Time for a National Imbizo?

Back in 1955, the Congress of the People was a national gathering for those excluded from the apartheid order, which produced the Freedom Charter, a blueprint for a non-racial South Africa. By the time of our first democratic election in 1994, there was a presumption that the Freedom Charter was dated in detail, but nothing was done to replace it. Nearly 60 years on, the country is increasingly directionless and it is not clear that there is a national consensus on the kind of nation we want to be.

In the wake of the expulsion of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) from Cosatu there is growing talk of launching a new political party.

Before Numsa rushes into creating yet another party, is it not time for us as a nation to sit back and take stock of where we are as a nation, and what our national programme should be?

Anyway, haven’t we been there before?

Voting pattern 1994–2014: the biggest change is in the fraction not voting

There was the split of the ANC in the wake of the Zuma ascendancy that led to the formation of Cope, which fell apart amidst acrimonious lawsuits. From 6.75% of the vote in 2009, they dropped to 0.67% on 2014.

Then in 2013 the EFF and Agang were formed, each as the great new hope for an alternative to the ANC. The EFF fared a whole lot better, with 6.35% of the vote, while Agang barely made it to 2 seats with 0.28% of the vote. Collectively, Cope, EFF and Agang only scored 7.3% – not much more than Cope’s 2009 result. Agang is now following the Cope example with acrimonious lawsuits and EFF has split, with results still to be determined.

The DA, meanwhile, has gained ground – but if you look at the picture, the opposition vote is no bigger than it was in 1994, when the ANC was led into the election by Madiba, one of the most revered political figures of the last century. The only really big change since 1994 is the declining fraction of the voting population who turn out to vote (the black zone at the top – a drop of nearly 30%).

So what we can see is that parties that try to appeal directly to the ANC base are stuck in band of 5-7% even when they come with a huge plus like taking away a big section of senior leadership (Cope) or a major part of the ANC Youth League (EFF). And parties that do not have such a direct appeal to the ANC base cannot attract much more than 20%. That the biggest effect since 1994 is the collapse in voter turnout says a lot about how little appeal opposition parties have to disaffected ANC supporters.

If the main unifying force of a new party is dislike of another party, that cannot lead to a sustainable movement, which is why there is so much internal strife in opposition parties. Even the DA, the most successful so far, has had its internal conflicts.

Part of the crowd at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, 1955

Back to 1955: the Congress of the People was a national gathering of those excluded by apartheid and preceding orders. It resulted in the Freedom Charter, a document so long dormant that by 1994, the ANC did not consider it relevant in detail even if the ANC pays lip service to the main ideas.

What we need today is another national gathering, this time reflecting the full diversity of our society, to talk about the problems we face today – and to map out a new national direction.

Since the political process has not delivered this and indeed is failing in many very basic ways, civil society should take a lead. I propose we call a national imbizo under the auspices of major civil society movements. We have some in this country with a huge following and that have done brilliant work, filling the gap where government has failed. Examples include various movements of the unemployed, unions, Treatment Action Campaign, Equal Education, business organizations, environmental groups, Khulumani Support Group – and there are many more.

If we can call such a national imbizo and arrive at a common understanding of what we as a society see as our priorities, only then is it reasonable to talk about a new political movement. Even if this imbizo does not result in a new movement, it will help those in existing parties to understand where we are going wrong.

The South African Opposition Challenge

Split of the vote since 1994: ANC is essentially at its
1994 level after increases in 1999 and 2004; the DA
has about the same share as the NP+DP in 1994.

When the dust has settled on the elections and the DA and EFF are over their triumph at a big swing in their direction (5.6% to the DA taking them to 22.2%, 6.4% from nothing to the EFF), we have to sit back and look at the big picture.

The total gains of these two parties are more than 3 times the swing of 3.75% from the ANC.

A remarkable thing about this election is how little the ANC was hurt by a string of scandals and blunders. While a swing of nearly 4% is pretty big, the ANC’s share of the vote in 2014 is only 0.5% below its level in the first democratic election in 1994 (illustrated, right).

