Absence of interrogation lets officials off the hook

AMONG the many things to be learnt from the Bangui debacle must surely be the broad lesson that publicly elected representatives should do the jobs they are paid to do.

The ANC in the Eastern Cape is still trying to untangle the mess caused by the 10 party members who in the 2011 election of a new mayor for the Mthatha-based King Sabata Dalindyebo Municipality thought their votes really were their own.

The ANC’s candidate, Nonkolisa Ngqongwa, scraped to victory with just 35 votes to the opposition United Democratic Movement’s 33 because 10 ANC members opted not to vote for her.

The ANC has been trying ever since to expose and fire the rebels. Party leaders even considered fingerprint technology to crack the secrecy of the ballots before settling on lie detector tests.

Not surprisingly, seven ANC councillors refused, arguing that the test would make a nonsense of the secret ballot, which underpins the concept of democracy. The incident is one among many in which the party has tried to force recalcitrant local councils to implement decisions taken at the ANC headquarters.

At a different level of government, the ANC imposed its will on MPs in September 2007 when ANC members took their public duty too seriously and tried to reject then president Thabo Mbeki’s slate for a new SABC board.

The fight went back and forth until Mosiuoa Lekota, then still a loyal and disciplined cadre of the movement, summoned the ANC members of the portfolio committee on communications and told them exactly who they would vote for.

They had no secret ballot to hide beneath, but the process made a public mockery of the public interviews by MPs of board nominees who had had to be flown in while the elected legislature pretended to do its duty.

In both these very different cases, decisions that ought to have been taken by elected public representatives were imposed that had nothing to do with the public interest and everything to do with the individual interests of political powermongers.

These are not isolated cases. The ANC, with its national majority of just under two-thirds and often much bigger majorities in some local councils, is increasingly treating the institutions of representative governance with contempt, using them to endorse but seldom to discuss decisions taken higher up the party chain.

There is reason to be worried about the crucial work of the statutory Judicial Services Commission in the appointment of judges, there is evidence of politically convenient appointments to the so-called Chapter Nine institutions that guard our rights, and the processes of parliament often get abused to achieve a pre-determined outcome.

Sometimes these abuses do achieve basically undemocratic outcomes that I and most of my friends would consider to be positive. The public hearings held around the country about the legalisation of gay marriage delivered a resounding popular repudiation of the concept, but the government went ahead and did what I think was the right thing.

Occasionally, as in the case of the Secrecy Bill now approaching the final stage of its passage into legislation, consultation and committee deliberations do improve intrinsically bad legislation.

But the process more often is abused to deliver outcomes convenient to the ANC president, Jacob Zuma, and his close associates. And the sad fact is that public representatives elected on an ANC ticket tend more and more to regard themselves as voices of their masters.

Their oath of office obliges them to “obey, respect and uphold the constitution” and to work “to the best of my ability”. Blindly obeying a party dictate is not the best of anyone’s ability.

Parliament’s website concedes a secondary duty to parties but still puts the public interest first: “Members of Parliament are elected to represent the people ...because MPs are elected representatives, they must be accountable to the people of South Africa and they must act in the public interest.

“MPs are also accountable to their own parties – the whips of the various political parties maintain internal party discipline in Parliament,” comes later.

The danger inherent in ceding the responsibility of elected representatives to paid party bosses is evident all around us. It feeds corruption, encourages appointments based more on party loyalty than on competence and weakens the structured oversight of the cabinet and government that is central to the success of our post-apartheid development plans.

Now, in possibly the single most dangerous consequence of this abrogation, we see soldiers deployed and dying in defence of a corrupt government in the Central African Republic and possibly on the brink of renewed conflict far from home.

The constitution declares the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces because it is conceivable that he might have to send our soldiers into battle against an immediate threat.

But it also requires that he tell parliament about any troop deployment as soon as possible and it assumes that MPs will apply their minds before they endorse, amend or reverse his action.

In our emerging culture of acquiescence, however, parliament has lost the habit of interrogation. “If it comes from the presidency it must be right” has become the mantra of many who sit on the Speaker’s right.

If we let that continue we risk a lifetime of boring propaganda from the state broadcaster, councils incapable of anything not ordered by a higher level of government and entanglement on the wrong side of some foreign war when our proper duty is to build and maintain peace at home and, where we can help in step with other countries, across Africa.

Brendan Boyle is the editor of the Daily Dispatch