Never has the Chinese curse or cliché, “May you live in interesting times,” been more fitting for South Africa in the aftermath of the momentous 29 May election.
As we navigate genuinely uncharted waters, it could be said that the map to hand, our Constitution, will guide us safely to calmer waters. That is both true and untrue.
The Constitution does indeed provide us, and crucially, new members of Parliament, with a reasonably detailed roadmap, forgive the mixture of metaphors, but of course, just as it had a Nelson Mandela in mind as head of state, the Constitution also had an implicit bias that one party would obtain a parliamentary majority.
It did not closely contemplate the reality we are in – a hung Parliament with no overall majority for a single party.
Of course, the Constitution tells us exactly the form and manner of electing the speaker and president.
No lengthy bargaining period
However, the timeline it prescribes – 14 days after last Sunday for Parliament to convene and elect – does not allow the lengthy bargaining period, often months, not weeks, in other democracies where multi-, not single-party, governments are the rule, not the exception.
I am not going to interrogate here the merits and demerits of the possible arrangements that could provide South Africa with a stable government consonant with democratic continuance, economic sensibility, genuine freedom, and equality, as our Constitution mandates. (I am involved in negotiations for one of the parties.)
But there is one approach which does need to be headed off at the pass. Some otherwise impressive analysts have suggested that even if, for example, a government consists in part of parties which want the Constitution junked entirely (MKP) or who will red ant it from within by destroying its key pillars and foundations (EFF), then it would be rough, but South Africa would survive.
Indeed, on this analysis, afterwards, the current centrist political forces would, after such a torrid and destructive period, emerge to reclaim democracy and rebuild the economy.
Mistakes in history
I regard any such view as an extreme form of wishful thinking. Someone said that when you introduce Hitler into an argument, you have lost it since his regime was such an extreme and nihilistic example of genocidal authoritarianism that it has no equal in history. That is true, but the Micawber approach, “hoping that something will turn up for the better,” is applicable to some naivete around our current situation, and it is as misplaced here and now as it was back then in democratic Weimar Germany in 1933.
As brilliant historian Timothy Snyder reminds us: “History does not repeat, but it does instruct.”
In his short booklet, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Snyder writes:, “We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks.”
This, of course, is a historic mistake, as Snyder illustrates by reminding us that institutions (courts, constitutions, reserve banks, etc.) “do not protect themselves”. And “hope as a strategy” is nothing new, as Nazi Germany ominously reminds us. Snyder quotes at length from a leading newspaper for German Jews published on 3 February 1933, days after Hitler, because of backroom machinations not a parliamentary outright majority, was installed as Reich Chancellor.
It read in part:
While Nazi Germany was darkly unique in history, the entirely reasonable view of people then is based on a mistake which equally reasonable people make now.
As Snyder reminds us: “The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions – even when that is exactly what they have announced they will do.”
Jacob Zuma’s MKP wants to dismantle the Constitution entirely and strip the judiciary of its testing power over parliamentary legislation and worse.
The EFF has advised – per its leader or “commander in chief” -that it wants “to slit the throat of whiteness”, destroy the independence of the reserve bank (and with it our currency via runaway inflation) and expropriate private property and nationalise industry.
Place either or both such parties into the new government of South Africa and you can see the future plain. Our bond rate now is already around 20% for a 20-year bond, given future uncertainties, then confidently you can predict it will be, under such a prospectus, impossible to raise any funding at all for these economically ruinous programmes.
An opportunity
It is entirely correct to say this is hardly a replica of Nazi Germany, but it is a pretty good facsimile of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela (and the late Chavez is the explicit role model for Julius Malema).
Venezuela was once upon a time the most successful economy in South America; today, its citizens are reduced to beggary, and its currency is debauched.
Like South Africa, it had an authoritarian past, but, immediately pre-Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, it was a robust democracy.
Since their ascent, it has become a sham democracy, an authoritarian one-party state in form and substance, if not in name.
Last week’s election presents South Africa and its new Parliament with great opportunity and a prospect for renewal. But the opposite is also true: it is also a moment of great peril. Let’s hope there is enough common wisdom and deft leadership to choose the right path.
And given the arithmetic of the new Parliament, this is the one time when the wisdom of US baseball icon Yogi Berra, alas, does not apply.
He said: “When you come to a fork in the road take it.”
The choices made or not made in the next 14 days will determine our future for a very long time to come.
