Getting Back to Basics

Pravin Gordhan led a campaign to improve the Public Service by ‘getting back to basics’.  There is some merit in this thinking, and it could well be applied to Government as a whole.  Here are some suggestions for doing this.

1. Bring a realisation to all levels of Government that the Government is owned by the people, works for the people and is responsible to the people.  This includes everything from the start of the State President’s speech on the state of the nation when he spends many minutes greeting the Speakers, the Members, the guests and, last of all, the people.  This is wrong.  The State President is primarily responsible to the people, and the people should be the audience.  All others are incidental.  When this realisation is firmly implanted in the minds of the politicians and the civil servants, they will understand that arrogance has no place in their actions.  It must be replaced by humility.
2. Make the workings of State accept that what is done can only be done in the interests of the people who are paying for it.  There is place for secrecy in the formulation of policies and laws only in very limited circumstances.  Everything else must be open and above board, with no allowance for closed door meetings, policy formulation by elite groups of Party apparatchiks, no permissions for lobby groups to influence policy formulation without full disclosure and the right of reply by any interested citizen.  There is no place for the preferment of a particular group unless the principles of such preferment and the objectives of it are clearly stated to the public and accepted by them.
3. Gain an understanding that everyone in Parliament is representing all the citizens, not only the voters who support them.  A policy must be beneficial to all the citizens, and must gain the acceptance, at least in principle, of all of them if it is to avoid resistance by those who are disadvantaged.  The readiness of the Whites, for example, to accept measures that will bring others to the same standard will probably surprise the legislators, as will the willingness of the wealthy to assist the poor, if the group that is to be disadvantaged can be brought to believe that it is in the interests of all for the economy to be fully inclusive, and the collective skills, intelligence and experience of all can be concentrated on achieving the accepted objectives.  The current method of blaming the Whites, including Jan van Riebeeck, for all the ills of the country achieves only the alienation of that group, manifested in resistance to the policies and the emigration of skilled persons of all races, depriving the economy of their capabilities.
4. Establish a rule that corruption of all kinds and at every level is not acceptable, and will be revealed and punished.  By its nature, corruption involves at least two parties, and, in many cases, one of the parties is using his or her position of power to offer an advantage to the other party if a payment in one form or another is made.  The only way to prevent that would be to establish a policing and investigative unit under a person of undoubted integrity who does not consider himself beholden to any person for the position, such as the present Public Protector.  That person should be empowered to offer immunity to prosecution to any person who is involved in such corruption if they give evidence resulting in a prosecution, and there must be no holds barred in actions to be taken against those involved in such corruption.  Included in this package could be an increase in the penalties applied against guilty persons who have used their positions in Government to facilitate the corruption, possibly as much as double the penalties otherwise applied.
5. Make the Executive completely accountable to Parliament, with an unlimited question time, an exclusion of prevarication and avoidance of questions, and a requirement that full documentation may be required to support the answers given.  This requirement would include the right of Parliament to give or withhold approval to the appointment of every Minister, Deputy Minister and Director General, or senior executives of State-Owned Entities.  Every responsible Minister must account for reasons for the failure of any entity subject to his or her control to meet its plans, to gain a clean audit report or to issue final accounts timeously.
6. Make the Speaker of the House fully responsible to the House, with the prime purpose not to rely on the Rules, but to give full expression to the principles of democracy and accountability.  This would include banning any preference being given to any member of the Executive or to any Party.
7. Institute a rule that every member of the Executive and every MP must use the facilities provided by the State to the public, including using public hospitals and public transport.  They should, as far as possible, use the same facilities as are used by the public.  Their salaries should be increased by the same proportion as is experienced in their income by the average of all citizens.

Only by breaking down the perception that politicians, MPs and ‘the leaders’ are above ordinary citizens, and that they have responsibility to their sponsors that are greater than those to the citizens, will it be possible to realise the basic principles of true democracy in an economy that is managed in the interests of all citizens.

The Failure of Democracy

It is an indisputable fact that ‘democracy’ is failing around the world, with many of the institutions of democracy not meeting the ideals of the system, and even the most ‘democratic’ nations showing increasing signs of at least some elements of dictatorships.  Why is that?

There are many apparent reasons for the phenomenon.

One of the major reasons is the Party system.  Under this system, members of the electorate band together to form a union of voters.  The union then chooses who their representatives will be, and these representatives then choose their delegates who will select the candidates for the Parliament, Congress or other legislative body.  The process of the choice at each of these levels is hardly democratic.  It is subject to influences that have little or nothing to do with the suitability of the candidate to represent that section of the electorate, with the inherent honesty of the candidate, with a proven ability to understand the essence of an argument, with the legal knowledge to take into account the effects of proposed actions on the rights of the voters, or with the economic understanding required to ensure that the policies do, in fact, promote the good of the community as a whole.  It is subject to emotive advertising, which, in turn, is subject to the funding available to the Party, funding which, in the main, comes from organisations desiring to buy favour with the Party which is elected.  The process of election is fraught with many threats to the essence of democracy.  It is almost designed to ensure that the real desires of the electorate, unformulated as they generally are, are frustrated by their representatives.

