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Publications >> International Forum Publications >> Democratic Consolidation in South Africa: Progress and Pitfalls
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Session 5 Civil Society and Political Culture Michael Bratton Civil society encapsulates the totality of political experience outside of the state, but it cannot be understood independently of its relation to the state. In a deeply divided society we should not expect a monolithic culture. While 82 percent of South Africans agree that they should stop thinking of themselves in ethnic terms, far fewer actually do, and race is still the prime determinant of party affiliation and voting behavior. As recently as 1995, 32 percent of the population favored a strong government, defined as one that does not have to bother with elections; 20 percent considered military rule acceptable; and only a minority understood democracy in terms of political rights and guarantees, while about half viewed it instrumentally as a means to economic ends. The experience of other new democracies in Africa suggests that state elites are unlikely actively to build a political culture supportive of consolidation. The task thus falls mainly to ngos. But this sector in South Africa lost many talented leaders, attracted away by opportunities in the public and private sectors. ngos have also encountered a funding crisis as donor resources have been redirected to government. As civil society has lost capacity, its autonomy has eroded, and ngos have begun to develop a cozy corporate relationship with the state. These developments do not necessarily mean that ngos have been fully captured and subordinated by the government. Relationships between state and civil society remain fluid and negotiable. But how long will it take before government-ngo partnerships begin to undermine the pluralism of the voluntary sector? We must ask whether civil society in South Africa can effectively perform the classic function of legitimizing the state by delivering popular support to an elected government and democratic regime. The very closeness of ngos to government may be undermining their credibility as a source of independent initiative. Sipho Maseko I would offer five propositions as explanations for the decline in civil society activity in South Africa since 1994. The first is that before 1994 civic organizations viewed their role as supporting the national liberation struggle. The second is that the new era that began in April 1994 marked a shift from street-and-pavement politics to activity in formal institutions, based on the expectation that issues addressed by civil society would then be raised in these institutions. The third is that many of these civic organizations have a strong loyalty to the present government. The fourth is that many leaders of civil society organizations have been co-opted into government. The fifth is that some have entered a new area of struggle—economic empowerment—and are thus engaged in business. In breaking with the past, civil society must rethink the culture of entitlement and expectation. It must realize that unemployment is not linked to apartheid, and that there would still be a lack of housing, or housing of bad quality, without apartheid. It must also embrace independence and autonomy and realize that participation in politics is not the sole preserve of the elite, but that ordinary citizens can take an active part in politics and the economy. E. Gyimah-Boadi There is a vastly expanded space for civil society to grow and develop in Africa in the 1990s because of the general liberalization of politics, specific legal and constitutional changes, the relative weakness of the state, and growing external support for ngos. But threats remain. There is much intolerance and hostility toward ngos and other civil society organizations in Africa based on the suspicion that they may be subversive agencies acting on behalf of foreign interests. This is aggravated by lack of support from business: Corporate sponsors are far more willing to support soccer clubs than advocacy ngos for both political and public relations reasons. Liberal scholars are not sufficiently concerned with the fact that most ngos on the continent are male-dominated, especially at the leadership level, or with the growing tendency among ngos to fail to impose proper self-governance and be internally democratic and accountable. We decry ngo leadership entering government, and yet one of the tasks of a well-functioning civil society is to generate leadership for democratic politics. We should be concerned, rather, that former ngo leaders behave like democrats when they find themselves on the other side of the fence. Maxine Reitzes In many instances, there is a kind of schizophrenia in civil society organizations about whether they are in opposition and continuing their liberation role or whether they are now in a position to legitimize the state and act as a watchdog over it. Just because formal political representative institutions are now in place does not mean that they are automatically recognized as legitimate. Political parties and civil society should not be confused. Parties remain the sole political institutions that aggregate interests and mediate between them. The importance of organizations in civil society is that they are able to accommodate multiple identities and multiple interests. When civil society organizations become uncivil and violent, it is symptomatic of weaknesses in the representative institutions and party system. The relationship between state and civil society organizations only becomes adversarial when political institutions are seen to be unresponsive to organizations of civil society. There is a real possibility that civil society in a post-transition phase can become enormously elitist because of problems limiting public participation, such as language, organizational capacity, and access to political institutions and information. Far from being a watchdog over the state, civil society might become a parallel set of organizations used to endorse and legitimate state policies that are purely in the interests of the elite and exclude the majority of citizens. Dumisani Hlophe The notion of civil society in South Africa has been primarily formed by the apartheid history and reactions to it. Talk of South Africa’s rich history of civic activity usually refers to organizations that were under the umbrella of the United Democratic