Most of the DA and EFF increase has come from the collapse of other opposition party votes. Part of the DA swing is also accounted for by taking over Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats, who scored nearly 1% last time. COPE alone lost nearly 7%, and most minor parties lost votes.

While the DA has done well to increase its votes every election, chasing after votes of other minor parties has had the inevitable consequence of the DA losing coherence, with nasty infighting and selective leaks, some of which can only emanate from senior leadership. It was this selective leak culture that made the proposed deal with Agang very difficult to stitch together – leaks forced a premature announcement, leading to confusion.

Vote since 1994 including National Party 1994: the
opposition has essentially gone sideways and the ANC
has not really been punished for lack of performance.

The DA, to put things in perspective, in 2014 has about the same vote share as the combined Democratic Party (1.7%) and National Party (20.4%) vote in 1994 (total 22.1%). While this may be from a different demographic split (if you look at provincial votes, there are some big shifts), the DA has not significantly grown the opposition vote. In fact, given that they have picked up some support from black voters who would not have voted for the National Party, it is surprising that their vote share is no bigger than the combined DP-NP vote of 1994.

Look at the second picture: the dashed lines show that the conservative opposition vote has barely shifted since 1994, as has that of the ANC, while other opposition parties have been trading places rather than growing overall.

Another truly remarkable thing about this election is the way communities that have most reason to be upset about government failure still vote solidly ANC – sometimes with 80-90% of the vote. Ironically, where government has failed less, opposition parties score more votes. The DA has a real shot at winning a number of metros where the ANC vote has dropped to close to or even below 50%. These include Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela and Tshwane.

Despite all the complaints about potholes, e-tolls and the like, services in the metros are way better than in ANC-run small towns and deep rural areas. Where I live in Makana in the Eastern Cape, some township residents have been without water for months, some even years. Most rural schools are of a poor standard, and many rural communities have little or no cash economy besides social grants, with no prospect of jobs.

The ANC meanwhile is increasingly focused on pandering to the needs of a self-serving elite. The opposition made too much of Nkandla, allowing the ANC to paint a rosy picture of “good stories” – as if Nkandla was a glitch. Yet by the government’s own figures, R33-billion was lost to waste and corruption last financial year, an Nkandla every three days. No, not a glitch. This is the way the government usually does business.

 To resolve the mystery of why so many people who have cause for complaint vote ANC solidly, we have to look to history for why the excluded poor do not automatically rise up against a self-serving elite. In medieval times, a “good” lord ensured his serfs didn’t starve, since they were valuable as a pool of labour and as cannon fodder when a lord was called on to provide soldiers. Serfs were never allowed too much though – that would give them ideas above their station. Feudalism eventually ended when labour became scarce after Europe was depopulated by crusades, creating an opening for a working class with commercially valued labour.

As De Tocqueville observed, revolution broke out in France not because conditions were especially bad there, but because they were better than average in Europe – frustrated hope is a much bigger drive for change than utter hopelessness.

And that is the key to opposition politics in South Africa: very poor people on the edge of starvation are inherently conservative. They do not rebel against the existing order, not matter how unfair, if the existing order can instil in them the fear that they will do even worse if things change.

How unfair is the existing order? The worst off 20% of the population earn less than 3% of national income, and more than half of that is social grants. The best-off 10% account for over 50% of national income.

When out campaigning for Agang, one of the most incongruous sights was seeing a top of the line Merc festooned with ANC socks on its side mirrors cruising through a scene of extreme poverty. Why did those who had been left behind not bitterly resent the theft of public resources that went into that Merc? For the same reason a lord and retinue of knights in shining armour could parade through scenes of medieval poverty without risk of attack. Feudalism was such a complete trap that the victims could see no way out.

Here’s bad news for opposition parties: feudalism was an extremely enduring system. However, a key difference between the old kind and the new kind is we nominally live in a democracy. It is theoretically possible for a political movement to arise that challenges the system. It hasn’t happened yet, judging from the voting pattern of the last 20 years.