Once the representatives are in a position to make the policies and laws they desire, the electorate is generally totally removed from the process.  There is no effective control of the laws that are made by those governed.  That is a fact that is desired by those in power, who use the anonymous processes of the formulation of laws and their passing into legislation to create systems and conditions that are desired by those controlling the purse strings.  The only so-called control lies in the re-election process every four or five years, a process which is, once again, subject to the same dictatorial controls as previously.  Until then, someone in the Party decides what the laws or policies will be, and that decision is imposed on the representatives, the threat being that failure to toe the Party line will result in their nomination for re-election next time being reviewed in the light of any dissenting votes.  When was the last time that any representative cast a vote against the Party line in any matter of importance to the Party?  What that tells you is that the ‘democracy’ exists only on paper, not in fact.  The Constitutions of the countries are generally good on paper, but that is where they stay.  In reality, most democracies are in fact dictatorships, controlled by the Party bosses, and the representatives of the electorate are in fact seldom better than stooges for the Party bosses.

In practice, laws are passed by a majority of representatives, most of whom do not bother to read the laws or to understand their purpose or implications.  Laws are heaped upon laws, making a legislative mess, in which the vast majority of citizens are wittingly kept in the dark.  The quantity of new laws passed every year, piling on those already in existence, is such that no ordinary citizen is able to know the meaning and intention of every law, and even specialist lawyers are bound to read and reread the laws applying to their field each time they are confronted with a new set of facts.  That mess is compounded by the fact that most laws permit the Minister (read: the civil servants dealing with the matter) to make regulations which have the force of law, and it is not unusual for these regulations to be retained as internal documents, unavailable to the people affected by them.  To make it worse, the regulations are then read in the light of ‘internal policies’.  As an example, the Public Health Act of South Africa imposes on the Police the obligation to assist a citizen who makes a statement under oath that a close friend or relative is suffering from a serious mental disturbance, taking the affected person to a suitable health care facility.  The Police have a policy that no person may be taken into custody for any purpose, even to prevent the suicide of that person or a threat to the public that may result from the mental delusions of that person, unless that person has actually committed an offence.  The effect is that the internal policy of the Police overrides an Act of Parliament!  In this situation, the legal presumption that the average citizen knows and understands the laws and regulations that affect him is impossible to achieve in real life, with the effect that thousands of members of the public each year breach one or more of the multitudinous laws in existence, and can be punished by the Courts for an offence that he or she did not know of.

The South African Constitution is touted by politicians as ‘the best Constitution in the world’.  The problem with this statement is that the people who make that claim have seldom read the Constitution with intelligence, and even more seldom applied their minds to the real meaning of the detail in the light of the real world.  Almost none of them have read any other Constitution.  It is clear to any thinking person that the South African Constitution bears the fingerprints of the political parties, the Trade Unions and impractical idealists, each one heavily influenced by political theories without any understanding of the real-world working of those theories.  It fails to consider the implications of its clauses and the rights they grant and the obligations they impose when they are confronted by the greed and self-interest of the politicians who will be called on to implement them as they interpret them, or the fact that the implementation will be done at the hands of dishonest politicians and Party bosses who have only their own interests in mind.  While it is a flagrant example of poor legislation, of being written by people with their own interests in mind, the South African Constitution is not the only example of a failure of the basic law of a land to meet the needs of the day.  The American Constitution was drafted at a time when the population of the entire country was about the size of a present-day large city, when transport was by horse and buggy, when a message was transported, sometimes for weeks at a time, by the Pony Express, when Adam Smith was unknown, when the largest company in the country was smaller than any one of the Fortune 500 companies, and when the biggest threat facing the country was a possible invasion by England or France.  Practically none of the conditions facing the country today could have been imagined at that time.  Perhaps the biggest threat to a just Constitution that existed then and still exists today was the fact that big money was able to make its presence known.  The British Constitution is equally defective, largely because it does not exist as a single document or law, but is a collection of precedents and practices and a collection of laws.  No more glaring example of the deficiencies of this system exists than the promise, made by the British Prime Minister during the debates on the desire of the Scottish people to secede from the Union, to ‘allow the Scottish Parliament more power in deciding matters related to Scotland’.  Could this be a democracy?

If all this is so, is there a country in which true democracy is practiced?  The answer, fortunately, is yes.  Switzerland is a truly democratic State.  Each law is subject to the approval of the people, not only once every four or five years, but as it is passed.  It is not possible for a political Party to sneak a new law into existence under the radar, as happens so often elsewhere.  The politicians are made aware, with the passing of each new law, what the desires of the people really are.