Front, engaged directly in a fight against the apartheid system. We have tended to focus attention on those organizations as instruments of civil society and disregard other institutions outside the liberation camp. Parts of civil society reflect the habit in the liberation movement of trying to achieve some form of hegemony within civil society. The South Africa ngo Coalition is one instance. At the same time, there is a growing realization that the state is not the only repository of power. A network of relationships among different structures in civil society is developing. Civil society organizations are beginning to invest in business ventures and to buy shares. Capital is no longer the enemy, but has come to be seen as desirable. Discussion Debate followed on whether it was possible to speak of the “uncivil characteristics of civil society.” One argument was that “uncivil characteristics” are, by definition, not attributable to civil society—there is both an uncivil and a civil society; the goal of democracy is to try to reduce the former and expand the latter. In response, it was argued that this distinction cannot account for “uncivil” elements in resistance strategies during the 1980s to unresponsive and illegitimate formal political institutions. On the contrary, there was an uncivil state, and for that reason, there was more of an uncivil than a civil society because of the nature of the relationship between the two spheres. Civil society, it was argued, is not simply a set of intermediaries that transmit demands from their respective memberships to the state. Units of civil society are massive generators of norms and rules by which citizens must live. The associations of insurance companies are a good example and are sometimes called private governments. They are a fundamentally nondemocratic aspect of civil society because they are often not accountable. They make deals among their own members and pass the cost on to others. Further discussion focused on the changed character and role of civil society both in South Africa since 1994 and in Europe and Latin America. It was argued that, while the number of civil society organizations in South Africa has declined since 1994, it is not necessarily true that the capacity of the ngo movement to monitor the state has weakened. The budget of idasa, for example, has grown by something like 1000 percent since 1987 and its capacity and range of activities have increased remarkably. There may be fewer ngos but they are larger, more focused, and more centralized, and they have increased capacity to monitor the state. It was emphasized that the character of civil society in South Africa is more complex than the concepts that can be extrapolated by concentrating only on the anc political elite. There is a multitude of organizations, including self-help groups, credit-rotation schemes, welfare ngos, burial societies, private clubs, and professional bodies; some of these organizations’ relationships with the state are complex. Some of these organizations do not relate to the state on political or social issues. Some do not exist to oppose the state; they simply take care of the interests of their members. They are, however, as much a part of civil society as those that do take an overt political stance. One cannot make broad generalizations about civil society on the basis of a limited set of organizations. Many civil society organizations do not have a clearly focused purpose and are therefore likely to play their role increasingly within the framework set by the state and not within one that is emerging autonomously from a position within civil society. In most thinking on the European continent, the emphasis on civil society stresses autonomy from family and primary units of society. In Latin America, this issue is serious because many of the institutions of civil society are controlled by single firms, single families, and single ethnic groups, and are merely extensions, in an organizational form, of informal and primary non-elective affinities and memberships. In Latin America, one must examine not only whether organizations are autonomous from the state, but also whether they are independent of these basic units of human reproduction. Session 6 An Accountable State Terry Karl Accountability is essentially the power of political institutions to satisfy the democratic demand for an effective government that respects the people who are the source of its rule. In most democratic theory, accountability is defined in terms of the relationship of the rulers to the ruled, primarily measured through the electoral process and party competition. I want to look at accountability in a broader way—as a thick network of institutions and relationships that involve vertical and horizontal accountability. In the older democracies, the people are growing increasingly skeptical of elections as a key mechanism of accountability because the responsiveness of governments to electorates is problematic, even where there are well-developed constituency networks. Horizontal accountability involves control of the rulers by the ruled, accountability of the rulers to one another, and accountability of the ruled toward their rulers. This means that there are state agencies and private organizations empowered to oversee government performance and to stop unlawful actions or omissions by other agents of government. One type of violation that needs to be regulated by these institutions is state abrogations of liberal freedoms and civil rights. Another is rent-seeking behavior by private and state authorities. How do you ensure that state agents act for the public rather than the private interest, especially when new rulers believe that they are entitled to benefit personally or to help relatives or comrades because they are, at the same time, trying to achieve goals that are for the public good? If you do not build institutions to counteract this notion, no clear boundary between the public and the private will be set. If you are in that situation, certain prohibitions become eroded over time. Some mechanisms of accountability are transparent media, an accountable electoral process, and a civil service that will not violate the rules. Yvonne Muthien I want to comment on three institutions of accountability—the legislature, the institutions supporting democracy, and the public service. The effectiveness of the South African parliament in holding government accountable depends on the quality of the elected