Op-Ed: Confessions of a tactical voter By Barney Pityana
The National and Provincial Elections have been dominated by splintering political parties – 48 political parties have been registered on the ballot paper! Besides, maybe as a result of there being so many political parties, one senses that there is a mood of uncertainty and doubt about preferred choices, or none of the choices are as obvious as has been the case previously.
Then came Polokwane. Since then I have been convinced that the ANC did not deserve my vote. I could not accept that a party in government could so gratuitously trash our Constitution only so as to undermine everything that the Constitution stood for; to facilitate and to enable a criminal capture of the state, to undermine law and order, disable the criminal justice system and generally govern without the vision and idealism that had brought us the constitutional democracy in the first place.
The electoral system is a Party List system. Members of the National Assembly are representatives of the party and not the voters. They are accountable to the party whips and the law allows the party to remove members who do not conform to party prescripts. Whatever advantages or disadvantages such a system may have it definitely creates a distance between the voter and the member who serves in Parliament.
My final consideration about manifestos is first to evaluate the record of the party in government, and to assess whether what the party offers as platform for government is more than theory but practical logic, that can be assessed, verified, executed and costed within a time-period of five years. It is the ANC that has played fast and loose with the Constitution and showed no interest in abiding by court orders, allowed President Zuma to play hide and seek with the courts for more than 10 years. The ANC faces a problem of credibility of enormous proportions. None of this is of Cyril Ramaphosa’s own making. Based on the principle that governments are responsible for the acts of predecessors he too must take full responsibility for the Zuma nightmare.
This time around, of course, I desire strongly to vote in support of Cyril Ramaphosa, just as I believe many South Africans would. I have no doubt that Ramaphosa is no Jacob Zuma and he is not beholden to him or anyone else. I want to vote for Ramaphosa because in the 15 months that he has been head of the executive he has begun the difficult task of clearing out the Zuma cobwebs. He has established instruments for establishing good governance in state institutions.
My problems with Ramaphosa run even deeper. I believe that while his attention to the state is welcome, his capacity to reform the state is dependent on the exercise of his authority in the ANC. The slogan of unity and renewal does not promise to yield any results. It is clear to me that unity is unprincipled, and renewal is very much business as usual. ANC needs a surgical operation. It is outdated in its systems and in its assumptions.
There are three matters that mitigate the disaster that Cyril Ramaphosa finds himself in, especially to discerning voters. It is the commitment to reduce the size of government, reducing ministries and departments and generally reducing the personnel cost of the Public Service. Indications are that the unions will resist this vigorously. The second matter that he deserves support for is the undertaking to professionalise the public service.
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