What has Gone Wrong with Democracy?

Democracy means many things to different people. To some, it carries the right to entitlement to share in the wealth of all. To others, it means the right to participate in public life without intervention by authorities. To the Speaker of the South African Parliament, it means that questions are discussed exhaustively behind closed doors by the Party elite (an undemocratically selected group) and the conclusion then imposed on the public, without any members of her Party having the right to discuss or criticise it in public. To many people, it implies a moral obligation to participate every few years in the tiresome process of choosing from a list of candidates the person or the Party that will, supposedly represent them in the legislature in the forthcoming term.

And therein lies the problem that is bringing down the principle of democracy, not only in South Africa, but also in many other countries around the world, which nominally espouse the description but consistently fail to apply it. Democracy was intended as a fair means to hand the task to represent all of the people in their constituency in the setting of policy, the passing of laws and the monitoring of those on whom the duty to perform those laws in the interests of the whole community, to representatives of those people. Those representatives are entrusted to do this work competently, honestly and to a standard that would normally be regarded as at least good.

The real facts of the situation are quite different.

The people who are put up for election are chosen, not by the people of the electoral district they are supposed to represent, but by a small committee of senior Party members, each with his own, often unexpressed biases, objectives, misunderstandings and preconceptions, but almost all with the primary objective of securing the supremacy of the Party and of their position amongst the Party elite. The wishes of the electorate are, at best, superficially canvassed to garner a list of topics on which the Party, and the candidate as its representative, can wax lyrical. In many, if not most, cases, those topics and the contrived views of the candidate are chosen by the Party bosses and promoted as the real desires of the electorate. They are, in fact, imposed on the electorate, and they are far from summarizing the real interests and desires of the community which the candidate hopes to represent.

If those candidates are elected, they are sent to Parliament or Congress to collect their grossly inflated salaries, where they jockey for position in the Party to gain a Ministerial position, very often by positioning themselves as experts in a field in which they have very little experience and usually not much real interest. It is rare for a Minister to have the education, training and years of experience to become a real expert in a particular portfolio, and certainly not to the extent that one would expect from a candidate for a senior managerial position in a company dealing in that area.

In virtually every decision, in the form of a parliamentary debate or, as Minister, in the process of formulating policies and guidelines for future legislation, the Member of Parliament is subjected to the will of the Party. It is seldom that a Member of Parliament is permitted to vote in accordance with his conscience or, heaven forbid, the express will of the constituents. The process of formulating and adopting laws is almost exclusively performed by the (unelected) Party bosses, who are, in almost every sense, an unelected background dictatorship. In some cases, this dictatorship is controlled and dominated by a single person who has the financial clout to call the shots. Almost nowhere is the real will of the people either canvassed or given effect to.

In the process of doing this, the members of Parliament and, more particularly, the Ministers and the President, take pains to elevate themselves above the level of the people they are supposed to represent, by means of large paychecks and substantial benefits, special protective squads of police or bodyguards, large research and gatekeeper staffs and substantial immunity against investigation or prosecution for their misdemeanors. At Ministerial and Presidential level, those benefits and protections are much more extensive, with the incumbents having the ability to defend themselves personally by using the resources and funding of the State, with the result that taking legal action against one of them is almost prohibitively expensive and extremely difficult, in comparison with a similar legal action against a private individual.

In summary, the supposed representation of the average citizen in the legislature is almost entirely illusory, a fabrication of the political Parties and the Party bosses holding their strings. The illusion is designed to give the average citizen a belief that the principle of democracy works for him or her. It works only to the extent that the Party bosses deem it wise to permit a cent or two of funding to leak through from the vast resources at their command to mollify the voters who count. Of course, they are somewhat constrained in their excesses by the limits on the willingness of the taxpayers to hand over their hard-earned income and assets for ‘safekeeping’ by them, but even that constraint is limited and eroded over time by the relentless PR telling them that taxes are necessary, good and in their interests. The people pulling their strings have tens of thousands of well-paid agents and huge publicity potential to convince the unthinking masses that what they are seeing is good, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes. They have hundreds of billions in funding to hide even the most outrageous excesses, activities and expenditures that would earn the CEO of any effective company a quick trip to the Labour Exchange. Examples abound of crazy expenditure and extreme circumvention of control mechanisms, ranging from a donation by the US Congress of $25 000 000 to fund a peanut museum in Georgia, passed in an omnibus appropriation by Congress in the last hours of a legislative session, in order to allow the Congressmen to leave early for their vacations. After all, it was ‘only $25 000 000’. Another example is the payment of nearly R245 000 000 for the constructions of ‘security enhancements’ to the private home of President Zuma of South Africa, who explained to Parliament that ‘he had not noticed that so much money was being spent on his home’. Yet a further example is the awarding of a tender of more than one billion Rands to the step-daughter of the acting CEO of Eskom, the South African electricity utility, and his protestation, when the award was publicized, that he did not know that she was the Director of the company that was granted the highly lucrative tender, even though they lived in the same house. He later reported that, when he had found out about the tender, he had instructed her to resign as Director of the company. Note that he did not instruct her to repay the profits, or to relinquish the shareholding in the company.