representatives—their professional expertise and direct accountability to constituencies. Both conditions have been compromised by the exodus of skilled professionals from Parliament. Democratic accountability by the legislature is further compromised by at least three other factors—the lack of technical expertise among representatives in the legislature, the volume and time constraints on enacting legislation, and the reduction of the supremacy of the legislature over the executive because legislation originates in the latter. The South African Constitution enshrines an elaborate array of institutions supporting constitutional democracy that serve as a check on political and administrative authority. The efficacy of these institutions is dependent on four factors—their location and status in the system of governance, whether they have a powerful champion in the governmental system, the unqualified support of the legislature in the exercise of their functions, and the level of their resources. Despite these institutions, the novelty of exercising political power produces major constraints on setting limits on government. On the public service, the critical question is: How can it be made to function in a manner compatible with democracy? The history of the South African Public Service Commission, appointed after 1994 to administer the civil service, shows that excessive control over public institutions does not imply increased effectiveness. Nor does creating multiple accountability mechanisms and institutions by itself increase accountability. The solution to the problem of democratizing the modern administrative state lies in reconciling the democratic imperatives of public accountability with the managerial imperatives of administrative flexibility and responsiveness. A more direct form of accountability is exercised through citizen charters. Discussion Most of the discussion focused on the notion of horizontal accountability in democratic theory and the relevance of accountability in “suspended states” where the gap between state and society is so wide that the two have very little to do with one another. It was argued that democracy cannot be defined without the notion of vertical accountability of rulers to citizens through representation. The new emphasis on horizontal accountability, especially the notion that the strongest form of accountability is through the rule of law, is considered suspect by some. The rechtsstaat tradition, pioneered by the Germans, was used as an antidemocratic device; the law itself was antidemocratic, and accountability to the law was superior to accountability to parliament. It was also argued that in the notion of horizontal accountability two assumptions are questionable. One is that the law itself is democratic, the other that the judiciary is democratic. Being held accountable to undemocratic laws is not democratic, and judges’ social origins are likely to make them prone to pay more attention to some laws than to others. If elected officials must be accountable to judges, why not to central bankers or the general staffs of the armed forces? The problem with horizontal accountability is that it does not identify the actors to whom one should be horizontally accountable. A major lacuna in democratic theory was noted in the discussion. Most democratic theorists admit that you cannot trust democracies to themselves. Nondemocratically constituted powers, such as constitutional courts, central banks, and armies, are necessary in all democracies. Institutions of democracy are not equivalent to guardian institutions; the latter should be subordinate to the former and not the reverse. It is, for example, vital that the military be subordinate to elected representatives. Finally, it was argued that for the judiciary to be democratic it has to be transformed to reflect the society in which it is located. If it becomes an instrument of the rich or one ethnic group, there is no democratic rule of law. Mechanisms to facilitate access to the law are also crucial to counter the effects of socioeconomic inequalities. The role of civil society watchdog organizations in pursuing important cases on behalf of those who lack the ability or means to access the courts is an important mechanism of accountability. It is very important that the system not simply enable rich and powerful interests to use mechanisms of accountability to hold government back from democratic transformation. Session 7 Crime and Public Order Antoinette Louw There are three main points I would make concerning crime and South Africa’s current state of transition to democracy. The first concerns police statistics that suggest a stabilization in the occurence of serious crimes since 1994; the second relates to the fear of crime; and the third concerns the state’s response to crime. First, police statistics for some serious crimes show a decline, but from already very high levels; other categories of crime have increased. Statistics also suggest that crime has increased most dramatically since the transition began in 1990. Pre-transition forms of control broke down during the transition and have not always been replaced by alternatives that work. The police service, a historically authoritarian institution, has been trying to change and to respond both to crime and to pressures from the public and the new political system. Increased crime is also the result of the widespread availability of firearms, economic inequality, and the legacy of political and gang violence. Second, levels of fear of crime are high and dissatisfaction with the police and, to some extent, the courts, is thus also strong. But although the police are facing mounting public pressure on crime, survey results have not suggested that people are turning to extralegal options to deal with it. Victims of crime still generally turn to the police for assistance, and people still opt for more and better police as the best means of making the cities safer. Third, the state now recognizes that better policing is not the only solution to crime and that there is a need for a crime prevention strategy. It is also beginning to recognize the need for more police accountability, especially at the local level. Terry Karl My comments will be a set of propositions that come largely from my work on Central America. The first point is that transition violence really matters. In Central America, the political use of violence to bolster negotiating positions subsequently transformed itself into a form of