A day in the life of an MP, and: Are we heading for a seismic shift in SA’s political landscape?

The August 3rd municipal elections are behind us and we are in the midst of an unprecedented period of gamesmanship by the contenders for power in over twenty hung municipalities and metros throughout the country. The outcome of negotiations to form coalitions, particularly in Johannesburg, Tshwane, Nelson Mandela Bay and Ekurhuleni, could well determine South Africa's future and certainly influence voting patterns in the 2019 provincial and national elections. 

It is against this backdrop that I am publishing a talk I gave at my church three weeks ago, as the topic of political realignment is very much on people's minds now. 

A day in the life of an MP, and:

Are we heading for a seismic shift in SA’s political landscape?

A discussion evening hosted by the Centre for Christian Spirituality

Led by Toby Chance MP

St George’s Anglican Church, Parktown, Johannesburg

20^th July 2016 

I would like to thank Jeremy for the very kind invitation to lead this discussion this evening and wish him well on his sick bed as he recovers from a bad bout of the flu.

I have St George’s to thank in more ways than one for being here this evening.

It was in this very hall that I attended my first DA branch meeting shortly after the May 2009 general election. The meeting notice had gone up at the church entrance and I was intrigued so decided to attend. At the meeting I was elected to the executive of the new Lakes branch, later to become the backbone of the DA’s activities in Ward 87. Little did I know where it would lead me.

Then, five years later after deciding to apply as a candidate MP, Bishop Steve kindly agreed to give me a letter of reference. I must assume it left a favourable impression on the DA’s selection panel.

Finally, St George’s has provided me with the spiritual and musical nourishment necessary to survive the rigours of this job. Even though MPs have a punishing schedule I have prioritised attending choir on Sundays.

I am truly grateful to the St George’s community for being so supportive of the choir’s endeavours. Last Sunday’s evensong, when we bade farewell to Paul Spies and Stephen Crookes, was an especial highlight.

When Jeremy first asked me to speak at CCS earlier this year, the topic he suggested was “A day in the life of an MP”. The July date we agreed on was scheduled to be after the local government elections, which were expected to be in May, so all the excitement would have died down by now. With the shenanigans at the IEC and the contested Tlokwe bi-elections, the elections were postponed until August and are now just two weeks away.

So while I will spend some time on the day in the life of an MP, I am sure you are just as interested in the expected outcome of these elections. These are certain to be the most closely contested since 1994, and may re-shape the future of the country in unexpected ways.

I guess the first question I must ask is, what business has a politician got speaking at a CCS function in the first place? Should politics and religion not be strictly separated and not interfere with each other?

I think it is clear from Jeremy’s sermons and Bishop Steve’s recent outspoken statements that our church leadership is not afraid of stepping into this controversial terrain. And nor should it be.

The church took a principled stand against the oppressive apartheid regime. It is now bolder in its criticisms of a government and ruling party that arguably are regressing from their commitment to social justice, democratic values and respect for the law.

I do not intend to venture into the realms of religion or spirituality. But I hope what I say might contribute to your views on the morality of our present day politics and how your own moral position might influence your vote on August 3^rd.

Jeremy did get a commitment from me, though, that I would not turn this into a DA stump speech. What I’m aiming to do is bring to light some of the things MPs get up to in their daily round; why Parliament has all of a sudden become both a media hit and increasingly marginalised as a political force; and what scenarios can we prepare for as August 3^rd draws near.

This occasion is a rare luxury as far as a time allowance is concerned. Most speeches opposition MPs give in Parliament are between 2 and 8 minutes long. Our leader Mmusi Maimane is sometimes allocated up to 20 minutes. Only the President has no time limit, in his annual State of the Nation address.

Our debates are very formulaic and not really debates at all, with few opportunities for interjection and spontaneity. In a typical debate lasting two hours, the minister opens with a 15 or 20 minute speech and closes it with another one of 5 minutes. In the middle, the deputy minister is normally allotted around 10 minutes while opposition parties get minutes apportioned according to the number of MPs they have. With 13 parties in Parliament, most of them get only 4 minutes in a debate.

This is one of the peculiarities of our Parliament. To the left of the podium where we speak there’s a digital count down which you have to keep a close eye on. DA members’ speeches are written and rehearsed down to the last word to maximise their effect in the time allotted.

