The Last Hero

One of the great myths of politics is the value of heroic leaders.

Everyone does it. Police states build up the Great Leader (various variants on fascism and the like each had their own label: Der Füher, El Caudillo, Il Duce). Liberation movements have their icons – Che Guevara and the like, larger than life figures who take on impossible odds.

Now one of the greatest of them is gone – our own Nelson Mandela, Madiba (his clan name), Tata (father – a common Xhosa name for any older male).

Here in South Africa, many wonder how, despite such a great leader to take us into democracy, so much has gone wrong.

A true hero like Mandela was needed to take South Africa out of racial confrontation. A lesser person might have done it, but not with the same finesse and panache. Things like donning a Springbok rugby jersey, when many black South Africans saw rugby as the sport of the enemy, and the Springbok emblem as the logo of exclusion, or treating his former jailers with polite civility do not come naturally to someone who feels entitled to feel a victim.

Mandela’s great achievements mask the fact that in ordinary politics, ordinary people should be able to perform acceptably. The fact that things are breaking in his absence does not mean we need to wait for another hero to arise. In truth, a Mandela is not something we can expect to see again in many lifetimes. He was able strengthen when faced with extreme odds – and very few people can do that.

If our system today is not working, we need to look to the system, not to the character of the leaders. A working system will limit corruption and incompetence. Our system today does not. So we need to think why.

There are two key problems we need to face up to:

• civic responsibility – our people need to understand that the government is not everything. Ordinary citizens can do a lot without involving government, and can work collectively to improve government
• political accountability – our electoral system puts too much power in the hands of the party machine, and does not create a clear line of accountability between electoral office and the voter. A pure proportional representation system is good for two reasons: it accurately reflects the relative strengths of the parties, and it makes it easier for small parties to get a foothold. But the fact that the party machine decides where candidates go on the party list creates a big temptation to create a system of patronage within a ruling party – buying influence to raise your position on the party list is a lot easier than corrupting the local party machine to become a local candidate, and further fooling the voters into supporting you once you are revealed to be corrupt

Let’s look at each of these issues in more detail.

Civic Responsibility

Many areas where delivery is failing could be improved by local action. For example, where a school is inadequately maintained, community volunteers with relevant skills could pitch in. In the case of corruption or incompetence, if a particular government service isn’t working as it should, if everyone complained, it would become easier to just do the job than to deal with all the complaints.

Civic responsibility is failing because the majority of our population were strongly discouraged from complaining. During the apartheid years, anyone who complained was treated as a troublemaker, and subject to extreme punishment. In rural areas, banishment was a cruel weapon, involving forced relocation to a distant part of the country with minimal resources. Others were detained without trial for extended periods, killed in cruel ways, or simply disappeared. While leaders continued to fight, and many went into exile, the ordinary person had the culture of resistance beaten out of them.

Add to that one more thing: the civil service the post-apartheid South Africa inherited was not schooled in democratic practice, and a wholesale reskilling exercise didn’t happen. In some parts of the country, unreconstructed homeland administrations were absorbed into provincial governments. Where I live, the Eastern Cape, the provincial government is an untidy mix of the old Cape Province administration and the Ciskei and Transkei, both tin-pot dictatorships, and cadre deployments.

Cadre deployment is one of the ANC’s biggest mistakes – placing its people into public service ahead of competence. Naturally, their unreconstructed police state companions were only too happy to support this new influx that took off pressure from them to actually do useful work.

Fixing the civil service is obviously a worthy project – but waiting for that would require extreme patience. We can do a lot now, and we should not be patient, because those suffering the most are those who have the greatest need.

Political Accountability

The problem with a first-past-the-post system as in the old South Africa, the US and the UK is that it can produce very unfair results. The National Party did not win a majority (of the minority who could vote) for about 20 years after taking power in 1948. It is also very difficult for new parties to break through in that kind of system, because “splitting the vote” becomes an issue. For example, in the US, in the election that Al Gore lost to George W. Bush, some blame the Green candidate, Ralph Nader, whose votes might otherwise have gone to Gore, particularly in Florida where the result was tight. Whether that is true or not, that kind of logic tends to lock a political system into limited choices. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats battle to win for similar reasons.

But in South Africa’s system, though it’s fair, there’s no direct accountability. If a member of parliament is revealed to be corrupt but their party does nothing, you have no direct connection to that member. If you vote against their party, someone else lower on the party list may lose their seat. That is a very indirect path for voters to exercise accountability.

I have suggested previously an option for another way of voting;  there are others. The key requirement is that we maintain as much of the fairness of the current system as possible, as well as the possibility of small parties breaking through, while adding in the missing accountability link to the voter.

Whatever method we choose, it’s about time we started talking about it.

Why now?

With Mandela gone, many people will be more open to change. I am sure he would be open to these ideas too – the existing order has been hiding in his shadow to justify carrying on as before, long after he ceased to have influence.

The ideals he lived for are being lost, and will not return if we wait for another hero. We need to think now about building a system that will work even if politicians and civil servants are not heros, and where the average person does not need to be a hero just to live from day to day – a system that works for a government of ordinary people, for ordinary people.

And finally … 

Hamba kahle, tata. We miss you.

Should the UK adopt the Australian Voting System?

The UK referendum on a new voting system has generated heated debate. But it’s not as if the idea hasn’t been tried before. Australian has used a preferential system since 1918, and it has generally worked out pretty well.

On 5 May, UK voters will be faced with the referendum question:

'At present, the UK uses the 'first past the post' system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the 'alternative vote' system be used instead?