Why did Agang not do well this last election? Part of it was the difficulty of scaling up a new organization from nothing – the EFF for example had a large chunk of the ANC Youth League to build on. Another part was we were trying to address this dysfunction of the political system by addressing the left out voters – but the inherent conservatism of the victimized poor makes them a difficult constituency to win over. Much has been made of the failed DA deal – that was a setback, but cannot explain the whole problem.

I supported Agang because of Mamphela Ramphele’s history in Black Consciousness. What we badly need in this country is a revitalizing of hope, and the BC message of self-reliance, self-respect and rejection of externally-imposed limits is very much needed in South Africa today. It remains to be seen if the Agang project can survive the setback of a very low vote – but it is a worthwhile project and I intend to continue to pursue its goals.

Second-Chance elections

South Africa has a purely proportional representation (PR) election system at all levels, except for town councils, which have a mix of PR and ward councillors. A ward is essentially the same thing as a geographic electoral district (US terminology), constituency (UK and old South Africa) or electorate (Australia). To standardise the terminology, I choose the shortest term for the concept of voting for a representative in a given region: district, and MP for representative, since “member of parliament” is very common terminology.

A pure PR system as we have in South Africa, in which each voter chooses a party, and the party decides how to order its party list, puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of the party. How high you are on the party list determines your chances of election: the higher you are on the list, the fewer votes the party needs to win for you to make it. Yet your position on the party list is not in any way influenced by how you perform in the election. A party can reward a stalwart, or worse, corruption, by placing a candidate high on the list, while making sure they do no public campaigning that might reveal their weaknesses. Also, you have no concept of your own MP, so the line of accountability is very indirect.

It would be desirable to fix these problems without losing the benefits of PR system. But first, let’s examine the disadvantages of the alternatives.

A pure district system has the problem that it can skew representation relative to the popular vote. If a party has concentrated regional support, for example, it may score a low fraction of the vote nationally yet win several seats. A party with wide appeal but not quite enough to win anywhere may score significantly more votes than this regionally-based party. In Australia, we see this effect with the Greens, who win typically 10–15% nationally, yet only hold one seat in the lower house of parliament. By contrast, the Nationals poll about a third of the votes the Greens win, and have 7 seats. The Australian system, even so, is not as unfair as the lower house systems in the US and UK, which use a first past the post system (FPP).

The Australian system requires that voters rank candidates in order of preference. If your first-preference candidate has the lowest number of votes in a first-round count where no one has over 50% of the vote, that candidate drops out, and your ballot is reallocated to your second-preference candidate, and this continues until one candidate has over 50% of the vote. The advantage of the Australian system is that it doesn’t “waste” the vote of someone who votes for a small party or an independent. The disadvantage is it’s complicated to understand and difficult to audit results in a close race. And it can still result in unfair outcomes, as I explain above with the skewed representation of the Nationals versus the Greens in Australia.

To illustrate the point, I constructed a scenario for a 400-seat parliament, with each seat (to keep things simple) contested by one each of a small left party, a bigger left party, a bigger right party, a small right party and an independent. I didn’t do the distribution of preferences accurately, but the results represent a plausible outcome:

system small L big L big R small R Ind PR 80 112 124 49 35 Australian 6 276 90 14 14 FPP 15 14 339 22 10

What we have is three very different outcomes (based on the way I chose to allocate votes geographically). In a PR election, the two left parties have 192 seats, enough to form a coalition if they can win over a bit over 20% of the independents. The right parties have 173, and need almost all the independents to form a ruling coalition. In the Australian system (based on plausible assumptions about preferences), the bigger left party has enough seats to rule in its own right. In the FPP system, the bigger right party has enough votes to rule in its own right.