Only a tiny proportion of our time is spent giving speeches in Parliament. Twice a year, first in the department budget debate in May and in November when we review their annual performance plans, a lot of time and effort goes into perfecting these speeches to put government ministers on the spot.

My counterpart, Lindiwe Zulu, has earned a reputation as something of a street fighter, and is disparagingly called Ginger by the EFF on account of the tint to her hair. You may recall an incident last year when she challenged an EFF MP to step outside to settle a dispute, for which she was rebuked by the Chair and was forced to apologise. Nevertheless, she and I have established a relationship of cordial mutual respect and try to meet one-on-one at least once a term to discuss pressing issues.

While debates often get very heated and we go at each other hammer and tongs, things generally quieten down in the passages of Parliament, particularly in the tea room and bar where party political differences are set aside.

So what is the job of an MP, actually? How many of you even know your MP? Well that’s a bit of a trick question because we don’t have MPs in the sense that we understand the traditional role of an MP to be – to represent a particular geographical constituency.

This system was replaced in 1994 and we now have a proportional representation system, with MPs being chosen by party selection processes and placed on a list – the higher on the list, the better your chances of getting elected.

This system has its pros and cons. Being proportional to the votes cast, it means smaller parties are represented. But its biggest failing is MPs’ lack of accountability to the voters. Party bosses wield far more power than in a constituency system because MPs are beholden to them for their jobs.

This is one of the reasons Parliament became boring and predictable, because virtually all votes went along party lines. Only very rarely does an MP step out of line, such as when ANC veteran MP Ben Turok defied an ANC three line whip – meaning attendance in the House is compulsory - and failed to vote for the Protection of State Information Bill in November 2011, for which he was severely reprimanded by his party.

Parliament has become something of a rubber stamp for decisions made by the governing party. Our Chief Whip John Steenhuisen often quips, when ANC MPs trot out an unpopular party line, that a call has just come through from Luthuli House giving instructions on what or what not to say.

The job of an MP can really be divided into three: portfolio work, representing the party in Parliament and the country, and constituency work.

Let me begin with constituency work. In order to create a semblance of a connection with voters, most parties assign their MPs to a geographic area which we conveniently call constituencies. In the DA, MPs and members of the Provincial Legislature are what we call Political Heads of these constituencies.

In Johannesburg, we have 16 MPs and MPLs so we carved the map of the city into 16 constituencies. After the 2019 election this is most likely to change, so there is no real continuity between a political head and a specific geographic area - another disadvantage of this system.

My constituency, Soweto West, comprises 11 wards but because it is an ANC dominated area none of those ward councillors is DA. So we allocate PR councillors to these wards, in clusters. I have four PR councillors covering these wards.

Local elections are different from national and provincial elections in that we elect representatives using a 50/50 combination of PR and ward-based voting. Joburg has 135 wards and 270 councillors, half of which are PR councillors elected in proportion to the party’s total vote.

Most of our constituencies have a mix of DA, ANC and other parties as ward councillors but in my case, it’s only ANC. To give you an idea of the huge voting disparity across the city, in 2011 in this ward 87 where we sit, the DA got 78% vs 18% for the ANC. In ward 20 in Naledi in the heart of Soweto, the ANC got 87% and the DA 5%.

This is a direct consequence both of the spatial effects of apartheid and race-based voting patterns which have dominated elections since 1994. This pattern is beginning to change, as I will elaborate on later.

So you can see my task in Soweto is very different from, say, my colleague James Lorimer’s whose constituency, Linden, is solidly DA. While his job is mainly to ensure maximum turnout of his majority DA supporters, mine is to appeal to new ones, almost all ANC voters.

If these were constituencies in the true sense of the word, James would be elected by a landslide and I would lose dismally. So while James can argue that he represents his constituency in Parliament, I on the other hand represent my party in my constituency as an advocate for change. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

The DA believes a mixed constituency/PR system is best suited to our conditions, as recommended by the 2003 van Zyl Slabbert commission on electoral reform which is now gathering dust. Under the current government it is highly unlikely the system will change, as the ANC favours centralised control, or democratic centralism as it euphemistically calls it.

Roughly 40% of my time as an MP is spent on constituency work. The other 60% is spent either in Parliament or on portfolio oversight visits.

The Parliamentary year is divided into 4 terms of roughly 8 weeks each, with the House sitting on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and evenings. Mondays are designated as constituency days, Fridays are generally spent in Cape Town doing portfolio work while on Saturdays we are expected to be in our constituencies.

