effective government. There will no doubt be some ANC leaders who will favour the first interpretation and some who prefer the second. The debate between them after the election will shape governance in the next half a decade.
The debate will not, however, proceed in a vacuum – citizens and their associations will influence it too. The more civil society, the media and grassroots citizens insist on more accountable government, the more likely is it that an ambiguous election result will be seen as a cry for more accountability. To that extent, citizens and their organisations have an important opportunity to help nudge political leadership towards greater accountability which may allow the society to escape the worst of the financial crisis.
Steven Friedman is director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, a University of Johannesburg and Rhodes University initiative.