Naturally a simple question like this masks many complex issues so let’s cut to the chase. The core issue is whether you can vote for someone who’s not likely to win without throwing away your vote. Without that assurance, it’s almost impossible for new parties to arise outside of truly exceptional circumstances. Take the last UK election, where polls leading up to the election were showing an unprecedented vote for the Liberal Democrats. As election day loomed, voters defected two the two major parties. Why? Because they feared that voting for a candidate who had a faint chance of winning would result in someone they really did not want taking out their constituency.

Since the UK is currently facing this issue, I’ll use the UK term for electoral district: constituency. In Australia, we call the same thing an electorate.

I’ve lived in Australia for the best part of 9 years and run as a candidate in two elections, as well as managing two other candidates’ campaigns. I’ve also lived in South Africa and the US, which gives me a bit of international perspective. In Australia, we have a bewildering array of variants on “alternative voting” systems. Here are a few:

• compulsory preferential (used in federal lower house elections) – you must number every candidate for your vote to count
• optional preferential (used in some state elections, like Queensland) – you may number 1 or more candidates (if only one, any mark will do)
• above the line voting (used in the federal senate election) – instead of numbering individual candidates, you select one party ticket, and rely on the party to have negotiated a sensible flow of preferences
• single winner (the most common model in lower house elections including the federal lower house) – after distributing preferences, you elect exactly one person
• multi-member constituency (used in smaller states and territories) – each constituency elects several members

We can easily get lost in the details of these variations and indeed that is one of the hazards of a complex counting system: party machines can manipulate the poor understanding the less politically engaged have of how the system works. However, that hazard is relatively minor compared with blocking the rise of a new, fresh political movement because voters go for one of the bigger parties for fear of “wasting” their vote.

Let’s consider an example where four completely fictitious parties, Reds, Blues, Greens and Yellows, are contesting a seat. Polling shows that either the Reds or Blues will win in a first past the post system, with the Greens an outside chance, and the Yellows very little chance. 90% of supporters of the Greens vote Yellows, absent a Greens candidate, and vice-versa. The Reds and Blues supporters dislike each other’s policies so much, they would split their votes between Greens and Yellows if their own candidates dropped out. If everyone voted according to their first preference, the vote would be (in this fictitious example):

• Reds – 28%
• Blues – 27%
• Greens – 25%
• Yellows – 20%

In a first past the post system, as you have today in the UK and in the US House of Representatives, the Reds would win with less than a third of the vote. The Blues supporters would be very unhappy, as would a large fraction of Greens and Yellows supporters. In a real election, with this sort of expectation, potential Greens and Yellows voters would split their support over Reds and Blues, hoping their least worst choice would win, making it that much harder for their actual preferred party to win.

Now, let’s consider a vote on the basis of an Australian-style transferable preferential voting system. To keep it simple, we will assume compulsory preferential, so every ballot has to have every candidate numbered. With the above results, the Yellows would drop out after the first count because their vote is the lowest. 90% of the Yellows vote goes to the Greens, and the rest is split evenly between the other two parties:

• Reds – 28%+1%=29%
• Blues – 27%+1%=28%
• Greens – 25%+18%=43%
• Yellows – 20%-20% = 0 (dropped out)

At this point no one has passed 50%, so the lowest drops out, this time the Blues. Any second preferences of Blues voters to Yellows are ignored since they are out of the race, and in that case, the third preference gets counted instead. Thus all the Blues votes flow to the Greens (remember they hate the Reds’ policies and put them last), so the counts now become:

• Reds – 29%
• Blues – 28%-28%=0 (dropped out)
• Greens – 43%+28%=71%

To keep things simple, I didn't take into account that Yellows voters who put Blues ahead of Reds could have either put Reds of Greens next. Not only is this a very different outcome to the first past the post election, but voters are much more comfortable with giving the smaller parties a look because they know their first choice vote is not wasted if that party is too small to win. While the Greens were not the party with the biggest support on the first count (the “primary vote” in Australian terminology), they were the party that was disliked the least. Had the Reds candidate won, not only the Blues supporters but also a substantial fraction of the Yellows and Greens supporters would have been unhappy.

The major downside of the system in practice is that parties can manipulate public perceptions about the system to sow confusion. In Australia, except in a few jurisdictions where the practice is banned, parties hand out “how to vote” instructions outside polling booths. These instructions are no more than a suggestion, but many voters in my experience think that you have to follow the instructions once you’ve chosen which party to support. Consequently, there is a lot of horse-trading before elections between parties on how to order each other on their how to votes, in exchange for favours. This is however an easy problem to solve: better regulation of the  type of information that may be handed out on polling day can eliminate confusion, as can a more pro-active advertising program by the election agency.

Australia very seldom has hung parliaments; we are in an unusual situation currently with both the federal lower house and the Tasmanian state parliament with minority governments. This has happened because the major parties are uninspiring, rather than because of the electoral system. We have on the other hand a vigorous history of voting in independents and small parties, who have, in the words of the late great founder leader of the Australian Democrats Don Chipp, kept the bastards honest. Well, to a degree. There’s just so much you can do with the raw material.

As UK voters ponder which way to vote on the referendum, remember this. You can get exactly the same outcome as in the current system if you don’t like any of the smaller parties or independents running. Just number Labour and Tories ahead of them, and, if this is the general sentiment, they won’t stand a chance of winning. On the other hand, if you are really fed up with the major parties, you open up a new alternative of giving someone else a chance – without wasting your vote if they don’t make it.