While in Cape Town most MPs live in one of three parliamentary villages located in the suburbs, in my case Acacia Park in Goodwood. To avoid the traffic I leave there at 5:30 in the morning and most days don’t return until after 8 in the evening. It’s a tiring day, made worse by the ten hours door-to-door travel from Joburg to Cape Town and back every week.

Every MP sits on a portfolio committee, in my case as a Shadow Minister I sit on the Small Business Development committee along with my deputy Henro Kruger. Committees sit on mornings a minimum of once a week, mine on a Wednesday, but some more often. The Trade and Industry committee sits three or four times a week because it oversees a much bigger department so has a bigger workload.

The committee’s job is to hold the minister and department to account, and our powers have actually expanded since the last Parliament. So much so that we can accept, modify or reject a budget, submit bills to Parliament, call anyone including the Minister to answer questions before the committee and give strategic and policy direction to the department should we believe it necessary.

All the committees are chaired by senior ANC MPs and most are spineless, in fact, and do not take their constitutional mandate seriously. Some, like the Communications Committee, show some mettle – in that case by forcing Ellen Tshabalala, the SABC board chairperson’s resignation for lying about her qualifications.

Parliament can establish ad hoc committees, notoriously the Nkandla ad hoc committee which was a textbook case of a committee failing in its constitutional duty. All committees have a built-in ANC majority so votes are a foregone conclusion.

I was appointed to sit on the Joint Ad Hoc Committee on Probing Violence Against Foreign Nationals in April last year. This followed the spate of attacks against foreign spaza shop owners in Durban, Cape Town and Joburg. We visited the hotspots in each city and called for submissions, both oral and written, and by September had amassed a great deal of material with which to write our report.

The committee members were, on the whole, bi-partisan and took their responsibilities seriously but with one notable exception. After King Goodwill Zwelithini told foreigners to pack their bags and go home my DA colleague Sej Motau and I called for the committee to summon him to appear before us to explain his comments. The ANC and IFP members were outraged we should insult the king so! They indignantly asked if the British Parliament would summon the Queen to appear before it. To which the answer is, South Africa is a constitutional democracy, not a constitutional monarchy, and the Zulu King is technically an ordinary citizen like anyone else. And in any case, the chances of Queen Elizabeth being so untactful in public are minimal to say the least!

The DA and other opposition parties have, in this parliament, been much more vocal than before criticising the overweening behaviour of committees and ministers when they tow the party line.

In the EFF’s case, their style of opposition has captured the public’s attention like never before, but when one is actually sitting in the House one can witness the fine line between dissent and intentional disruption.

Julius Malema made it plain before entering Parliament what we could expect from the EFF: “I’m not here for rules of Parliament. I’m here for a revolution,” Malema told journalists at Parliament. “We are not going to sit back and allow a situation where a revolution is undermined in the name of rules.” (http://mg.co.za/article/2014-06-20-malema-eff-wont-follow-rules-of-parliament)

The confrontation between the EFF and the presiding officers – the Speaker, Deputy Speaker and House Chairs, all ANC MPs – was inevitable once the EFF’s strategy became clear. The EFF continuously baits and taunts Speaker Baleka Mbete, who has lost her cool on numerous occasions.

In a welcome nod to freedom of speech, the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled in June the ejection of Malema from the House in June 2014 for accusing the ANC of a massacre at Marikana was unconstitutional.

The ANC and its cadres in the chair are clearly attempting to muzzle opposition MPs from voicing uncomfortable truths. With orders from Luthuli House trumping their obligations to be fair and unbiased, confrontations with opposition parties is inevitable.

The shutting down of freedom of speech is a major threat to our democracy, and we are now seeing it in another guise in the censorship meted out by Hlaudi Motsoeneng at the SABC in the run-up to the election.

This situation could well provide opposition parties with grounds for questioning whether a free and fair election is possible. It is feasible to imagine the electoral court ruling after the election that the SABC, with by far the biggest reach of any broadcasting organisation in SA, biased its coverage in favour of the ANC and against the DA and other parties.

The EFF and possibly the DA are likely to contest the outcomes where votes are very close. We have already expressed our distrust of the even-handedness of the IEC. The IEC is overwhelmingly staffed by members of teachers union SADTU, an outspoken ANC supporter. Opposition parties must be vigilant as party agents on voting day to ensure irregularities are prevented or reported and corrected.

