Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
As the reality of these election results sinks in, the concerning slow progress of negotiations on forming coalition governments between elected political parties looms ever larger.
Some things we can say about these election results are how they have brought some parties down and others up and how they significantly impact our political practices inside and outside government from now on.
Whenever we glimpse the proposals under consideration in these parallel negotiations and contemplate several scenarios in which each might result, we realise that unpredictability, surprises, ructions and new lessons mark the facets of politics to change.
But what about the face of South Africa’s politics itself? This question matters as these elections bring us to uncertain territory with many unknowns.
The outgoing parliament will not be missed much, primarily due to its poor record of holding the executive accountable.
The question now will be whether the next generation of political leaders and MPs, in particular, will behave differently and rebuild trust in politics more enduringly if they do. We must fervently hope so.
However, it will not happen merely by ending one-party dominance and introducing a new generation of energetic politicians. What can we do differently to improve our politics, standards in public life, democracy and trust in government? There is no single answer. Some things that need to change are structural.
Refining our political culture in general and electoral system specifically are ways to enhance accountability and representation by affirming meaningful participation at all levels of society.
We must remove obstacles that diminish voter satisfaction in election processes, leading to many not voting even though they did everything the law required, including waiting patiently in long lines at polling stations.
However, countries with more accommodative electoral systems than South Africa’s proportional representation have political scandals, too. Our successive democratic parliaments with fewer antique conventions inherited from our colonial past and varying numbers of opposition parties have not automatically been temples of rationality regarding accountability and responsiveness.
These are not reasons for tolerance of the possibility of protracted negotiations and a shabby outcome swayed by political expediency, as much as we should not have exaggerated expectations of how soon an emphasis on consensus-building can prevail in our reconfigured politics.
Changing the culture and behaviour of politics matters at least as much. Too often, we have the wrong sort of elected representatives with the wrong values, including tendencies to abuse state resources for patronage, buying more extensive political influence through pet projects, or naked voter extortion.
We can widely sense the wide-ranging nature of the political trust problem across the political spectrum.
Many reports point to this subject. However, the core of our politics has inadequately addressed the trust problem in the wake of unscrupulous politicians continuing to negatively influence political decisions that directly affect our lives, including the current negotiations on a coalition.
Politicians themselves are often keenly aware of this. At the end of April this year, as reported in the Ipsos survey, South Africa was a country in which only 9% of the people said that they “generally” trusted political leaders, over a third (35%) of registered voters said that no political party fully aligned with their views and opinions. While firm supporters of the three major political parties expressed high trust in their chosen parties, the broader South African populace exhibited low trust in them.
Allowing things to stay as they are because they are difficult to change or because human beings are frail is a collective cringe.
We can do better. Our politicians must do better. They must put the country first.
* Nyembezi is a policy analyst, researcher and human rights activist
Cape Times