social violence directed against people, not property, and especially against people in rural rather than urban areas. The second is that there has been a tremendous rise in violence against women. The suspicion is that part of the reason is that post-transition settings are renegotiations of a wide variety of power relations, including those in the home. Many of the guerrilla armies in Central America were made up predominantly of women, and part of the violence is a reassertion of patriarchal power in the home over women who were formerly combatants. In the Central American cases, violence is extremely well-organized by gangs that consist of former police, government military, and guerrilla forces who were not sufficiently bought off or taken care of because of insufficient resources. These gangs have no ideological content whatsoever. Some of the members knew each other from the same villages and had previously fought against each other. We think this occurs because of an economic and an authority gap. The disbanding of the police prior to the construction of the new force following negotiations leaves a huge authority gap in the context of an enormous increase in the spread of arms. Even when demilitarization of both sides occurred and included the handing in of weapons, it only touched the organizational component of the guerrillas and the army, not the access to arms that was widespread throughout this area of the continent. Although the wars were partly fought for economic reasons, the waging of war and consequent instability meant that the economies declined even further. We thus have lots of arms around, lots of people who learned how to shoot, and no jobs. A third proposition is that there is also a very important transnationalization of crime. One of the factors influencing this is migration. People who fled the wars in Central America came to the United States, primarily to large cities in the south, such as Miami, and to Los Angeles. They were exposed there to youth gangs for the first time in their lives. When they were subsequently caught and deported, which many were, they reconstituted the L.A. and Miami gangs in Central America, thus transnationalizing them. They now use the same insignias, signs, and graffiti. The areas to which they returned have also become major trans-shipment sites for drugs to the United States or to other large drug-consuming countries. Druglords move into areas where there are authority and economic gaps because they can employ people there and there is no oversight. The threats that this poses to new democracies include an increase in vigilante activity, difficulty in regaining civilian control over the military as its role becomes expanded, increasing calls for a strong leader to reassert order, and decreasing tolerance of political difference or dissent. Lawrence Schlemmer Crime has to be seen in the context of the perception that we may be heading for a suspended state. The fear of crime has spread beyond what may be warranted by actual crime levels; this triggers the perception that the government is failing in its most fundamental duty of providing law and order and the protection of physical safety. Whether or not we are heading for a suspended state is a complex debate, but in the perceptions of people we are definitely well into the suspension of the state. Because of the fear factor, people are increasingly taking additional measures to avoid putting themselves in danger. Certain parks in Johannesburg that were once popular are now absolutely deserted, for example. The result is that stabilization of crime levels is due, to some extent, to an avoidance strategy on the part of the people rather than to successful police action. Two aspects of this spiraling problem are worrying. First, as fear increases, private security firms draw more and more skilled staff from the police, which means that police effectiveness decreases, which means in turn that the security firms draw more police staff. Security personnel now far outnumber the police, and the cream of South Africa’s talent in maintaining law and order is probably in the private security industry. Second, we are beginning to see crimes based on crimes—people who organize to have their cars stolen or otherwise dispose of them in order to claim insurance. With an arrest rate of about 16 percent of all crimes reported, crime is perceived to pay. This erodes other normative behaviors and standards in society and leads to a diffuse corruption induced by cynicism. Another consequence that is particularly bad is the effect on race relations. I have no doubt, on the basis of survey evidence, that interethnic and race relations have worsened steadily since 1990 and that this is mainly crime-driven. This is not spoken about in the open. Newspapers do not publish the racial or ethnic identity of alleged criminals and people tend to assume that it is always the other guy committing the crime. Another effect of the fear of crime is the emigration of business people, which is draining capital out of the country and which contributes directly and indirectly to increasing unemployment. One thing the government could do is to introduce an effective program for youth involving skills training and socialization. Discussion The ensuing discussion concentrated on the effect of social crises on the quality of democracy, the effect of neoliberal economic policies in postwar settings, the social cost of psychological damage caused by violence, and the effects of general amnesties. Some participants asserted that positive attitudes toward the efficacy of the democratic state are constitutive of strong democracies, but that they can be eroded by crises in education, employment, and the economy. The problem is that these are fundamental crises in the social order and will not be resolved quickly. This leads back to the question of the nature of the transition: Is it more than just a transition in the regime? The transition is not just about the political form, but about social relations—race relations, patriarchy in the family, and relations between youth and elders. The political regime transition is dependent upon resolution of these other forms of transition. This suggests the need for research into the likely length of transitions in very deeply disordered societies. Participants also pointed to the need to distinguish between the consolidation of democracy and its quality. High levels of violent crime in the United States do not result in a