Apart from the oversight role MPs have in committee, we also have the conventions of written and oral questions, notices of motion and motions without notice as ways to influence the flux of political debate and the media sphere. We can also submit Private Member’s Bills which focus on a particular legislative reform.

Questions can be particularly effective in forcing the executive – government ministers – to divulge information, especially when invoking a piece of legislation in support of the question. Ministers are obliged to answer questions fully and accurately and abide by the law, though many are evasive.

My colleague David Maynier has used questions to force Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan to publish the Treasury’s performance and expenditure reports, using the Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000 as the lever.

In January I received a response to a question to Minister Zulu revealing she had spent over R700 000 on two trips to the UK and France, which received a lot of negative coverage in the media. Ministers can run but they cannot hide!

Our job as public representatives, in summary, is to represent our parties in our constituencies; to legislate and perform an oversight function in Parliament; and to promote our parties and policies by getting as much media coverage as possible. Getting the balance right is a tough task, with MPs being better at some of our duties than others. In my case, by far the most challenging are my constituency duties, but that’s probably because I represent the DA in what we call a non-traditional constituency.

Now, let me turn to the forthcoming elections and what they hold in store for the political landscape. And what do I mean when I speak of the realignment of politics as referred to in the title of my talk?

This term dates back to the writings of Helen Zille after she became Mayor of Cape Town in 2006. Her weekly newsletter SA Today, which I am sure many of you subscribed to, was a must-read for political nut-heads. The 9^th of May 2008 edition dealt extensively with her mission to realign South African politics from the bottom up.

By realignment she meant a shift in the political landscape, with traditional party positions and ideologies being replaced by new formations reflecting changing underlying political forces. To use a geological metaphor, the political landscape is like the earth’s crust being gradually and continually morphed by plate tectonics. Occasionally the pressure builds up to the point where an earthquake turns things upside down – the seismic shift.

When she spoke about realignment happening from the bottom up, she meant it had to start at local government level, not in Parliament. This is why she resisted taking up a seat in Parliament. Instead she remained Mayor for five years before moving to the Premiership of the Western Cape, where she pursued her realignment project with added vigour.

The trigger for realignment was the 2006 election which resulted in no party receiving over 50% of the vote. The DA had 42% and after two weeks of intense negotiations reached agreement with 6 smaller parties to form a coalition. For a masterful account of how this happened I recommend Gareth van Onselen’s piece which appeared last week in BDLive.

Importantly, he points out that the Independent Democrats, led by Patricia de Lille, overplayed its hand believing itself to be the kingmaker. In the event, the ID sided at first with the ANC but combined they could not get over the 50% hurdle. The ID later supported the DA giving the coalition a semblance of stability. Five years later, the DA had absorbed the ID and de Lille was elected the DA mayor of Cape Town.

This was the beginning of the realignment of parties committed to the Constitution and the rule of law as the guiding light for our democracy.

In the DA, we have come up with a model to represent the ideological divide: an equilateral triangle with the apex representing the ideological centre ground, with the Constitution and the National Development Plan on the right side, and on the left side the National Democratic Revolution and the Freedom Charter.

On the right of the triangle sits the DA and many of the smaller parties including the UDM, the IFP, the FF Plus and Cope. On the left sit the ANC, the EFF, the PAC and other minnows like Azapo.

The DA and other parties on the right of the triangle all subscribe to the fundamental values enshrined in the constitution such as respect for the rule of law, freedom of the individual, respect for human rights, merit-based appointments, a market-led economy and a capitalist vision based on broad-based wealth creation and equality of opportunity for all. There is also broad agreement that the NDP is the best roadmap available for South Africa to progress. This is the liberal democratic consensus.

The ANC and EFF, on the other hand, as well as the ANC alliance partners Cosatu and the SACP, believe in state-led development, the primacy of the collective over the individual, subservience of the market to the state, and a socialist vision based on redistribution of wealth and equality of outcomes. For them, the loadstone is the Freedom Charter and the National Democratic Revolution, or NDR. This is the socialist or social democratic consensus.

The importance of the NDR in fashioning the thinking of this wing of the ANC is often overlooked. The NDR derives from Lenin, who wrote in 1905: "But an appraisal of a provisional revolutionary government's significance would be incomplete and wrong if the class nature of the democratic revolution were lost sight of.”

The NDR is the ideological mainstay of the hard-line left wingers in the Alliance and gathered momentum as it tried to head off what they termed the 1996 Class Project. This is an opposing, more centrist ideology which left wingers and Communists believed threatened the revolution, and is closely associated with Thabo Mbeki.