That, of course, shows up one of the major causes of the collapse of democracy.  As a country grows, its citizens become increasingly divorced from the people who represent them in the making of new laws, and from the process, systems and institutions that give effect to those laws.  This is clearly to the liking of the politicians, who enjoy the freedoms they gain from public control of their actions almost as much as they enjoy the increasing scale of the pot of wealth for them to plunder.  How many voters have a month-to-month contact with their representatives?  How many actually know who their representatives are?  And how many of the comments and requests made by the voters to those representatives are actually taken back to Parliament or Congress, to be given effect to?  The answer to these questions is a resounding ‘none’, and the result is that the voters no longer believe that they are able to have any meaningful voice in Parliament or Congress.  They express that belief by ignoring the actions of the legislators on their behalf, and by failing to vote.  The legislation of the country has drifted into the hands of the Party bosses, the dictators who manipulate the laws and the sentiments of the country to ensure their election, using public funds, taxpayers’ money, to do it.  The Civil Service has taken on a life of its own, with only minimal accountability for their actions to the Ministers, and none at all to the public, who pay their salaries.  The State has grown to be a giant grey cloud, overshadowing the tiny, helpless citizen. 

It is no wonder that internal terrorism has grown dramatically, as quickly as the regulations and bodies set up to ‘protect the citizens’ have grown.  The citizens are increasingly estranged from the threatening State which no longer represents them or serves their needs, or gives effect to their desires.

SONA 2015 – Cellphone Jamming in Parliament

It is now official – The National Intelligence Agency was responsible for the plot to act against the word and spirit of the Constitution by jamming the cellphone signals from the Chamber of the House of Parliament.  The Speaker of the House has also made the damning admission that she and her co-Chair of the sitting, the Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces, knew in advance of the joint Sitting that the device would be operative.  She, however, denied that she understood what the jamming device would do.  However, she claims that she knew that the media would not be the ‘target’.  These startling revelations are even more concerning than the fears originally raised, that the jamming had been done at the instance of Parliamentary Security.

When the DA raised the matter at the outset of the Sitting, the Speaker evaded the question, saying repeatedly that the Secretary would see to the matter.  Only on the third attempt to assert the rights of the Members of Parliament did she grudgingly agree to have the device turned off.  At no time did she give any indication that she was aware of the use of the device.  This can certainly be deemed to be tantamount to a lie to the Members of Parliament, a serious offence, as well as a breach of a duty she has undertaken on behalf of the nation.

Now, at a Court Hearing in the matter, the admission has been made that the National Intelligence Agency planted the device, and the Speaker admitted at a pre-debate conference that she knew of the illegal activity and, by implication, that she and the Chairperson of the NCOP condoned this illegal conduct.

The NIA has absolutely no right to be active in the affairs of Parliament.  That alone would be cause for a Judicial Enquiry into the matter.  However, it also raises the question that has cropped up in the past.  What exactly is the National Intelligence Agency doing against the citizens of South Africa?  There have been numerous rumours over the years that the NIA is more active in protecting the interests of the ANC than caring for the safety of the public, and this matter gives considerable credence to that.  It is certainly a matter of vital public concern that the activities of the NIA now be subjected to an in-depth scrutiny by an independent body.  On the basis of the ANC’s steamrolling of the Get-free, do not go to Jail ticket to Zuma in respect of his illegal conduct in the Nkandla affair, it would most certainly not be acceptable to have this conducted by a Parliamentary Committee, unless the Committee were to have a non-ANC majority.

The next question concerns Zuma’s knowledge of the planting of the illegal device, and whether he either condoned or instructed it.  Of course, Zuma, who has raised the excuse that he did not notice that R246 million was being spent on his private residence (!), will repeat the exercise.  However, even if he was not directly involved, it falls within his area of responsibility and, in any law-abiding democracy, he would be forced to resign.  However, the events at the beginning of the State of the Nation Address have demonstrated convincingly that South Africa is not a law-abiding democracy.

This matter, coupled with the forceful ejection of all Members of the EFF from the Chamber, in complete breach of their rights as Members of Parliament, by armed Policemen, also in complete breach of the laws of Parliament and of the Constitution, promises to offer many reasons for Zuma to step down from the position of trust that he holds.  Unfortunately, South Africans have little hope that right will prevail, unless the Constitutional Court is brought into the matter.  The harm done by Zuma and Mbete, and all of their cronies, to the country is inestimable.  It is a clear indication that the Rainbow Nation that was the hope of the world when Nelson Mandela was President, has slid down the slippery slope of dishonesty and corruption, to a point where it is now almost impossible to describe the nation as a democracy, and where many investors now view it as just another failed African basket-case economy.