BARNEY MTHOMBOTHI | Democracy is being undermined from within

Everywhere one looks these days, it would seem democracy, that system of government whose efficacy has been extolled and celebrated by its advocates over the ages, is either seriously under attack or in terminal decline.

Its architects saw democracy (or lack thereof) roughly as the dividing line between East and West, liberals and communists, and the good guys and the baddies — these differences becoming even more pronounced during the Cold War. For a country to be declared anti-democratic was almost akin to consigning it to a state of irrelevance, a damning indictment which many tried to avoid.

The West was seen as a metaphor for representative government, freedom, capitalism, and so on. Freedom of speech was sacrosanct, which meant people had the right to freely say, see and listen to whomever and whatever they liked without interference from the state or its bureaucracy. On the other hand, the East, epitomised by the Soviet Union, denied those rights to its people and dealt harshly with dissidents or prisoners of conscience. Winston Churchill’s description of the Soviet bloc as the “Iron Curtain” seemed to sum up the feelings in the West.

The West, led by the US and the UK, became the benchmark or standard-bearers of these free societies and moral arbiters or gatekeepers of those who had aspirations to enter this world of milk and honey. Even lending institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank seemed to use democracy as a yardstick in lending to poorer countries. Autocrats generally used to dismiss democracy as a Western imposition unsuited to their societies. The idea that Joe Soap could have a say in matters affecting his life seemed alien to them, even sacrilegious. It had to be nipped in the bud, and often it was. Ruthlessly.

In Germany, the far right is on the march, and their sympathies lie not with Washington or London — countries that rescued them from Nazism — but with Moscow and Vladimir Putin.

When the Berlin Wall collapsed, the West declared victory, and Soviet satellite states queued to join it. But now the system seems either to be unravelling or fraying at the edges. It’s as if democracy required an enemy for it to exist or stick to its precious principles. The enemy, if it still exists at all, seems to have mutated or transmogrified. It’s no longer the life-and-death struggle of the Cold War with competing stockpiles of nuclear armaments. The contest is now driven more by greed. It’s a race for resources. Ideology has simply become a foil.

But democracy is not being attacked by an outside enemy; it’s being undermined from within. Americans, for instance, used to brag about their democratic system — “a shining city upon a hill”, Ronald Reagan called it — until those inscrutable dimpled and hanging chads in Florida astonishingly catapulted George W Bush to the White House in 2000. The country was still recovering from that debacle when along came a conman called Donald Trump, who has turned the whole system into a running gag. Now the question is: can democracy survive the Trump presidency? They’re still trying to figure out what’s hit them.

In France, the country that launched liberal democracy by executing King Louis XVI, former president Nicolas Sarkozy this week began serving a five-year jail term for illegally receiving funds for his 2007 election campaign from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, of all people.

In Germany, the far right is on the march, and their sympathies lie not with Washington or London — countries that rescued them from Nazism — but with Moscow and Vladimir Putin. Even in the UK, the mother of parliamentary democracy, there are constant murmurs of dissatisfaction. In last year’s election, the Labour Party achieved a landslide victory with merely 33% of the vote. Now, given the government’s wafer-thin support on the ground, some are worried that the racist and xenophobic Reform party led by Nigel Farage, an avid Trump admirer, could sweep the board in the next election.

Although South Africa is a latecomer to the game, disillusionment is already setting in. What makes it more difficult for people to stomach is the fact that the country should be in a much better position than many of its contemporaries to take care of its people.

Poverty, unemployment, crime — all the pathologies — are increasing while resources are brazenly squandered and abused for the luxury and aggrandisement of a few. The country has more cabinet ministers than are required, simply as a reward for comrades. And not even their superiors seem to know or care what the gaggle of deputy ministers are supposed to be doing. Cassel Mathale told the parliamentary ad hoc committee this week he wasn’t aware of the letter his boss, police minister Senzo Mchunu, sent out to scrap the political killings task team. In fact, he said, the first time he saw it he thought it was fake. After more than six years on the job, Mathale doesn’t have a job description.

When crafting the constitution, we thought we were being smarter by dreaming up structures called chapter 9 institutions to “strengthen constitutional democracy”. They’ve done nothing of the sort. They’re more like paper tigers that are needlessly devouring scarce resources that could be put to better use. What they’ve done, however, is lull us into a false sense of security. Is it not ironic, for instance, that with these much-vaunted and extremely well-paid guardians of our democracy busily pottering about, criminality, corruption and mismanagement in government have become second nature? State capture had flown under the radar for a good number of years before Thuli Madonsela blew the lid off. And had Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi not broken ranks, the rot in the criminal justice system, including senior cops who are in the pockets of criminals, would not have been exposed. In fact, the media has done more to expose malfeasance than all the chapter 9 institutions put together.

Disillusionment is not with the system per se; it is with its ineffectiveness. Burying it under a clutch of useless bodies doesn’t enhance it but further hides those weaknesses. People will start believing in the system when they realise that their voices are being heard and that it is designed in such a way that they’re able to hold their leaders accountable when their needs aren’t fulfilled.