questioning of its democratic character. But in some societies, high crime levels impair the legitimacy of the regime type itself, prompting reduced tolerance, erosion of rights and of civilian control over the military, and growing perceptions of the need for a “strong man”. It is one thing for people to resent the way in which they are treated by the police and courts as victims of crime. In most countries people feel that way. The important question is how those attitudes translate into political behavior that affects the political regime itself. There has been much debate between the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations on the danger of neoliberal policies in violent or postwar settings. People in the un argue that neoliberal constraints applied in the context of demobilized armies and armed populations of unemployed people are likely to destroy peace agreements. What mitigates the effect of neoliberal constraints is the social assistance that is poured into these countries from international financial networks, foreign aid, and solidarity networks. Privatizations in Mexico sometimes involved some of the most corrupt deals in history. In the case of the sale by the state of the telecommunications industry, it was subsequently found that enough money had been deposited into the Swiss bank account of the brother of the President to feed all the hungry children in Mexico for one year. When political leaders get away with crime, the prospects for controlling crime drop dramatically. In a study of boys and girls who had fled Central America during the wars and who had been caught by u.s. immigration authorities and held in a camp on the border of Texas, it was found that every single boy questioned had witnessed or participated in significant acts of violence. Some had witnessed the murders of their parents. All the children were under age 16. It was also found that every girl in the camp aged between 12 and 16 had been raped either by somebody in her country of origin, or after immigration, or while passing through Mexico. In a range of studies it has been found that children who witness or participate in these events suffer deep psychological damage. Exactly why is not known, but victims of violence often become perpetrators themselves, unless there is significant psychological intervention to change that dynamic. Children who have witnessed violence often cannot concentrate in school; they usually cannot become fully productive workers in society; and the social cost is immense and far beyond the means of any developing country. One of the greatest difficulties for a democracy is a context in which everyone knows who the murderers were during the wars, but in which the heads of death squads also serve in the cabinet. The fact that there were truth commissions with the power to grant total impunity and amnesty means that there is not even the beginnings of a notion of the rule of law. Children who have witnessed violence have seen that the perpetrators get away with it, may profit from it financially, and enjoy an esteemed role in society. We need to rethink the long-term consequences of allowing those who have killed large numbers of people to operate freely in society. Conclusion Steven Friedman Although international comparative perspectives can lead to blind alleys if one looks for models, we need to look more carefully at the context of international comparative material to gain some sense of cause and effect. First, the difference between the South African transition and most others centers on the race issue. It colors the way people act and the way our democracy works. Second, although formal representational, institutional, and systemic issues are important, we need to look more closely at questions of political culture, interpersonal trust, social networks, and dynamics. The one issue we did not discuss adequately is citizen withdrawal from and evasion of the state, leading to a widening gap between state and society. One of the greatest dangers to democratic government over the next five years is that it could find itself exercising more and more authority over less and less. Hopefully, our international comparative discussions will lead us away from taking that direction; if they do that, we will move a step closer to dealing with some of the knotty questions at the center of the South African transition. Larry Diamond The regime in South Africa is likely to be stable for the foreseeable future. There is no threat of a major breakdown of the formal structures and framework of democracy. The formal constitutional arrangements also seem likely to be stable, and the anc seems unlikely to have the legislative special majority necessary to amend the Constitution. Perhaps the role of the judiciary, and particularly that of the Constitutional Court, in defending rights and constitutionalism should have received more attention here. This seems to be one of the potential bulwarks of South African liberal democracy. There is still the question of whether the commandist legacy of the liberation struggle will eventually show itself. One of the other dangers to democracy in this era could well be a kind of slow, quiet death, rather than a quick overt breakdown. It is regrettable that we have had so little discussion about the relative lack of pluralism and vitality in the press. There is as yet no elite and organizational consensus on the rules of the game. I am a little concerned about what I have heard here about the decline in civility and cooperation among contending political elites and maybe among contending races. A further issue of concern is the lack of compliance with both the formal rules and unwritten norms of democracy, particularly in areas such as KwaZulu-Natal. Factors are likely to shape progress toward democratic consolidation are continued and deepened liberality and democracy in government, control of corruption in an accountable state (which will require a more pluralistic and effective press than now exists), and the degree of electoral competition in the party system. Factors which may undermine consolidation include crime and the social and eonomic costs of being trapped in a low-level equilibrium of 2 percent annual economic growth, which means no real increase in per-capita income. That calls for substantial foreign and domestic investment because, even if the inqeualities are diminishing, they are probably not narrowing fast enough. |
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