SA’s democracy is fantastic. We have free and fair elections, our constitution rocks and, outside of hate speech, we are free to speak our minds. There’s no campaign of state terror. Everyone is equal before the law. There’s freedom of assembly and protection from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion and sexual orientation.
Awesome. Hundreds.
Of course, only the most misguided individual, overdosing on happy pills and rainbow unicorns, could say that SA is free from misfortune. Corruption, incompetence, failing infrastructure, arrogance, spiralling debt — and that’s just Eskom. But what isn’t one of the republic’s problems is the absence of a stable liberal democracy. What is the problem is that chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng doesn’t like our democracy.
On June 28, Mogoeng gave a speech to corporate SA at the Directors Event in Sandton. For those of us who don’t belong to the Davos crowd, the chief justice’s talk is safely archived on YouTube. Some of what he said is entirely praiseworthy; in particular his call for politicians and members of the state to be vigorously scrutinised.
So, in the spirit of fearless scrutiny, on to the rest of his speech. After decrying the corruption and economic failings of recent years, Mogoeng said: “How do we choose leaders? Who qualifies to be a leader? Is there a sifting mechanism of sorts?”
He went on to say: “Isn’t it desirable that, for starters, before you can become a president there are very stringent requirements to be met before you can even begin to run?”
According to the chief justice, the sifting mechanism to be implemented — how those stringent requirements are to be determined and assessed — is how the Communist Party of China moves young and talented individuals through the party and government. The bureaucratic mechanisms of Mao Zedong’s party are to be emulated because they produce capable leaders with great integrity.
The current paramount leader of China, Xi Jinping, started out in 1975 as the branch secretary of a production team and was then moved up the hierarchy, including a stint with the Central Military Commission and time as the Shanghai party chief, until eventually joining the politburo in 2007.
With that suggestion, chief justice Mogoeng threw democracy under the bus almost as fast as general secretary Xi Jinping threw more than a million Uighurs into concentration camps in Xinjiang.
The essence of a democracy is that political power flows from the people (the demos) and the people alone. We and no-one else get to decide who will be our president. Every five years parties give us their lists of candidates, we go to the polls and we elect our representatives on the basis of proportional representation.
With that suggestion, chief justice Mogoeng threw democracy under the bus almost as fast as general secretary Xi Jinping threw more than a million Uighurs into concentration camps in Xinjiang
Any of us can put up our hands to be a representative, to be the president, and the demos will vote on our candidacies: there can be no other criteria, no other sifting mechanism. Anything else isn’t democratic.
The constitution has two primary philosophical functions. The first is that it provides the rules for how the temporary transfer of power from the people to representatives works: in other words, elections, the structure of parliament, separation of powers and how, for example, the will of the people is realised in the choosing of a chief justice.
The second function is to place restrictions and obligations on how our representatives operate during their five-year tenures. Traditionally, human rights serve as barriers against repressive state action. They are lines in the political sand: the state cannot restrict our speech, it cannot deprive us of life, deny our religious beliefs or force religious beliefs upon us, it cannot prevent us from organising ourselves in unions, associations and political parties. We can hit the streets and insult our “leaders”. Moreover, human rights ensure equality in law: that none of us is superior to another.
Why do we have to place barriers on state action? History is filled with states, run by capable and efficient leaders, which have been more than happy to beat, enslave, exploit, detain and kill the “ordinary” folk. We do not trust the agents of the state and thus have to constrain their actions.
Chief justice Mogoeng, you are a functionary of the people, not a paramount leader. Your function is to ensure that political power remains with the demos and that means, at the very least, that we are the “sifting mechanism”. We choose our representatives through the electoral process and they rule at our pleasure. Our vote is the most stringent criterion because, ultimately, political power belongs to us.
And any of us can stand for political office, without permission from anyone. That’s democracy. That’s freedom.
• Taylor is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Stellenbosch University
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