People shall govern: Cope plans to let members directly elect president

When it comes to how we elect representatives, South Africa’s is a closed-list proportional representation system. We vote for political parties, in other words, and not for individuals. Party leaders decide who will represent political parties in Parliament, not voters. And a relatively small number of delegates from each party decide who the leaders of those parties might be.

You might be passionate about the principles of the African National Congress (ANC), for instance, but feel very differently about Jacob Zuma as president. Too bad: as an ordinary voter, you’re stuck with whoever a few thousand people decide to elect as ANC president.

As Public Protector Thuli Madonsela put it a few years ago: “At the moment, one can fail the people and you just have to be okay with the party bosses.”

Around 4,000 delegates attend the ANC’s five-yearly elective conference to vote for its national leaders. At the Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) party’s federal congress in March, 1,425 delegates elected the party’s new leadership. A reported 2,600 Economic Freedom Fighters delegates travelled to Bloemfontein in December last year to elect the party’s leaders.

Some of the most significant political power of the country, in other words, is vested in the hands of probably less than 10,000 people out of a population of almost 53-million.

Of course, these delegates are supposed to represent the views of wider constituencies. As the DA’s Phumzile van Damme put it to the Daily Maverick on Wednesday: “Represented at the federal congress are the DA’s public representatives (eg, MPs) and non-public representatives allocated to branches. The non-public representatives are elected by branches in order to represent their views at federal congress. All DA members thus have an opportunity to have their views represented at leadership elections.”

There are different models internationally. In the UK, for instance, 610,753 people have applied to vote directly in the current leadership contest for the opposition Labour party. Three types of people are eligible to vote: paid-up members of the Labour party, registered supporters and affiliated supporters (those who sign up through a union, for instance). These hundreds of thousands of voters are then able to cast their vote for the party’s new leader either by post or online.

This week, the Congress of the People (Cope) announced that it will be going against the grain of the status quo for South African political parties’ internal leadership contests in future.

From now on, the party says, Cope’s “rank and file membership” will directly elect Cope’s president rather than “delegates as is currently the norm with other parties”. The decision has been enshrined in Cope’s new constitution.

Cope spokesperson Dennis Bloem described the move to the Daily Maverick on Wednesday as “an aspirational goal deriving from the ideal in the Freedom Charter that the people shall govern”.

“That is why we are so determined to involve every member of our party, through communication technology, to be involved in the election of the president,” Bloem said. “The president in this way will be accountable to all the members and not to any lobby or clique or faction. Factionalism must be defeated and there is no surer way of doing that than involving every member directly in the election of the president.”

How will this work in practical terms? The UK’s Labour party, for instance, benefits from a reliable postal service, which South African political parties certainly can’t bank on.

“Cope will arrange with a company that will register our members and then provide those who qualify to vote by being in good standing with the party with a code,” Bloem says. “The member will then exercise his or her vote in secrecy in such places as the party approves of and where it has independent monitors who will oversee the election and certify that it was free, secret and fair.”

One major issue which the UK’s Labour party has been facing is the possibility that political opponents may take out membership of the party shortly before a leadership election in order to subvert the outcome. In the case of Labour, there is some controversy currently over the amount of people the party has barred from voting – over 3,200, at last count – for “not supporting the aims of the Labour party”.

Is this something Cope has considered?

“Our structures will be our first line of defence,” says Bloem, somewhat vaguely. “Secondly, members who are entitled to vote will have to be members in good standing. Thirdly, the CNC (congress national committee) will evaluate whether sudden membership explosion was occurring anywhere to warrant further investigation.”

Cope’s move may be an unusual piece of practical action in this regard, but opposition parties have at various points in the past voiced the desire to see South Africa’s electoral system reformed.

Electoral reform was one of the major policy platforms on which Mamphela Ramphele’s Agang campaigned before the 2014 general elections. The DA, too, has submitted proposed legislation which would aim to make representatives more accountable to voters.

Then again, there’s reason to be sceptical of the idea that this kind of change to our electoral system would magically fix everything. As law expert Pierre de Vos pointed out in a 2012 blog:

“Half of our representatives at local level are directly elected in wards, and no one is claiming that local government in all towns and cities is working perfectly. And, one suspects, many who yearn for the strengthening of the link between MPs and voters would be horrified if MPs actually started representing the true interests of those they represented and voted as their constituents want them to on all issues – including abortion, gay rights, the death penalty and gender rights.” DM

Interested in electoral issues? My Vote Counts and the University of Cape Town (UCT) invite you to a free public lecture by former Constitutional Court Judge Kate O’Regan on Thursday 27 August 2015, 17h30 for 18h00, at the Kramer Law Building, Lecture Theatre 3, Middle Campus, UCT. Topic: ‘A Constitutional Missing Link? The regulation of political parties in South Africa’

Read more:

• SA’s electoral system fails the people, on Mail & Guardian

Photo: Congress of the People leader Mosiuoa Lekota holds a news conference in Johannesburg on Wednesday, 24 October 2012. Picture: Werner Beukes/SAPA