Of these variations, arguably the PR outcome most accurately reflects voters’ intentions: they are reasonably evenly divided between left and right, with a slight preference for the left, but with a significant minority disenchanted with the parties, and who want an independent voice in government. In practice, in an FPP system, small parties lose because a bigger party tries to frighten voters of a smaller party of their side of politics into supporting them (think Ralph Nader’s Green votes being blamed for Al Gore losing in Florida), so an outcome like this FPP example is not too likely – but the stifling of the growth of smaller parties is bad for democracy.

How, then could you achieve the fairness of a PR system without the disconnect between voters and MPs resulting from a party-list system as in South Africa? There are various hybrid systems including the municipal election system in South Africa, where some candidates are elected from a party list, and others directly (on a first past the post district system). However that hybrid system still puts significant power in the hands of the party, and still has the risk that the party becomes a source of unaccountable patronage.

My proposal, which I call a second-chance election (2CV for second-chance vote, not the venerable Citroën car, illustrated), is to have two MPs per constituency. The first is elected on a first past the post basis, and the second on a party list system with the wrinkle that the party list is formed out of the candidates who ran and didn’t win in the first round, ranked within party by how well they did. If for example a party wins 70% of the vote in a constituency, 20% of their vote there is in effect wasted since they only need 50%+1 to win, and their second candidate should probably be in parliament. If on the other hand the first past the post candidate won with 30% in a highly split race, the second candidate from that party should end up a lot lower down the party list. The tricky part is working out exactly how to do the voting; I work through one approach here, and don’t prescribe it as the only option.

Going back to our example, if we only elect 200 MPs on a first past the post basis, assuming the votes split the same way as in the above example, on the first pass, the elected members will look as follows (with deficit indicating how many seats each party is short of its entitlement):

2CV steps small L big L big R small R Ind FPP half 8 7 169 11 5 deficit 72 105 – 38 30 correction 59 86 – 31 24 final 72 93 169 42 29 error vs. PR -13 -19 45 -7 -6

We can’t completely fix the deficit, because one party, the bigger right party (big R), already has more seats than it’s entitled to in a pure PR system, so it gets no more seats. The other parties’ deficits have to be scaled to a correction that adds up to 200 (each proportionate to the number of seats they are short of the PR total), so we get 400 MPs in total. The bottom row of the table shows the error versus a pure PR election (a minus value means a party has too few seats).

Compare the revised chart with the original. The 2CV system ranks the parties in the same order as PR, which is an improvement, though the result is not exactly the same. The two right parties can form a ruling coalition, which is not an exact reflection of the electorate’s intent, but the result is not as skewed as the FPP result, or as inaccurate as the Australian system, for this example. This is however a fairly extreme outcome, as it requires that one party be able to win nearly 85% of the seats in an FPP election, with only 31% of the national vote.

You could reduce the probability of an inaccurate outcome such as this by having more MPs per district, or by converting the entire election into a party list system after voting in districts. Working through such detail is a secondary concern once the principle is accepted.

Finally, two issues are worth considering: how independents are handled, and how switching parties is handled.

Independents may be of extremely diverse views but treating them collectively as a party list after voting in districts ensures that those with strong enough support are elected. If their support base is diverse, this will be reflected in a diverse independent “party list” being elected.

Since representatives are directly elected, unlike with a party list, they should have a right to switch parties, and this creates a clear division of accountability between the party (which can provide resources for re-election) and the voter (who may reject a candidate who abandons their principles or fails to deliver). In a pure party list, switching parties (or “crossing the floor” as it is described in South Africa, though that technically only applies to joining or abandoning the ruling party) is less defensible because representatives are not elected in their own right – though they can argue that their party has deviated from its principles or platform).

Where does this all take us?

What I have here is a basis for discussion. There are many details to work out. To create a direct line of accountability, if there are two representatives per district, that implies you have 2 votes. Do you have a different ballot for a different slate of candidates, or are all candidates on one ballot, that has to be marked twice? If a party exceeds its quota in the FPP stage, is there a good way to correct for this? For example, you could have an upper house that absorbs some of the excess MPs – though typically an upper house is elected on a different basis to provide some sort of checks and balances.