The Members who are elected to Parliament are entrusted with the onerous duty of ensuring that the interests of their constituents, all of the people in the ward for which they were elected, are adequately represented. That means, in effect, that their wishes and desires are given effect as far as that is possible, and that their interests, as voters and taxpayers, are well protected. Those are also the duties of the senior management of large public corporations in relation to the shqareholders, all of whom are required by laws or by codes of conduct to have at least the minimum standards of education and training to be able to understand what they are doing and to do it well. It is not possible to appoint a man as CEO of a bank or insurance company without him meeting these requirements as well as qualifying as a ‘fit and proper person’ in terms of honesty and integrity, proven by years of experience gained in a similar position in a similar type of business. That requirement, passed as law by Parliament, is completely disregarded in the choice of persons as MPs, Cabinet Ministers or State President. In South Africa, a semi-literate man was nominated by his party as President. He had not passed the ninth grade in school, had not even a faint glimmering of understanding of economics, and, in circumstances that have been branded by a respected Judge of the High Court as highly suspicious, escaped conviction on a charge of rape of the daughter of a friend, as well as having 783 criminal charges of corruption, fraud and racketeering, on one of which his counterparty in the transaction was found guilty and sentenced to a lengthy prison term, withdrawn by a friend in the National Prosecuting Authority. To make it worse, despite numerous well-founded accusations of assisting certain business associates to dictate the granting of lucrative tenders and loans by State organs, as well as having been found to have benefitted unfairly from the State subsidy of the construction of his home, and having lied outright to Parliament, he was appointed for a second term. Jacob Zuma was not elected, but nominated by his Party to be President. To compound the wrongfulness, he appointed as Minister of Social Security a woman who had been found guilty on a criminal charge of fraud against the Government in an amount of R245 000. If he had been the CEO of Enron, he would today be in jail, and disbarred for life from holding any position as Director of a company. However, he is a politician, and the rules that are necessary and justifiable in businesses, in the considered opinion of the MPs, do not apply to such elevated personages, although the expenditure of trillions each year is entirely within his ambit.

It can truly be said that professional politicians are a race apart. That, of course, makes the average thinking voter feel powerless, it makes him or her believe that his or her vote means nothing. And in that, he or she is entirely correct.

What can be done to correct the situation?

Although democracy, as it is envisaged to be in utopia, is not a perfect system, it is true that it is better than any other system. It is the one system, if it can be made to work by the rare individual who understands that he is subject to the sacred trust granted by voters, that can work for the good of the people. That is much more often the case in small communities, where the voters have the opportunity to know the man or woman they trust to represent them, and are able to give them a meaningful feedback on what they want done, and how they expect their community to work. At best, that feedback is by each citizen having a working understanding of the need for legislation and how that legislation must be framed and applied. This is not a perfect system. Errors do occur, caused usually by a lack of complete understanding by the citizens or, less often, by duplicity on the part of the representatives of the people in order to attain their own ends – after all, they are still politicians and believe themselves to be superior beings, and so wiser and more capable of understanding – but usually the crooks and incompetents are weeded out by the citizens, who want to get the best for their buck. In addition to that, it is essential that the citizens do not give too much power to the politicians. They are the representatives of the people, and it is essential that their actions represent faithfully the will of the people. That means that any important decision be explained to the people and justified, both in advance and in relation to its effectiveness in the real world. The politicians must be adequately monitored by persons who are qualified to make a correct assessment, and who are willing to admit to their own biases. And they must be held to account, without exception. Any wrongdoing by a public servant or a politician in the execution of his duties should attract a higher penalty than it would for a private citizen, because they swear an oath of duty to the citizens. Politicians should not be allowed to hide behind their offices, nor should they be entitled to recover from the State the legal fees of their defence if they are found guilty of wrongdoing. There should be no possibility of an administrative penalty as an alternative to criminal prosecution, and any breach of the rules of prosecution, as there clearly was in all 784 criminal cases involving President Zuma, should attract a heavy personal penalty to any person involved in any way, even in the concealment of a miscarriage of justice. Politicians and senior civil servants earn very large salaries, often with a lower level of competence or qualification than would be applied in the real world, and they must be made to understand that they are not merely collecting a salary and driving a government car, but are actually performing an important and sacred duty, entrusted to them by citizens who do not have the ability to check on them every step of the way.

Perhaps, if these recommendations were carried out, the citizens would grow to learn that democracy gives them enormous rights coupled with large responsibilities. Perhaps that would restore the faith that the people should hold in the principle of democracy.