In an interview in The Star newspaper in April 1995, Mbeki predicted that the ANC would split into a liberal democratic wing and a social democratic wing within 5 years. His prediction has not come to pass, but the stresses and strains within the Alliance are evident for all to see and the likely outcome of the local elections will increase the pressure for a split, or a political earthquake.

The latest polls suggest the ANC will go below 50% in Tshwane, Nelson Mandela Bay and Johannesburg. This will lead to a crisis in the ANC, which has got used to being in power with all the opportunities for patronage and diversion of state resources to party ends this offers.

The opposing forces within the ANC will be tussling with the prospect of forming coalitions with their sworn enemies, particularly the DA and EFF. If the left within the ANC hold sway, a coalition with the EFF seems likely while the liberal democratic wing will see this as anathema and could well swallow its pride and opt for coalition with the DA.

The DA could emerge as the leading party in all three of these metros, but not necessarily with an overall majority. In this case, we could face a re-run of what happened in Cape Town in 2006, i.e. a coalition with the smaller parties and the elimination of the ANC and EFF as coalition partners. Barring a DA overall majority, this is the preferred route for the DA as a coalition with the ANC or EFF is fraught with difficulties.

The ANC is disinclined to share power with anyone. EFF and DA policies are wide far apart, and the EFF’s predilection for disruptive politics would make a coalition with them highly unstable.

The DA has a ready to govern team in place examining all the scenarios in each metro and local and district municipalities. We are ready for any eventuality. But we will not entertain coalitions if the cost in terms of ensuring stable government and abandoning our core principles and polices are too high to bear.

Should coalitions be the norm in many municipalities, Helen Zille’s mission to realign our politics at the local level will then take on a greater dimension. If the DA is in the ascendant, our values, principles and policies will be implemented over the coming years and if we succeed, we are likely to see further inroads made in the 2019 national and provincial elections.

The experience in Cape Town shows capable government, focused on well managed service delivery by a professional civil service based on merit rather than cadre deployment, wins over more voters than it sheds.

The ANC factions will be under intense pressure to make a choice about who they align with, based on the likely outcome of that election and the threat of losing power entirely or going where the political winds are blowing. A split is more likely than not, and the big question then will be, which faction will retain ownership of the ANC brand and who will their leaders be?

Factionalism within the ANC is a complicating factor. There are the populists, who lean towards an EFF style of politics and policy-making, the racial nationalists and tenderpreneurs a la the Jacob Zuma wing, the liberal democrats who lean towards the DA way of thinking and the socialists/communists. Events in the coming two or three years will see which faction holds sway and either abandons the ANC or entrenches its grip on the party’s brand.

We have already seen a split at the edges with Numsa’s breaking away from Cosatu and the vaunted formation of a new party to the left of the ANC, the United Front.

It is entirely possible a new party or parties will emerge which will jettison old nostrums and loyalties that have sustained the current party make-up since 1994. The new parties will coalesce around shared values and one of them, we must hope, will reflect those on the centre-right of the ideological triangle I described earlier. I stress shared values rather than shared race, as our politics evolves into a class rather than race-based form.

Such a party, or coalition, will have to face up to some tough choices, similar to those facing the current government for several years but which it has chosen to avoid.

The ratings agencies are still hovering, and a downgrade in December is likely if Pravin Gordhan is unable to bring about significant reforms to our state owned enterprises, our labour regime, public sector pay and by lowering the cost of doing business. Expect major opposition from the SACP and Numsa if he takes these steps.

If a coalition of the left emerges instead then South Africa’s trajectory will take a different course. Socialist or populist policies will lead to less fiscal restraint by government, higher minimum wages, pressure for more radical land reform, higher inflation, disinvestment by business and capital flight.

At a local level, all of these opposing viewpoints will translate into policies and programmes which either advance democracy and economic wellbeing, or threaten further misery and contestation over dwindling resources.

The scenarios for South Africa’s future have been written about extensively by many commentators and analysts, including RW Johnson’s Will South Africa Survive?, Frans Cronje’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to the next Ten Years, and Songezo Zibi’s Raising the Bar. I can recommend them all.

One thing is clear: more than in any election since democracy dawned, every vote counts. So if any of you are planning to be away on August 3^rd, please think again. South Africa’s very future lies in your hands.

ENDS