There has to be a better way: pure PR has served South Africa badly. The Australian system has too many imperfections to be a good alternative, and a pure FPP system is too unfair and locks out small parties. I don’t like a mixed-member PR and representative system like the South African municipal system (with variations in other countries like Germany and New Zealand) because it retains a party list as a component. The party role should end at nominating and supporting the candidate; if the party chooses badly, they deserve to lose.

Libya and the Media = Fail

Gaddafi on Al Jazeera, a reality check we aren’t getting from any other media here in Australia:

I sent off a letter to The Australian yesterday. it didn’t appear long with the others on Libya today:

I’ve been watching the increasingly horrifying situation in Linya unfold over the last few days via twitter, the Al Jazeera web site and whatever informal sources I could find. The reporting of this revolution has been appalling in the mainstream media, including your own report, “Muammar Gaddafi’s rule teeters on brink” (22/2), which reports it as a side story in the context of the other Middle East uprisings. This one is of a whole different character. A crazy government has declared war on its own people who, largely unarmed, are taking on tanks, heavy weapons, fighter aircraft, bombs and mercenary snipers. The real story of Libya is the incredible bravery of the Libyan people, acting with almost no outside support against a regime that values its own survival over all else. The other big story about Libya is how world leaders have stood by making mealy-mouthed statements about the need for peaceful dialogue while a bloodthirsty megalomaniac is letting all hell loose. As I write, at least 9 Libyan ambassadors have defected, indicating how isolated Gadaffi is from his own people. While much of the information out of Libya is unverified, you could report it as such. All you have to do is watch twitter and Al Jazeera, and summarise the general picture. Largely ignoring what is happening should not be an option.

As a computer science academic I am proud of the way technology my field developed has made it possible for the Libyan story to be heard, and for the protesters to organise against overwhelming force. Are you proud of the way you have allowed this story to unfold while largely ignoring the detail?

I’m not holding my breath for the follow-up I sent today to appear:

Muammar Gaddafi has the remarkable distinction of uniting old-time lefties and short-sighted western powers into mealy-mouthed platitudes about a situation that demands instant action. This revolution is all the more remarkable for the way an initially unarmed civilian population has fought back against extreme violence. But what is really remarkable is how the story is getting out despite the abject inattention of mainstream media. How many of your readers, I wonder, know what the February 17 movement is? How many know that people in Libya have resourcefully found ways of getting their story out, including gruesome pictures of bodies blown apart by artillery, amateur video footage and eyewitness reports, despite the best efforts of a police state to lock everything down tight?

Rupert Murdoch is attempting to storm into the Internet age by selling an iPad newspaper. How pathetic. This is one of the biggest stories of our time and you are reporting it as if nothing is happening unless you can get a reporter there.

 Here are some places where you can find out what’s really happening:

• Libyan Revolution Central
  
• Google map showing violence against pro-democracy movement


• February 17 on twitter


• Al Jazeera’s live blog


• Operation Libya White Fax

Many people are still arguing this on the old cold war divides. The instant Gaddafi ordered soldiers (and worse, foreign mercenaries) to start shooting at his people with heavy-calibre weapons, he put himself beyond the norms of reactions to crises. That some of what has happened is not being widely reported in the media doesn't reduce the horror of it. Al Jazeera is doing a good job of reporting with limited sources, and you can find out a lot of you know where to look on twitter (try #feb17 and #Libya as well as the links above).

In short people in Libya and the rest of the Arab world are not in revolt over imperialism, capitalism Islamism or any other ideology. They are just sick of others telling them what they should think and how to live their lives. Many of them are so sure of their cause that they are taking on tanks and artillery with their bare hands. And -- remarkable, winning. no thanks to mad mullahs, no thanks to the west, no thanks to leftist anti-imperialists.

There is a big lesson in this and we should stop prattling on with the old rhetoric and platitudes, and absorb the lessons.

For those who rely on the mainstream media, this is what is really happening: