This year has been dubbed the ultimate election year. By the end of 2024 about 97 regimes, as well as the EU, will have gone to the polls to refresh their political mandates.
A staggering 4-billion of the world’s 8-billion inhabitants will have participated. So far Bangladesh, Chad, France, India, Iran, Madagascar, Mexico, Panama, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa and the UK have held elections. In three months, the US will head for the polls. Two things are immediately discernible from this list.
First, the listed countries are so diverse that we should hesitate to speak of democracy in the singular. Rather, there is an array of democracies but they share one fundamental — the electoral process. But each society propagates distinctive features that define its place on the democracy spectrum.
Second, to speak of democracy is also to speak of the period between polls. Rudimentary problems such as intolerance, violent election contests, disputed election results and judicial attacks are not the sole preserve of embryonic democracies. Established democracies themselves have ebbs and flows. They are as much followers as they are leaders in the quest to advance democracy.
Transitology describes the pathways for how political regimes progress from autocracy to democracy. Under democracy, some societies establish anchorage through traditions such as parliament, elections, an active civil society, the judiciary, free media and the economy. Chillingly, transitology also explains that to simply have this foundation in place is not sufficient. There are perpetual risks of regression.
Societies that fail to infuse transparency, accountability and inclusivity within their institutions are vulnerable to drifting towards the slippery edge of power.
Until 1994 South Africa was a monocracy. This year it returned to the polls to elect the seventh democratic administration. The voters rejected the intrinsic message of the leading contenders. The ruling ANC sustained significant haemorrhage, but conspicuously, voters also rebuffed the Moonshot Pact, as led by the DA.
The biggest winner is the new MK party, which is yet to be fully understood. A combination of the EFF and MK party created a potential for a new opposition bloc bigger than the DA. Judging by the political machinations in the KwaZulu-Natal legislature, which cost the MK its lead, a similar manoeuvre in the national parliament could have secured this bloc the position of new national opposition. Alive to this reality and other dynamics, the DA joined the ruling party in a fragile government of national unity (GNU).
The new narrative is that it is the citizens that have voted for a GNU. But about 61% of the eligible populace elected to abandon the polls. For a young democracy this should be a distressingly loud voice of silence.
The president’s dignified response to a humiliating election result is commendable. Indeed, the ruling party and its supporters displayed a maturity that is superior to that of losers in many established democracies. By comparison, the 2019 US elections resulted in discourse that has sunk the nation to new lows.
It is only prosperity for all that will recalibrate the path of our democracy towards unity. Our society must mould a new national compact built through an ethos of inconvenient interrogation. But just what does this mean practically?
But the outstanding conduct of South Africa must not gloss over fundamental failures of her substantive democracy.
In 1994, we erected a GNU on deceptive fundamentals. We soothed our national conscience through the fallacious prescription of a rainbow nation. Thirty years later, our people are saying that the rain never came. The public protests that are a part of our daily lives say all that needs to be said about the plight of the majority.
That majority live in abject poverty. We are global leaders in unemployment. Our society is the ultimate illustration of inequity. For this reason, there should be no illusions.
We need to rejog our democracy or we will drift into mobocracy. In his inaugural address, President Cyril Ramaphosa conceded that the lack of a majority mandate means that the time has come for a consultative process that can help batten down our democracy. Any government worth its votes should have the maturity to represent those that voted it into power while embracing those that voted against it and those that decided not to vote.
Before the president’s inaugural speech, the Steve Biko Foundation, in partnership with an alliance of like-minded foundations, issued a call for a national dialogue.
Having been once bamboozled by the impulse of national unity, we should now know that it is only prosperity for all that will recalibrate the path of our democracy towards unity. Our society must mould a new national compact built through an ethos of inconvenient interrogation. But just what does this mean practically?
After the murder of George Floyd, Michelle Obama implored: “Do not agonise. Organise!” That is the first command. The process of engaging citizens requires the participation of as many structures of civil society as possible to respond to the call. Indeed, many have already raised their hands.
The second command draws from the cohort of young leaders, led by Bantu Stephen Biko, who in the 1960s provided lessons on “ceasing to be spectators in a game in which we should be players”. It is a fact that Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness was born on university campuses.
That the idea, and the questions it raised, was an initiative of intellectuals, feeds into Jeffrey Goldfarb’s analysis in which intellectuals play a pre-eminent role in democratic societies. But it is the pedagogy of Paulo Freire that embedded Black Consciousness in communities as an effective tool to democratise society.
Freire bemoans the presumptuous attitude of intellectuals, the elite, or elected leadership as bearers of the truth. Rather, he advocates that the rendezvous of ideas should not be a territory where “egoistic interest, false generosity or paternalism” is unopposed. Using the analogy of a teacher and student, he cautions that the envisaged national dialogue should not be a process where the “teacher fills the student with the contents of his narration”.
It must be a space where ordinary citizens are empowered to articulate not only the stresses that have led them to abandon the ballot for a life of protest, but also a podium to posit inconvenient truths. Biko’s teachings are as much about self as they are about others.
They commence with self-examination and provoke agency at the level of people as much as they inspire collective action. In this regard, they direct the national dialogue to be a process that holds individuals and society as accountable as the government. They challenge citizens to avail themselves not only to talk but to actively protect democracy. It is for these reasons that the Steve Biko Foundation enrolled in support of the call for a national dialogue.
There is a fundamental difference between the act of moulding consensus with, and that of moulding it for, citizens. A consensus with citizens begins with an accord of the people led by the people. We, the people, recognising the ills of the present, must rehabilitate our democracy.
• Biko is the founder and executive trustee of the Steve Biko Foundation and writes on behalf of the organisation.
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