Amid the noise from the Red Berets’ children’s party last weekend and the coup in Niger: two seemingly unrelated events, the question in my mind is: what is it that makes South Africa unique? Why have we been able to avoid the coup d’états of countries like Lesotho and Niger? If we allowed parties like the EFF to take power, would we be the same country?
South Africa even now stands apart from African countries because of the strength of our institutions, both private and public. Public institutions, such as the judiciary, supported by the Constitution and the principle of the separation of powers, play an enabling role for the private institutions like our stock market, our banks, and our NGOs, among others, by limiting the arbitrary exercise of power. The flourishing of these private institutions then allows for the things that make South Africa unique, the things that attract Africans from all over the continent here despite our unnaturally high rates of unemployment, crime, and poverty.
A coup (or a violent revolution, there isn’t much difference) would undo all of that because it would replace the strength of our institutions with the whims of either the majority or politicians/generals (most likely the latter as in every historical example). This would be disastrous, because human whims are destabilising, destructive at times and subject to manipulation using emotions like envy, spite, anger, fear, greed, and so on. The strength of institutions lies in their ability to give the same answer to a question, regardless of what any particular person may feel about it at any given time.
Lament
This aspect is often not appreciated until it’s gone. Even when it has gone, people usually lament the lack of good leaders instead of the lack of institutions that remove a lot of the necessity of having good leaders. Now it’s clear that South Africa does not have perfect institutions, otherwise we wouldn’t have the highest unemployment rate in the G20 or our frightening levels of crime. Julius Malema couldn’t garner the support he has. However, compared to many African countries, we have fairly robust institutions.
The main area of concern is that we have a government that is determined to undermine these institutions. We have opposition parties who want to do the same thing. South Africans tend to believe in their own uniqueness without really understanding what sets them apart. If they understood this, they would not even consider supporting parties that have promised to remove the constitutional protection of property rights.
While Africa’s revolutionaries may believe there is something to celebrate in a coup, history does not really bear this out. Coups tend to beget more coups, as in Lesotho. (In ancient Rome, the Praetorian guard got so used to coups that they once tried to auction the role of Emperor to the highest bidder). Once the people with guns realise that they can take power any time they want, they will do just that. We can expect the same cycle in Zimbabwe as well, since the precedent has been set with the way Robert Mugabe was removed from power.
Not sustainable
No matter how well-intentioned the coup leader, a coup is not the sustainable path to development of a society. Through luck, a country might get a decent coup leader, but once institutions are destroyed, the country will be subjected to the whims of either the next coup leader or the successor to the current leader, with no guarantee that the next guy will be as decent.
On the other hand, institutions ensure that no man has too much power. Institutions like the separation of powers both horizontally (judiciary, legislature and executive) and vertically (national, provincial and municipal governments should all have exclusive reserved powers) are incredibly important. So too are our rights, the ones enumerated in the Constitution and the ones that are implied in things like the common law.
There are some South Africans who want to undermine all these institutions in the name of an effective government. They believe that giving Parliament absolute power because it is an elected body will somehow solve our problems. These people do not understand that the extent that the power of Parliament is limited is the extent to which they as individuals can exercise any power at all.
Once the power of parliament is unlimited, what stops the same parliament from doing away with elections and making us a one-party state? What convinces people that those in parliament have their best interests at heart, just because they voted them in? Did voting for those people stop them from stealing billions from you through corruption, even as the poor suffered? This myth that somehow our institutions, and primarily the Constitution, are stopping development is based on nothing but wishful, childish thinking. People do not want to accept the responsibility of voting for parties with better policies.
Human nature
It is human nature that people generally don’t know what they have until it’s gone, and experience on the continent shows that when it comes to institutions, people don’t know what they have. Then they lose it, and after losing it they still remain ignorant of what they had. I am reminded in particular of Zimbabwe and Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa who want South Africans to abandon our institutions of governance as the Zimbabweans have done. This is not to say there is no scope for reform, our institutions should be made stronger rather than weakened.
We should strengthen property rights and abandon the disastrous concept of squatters’ rights. We should cleanse our Constitution of certain rights like the right to electricity, water, and dignity and keep only the rights which do not undermine other individuals’ rights by imposing obligations on them. We should give provinces and municipalities more powers, including the power to levy their own taxes instead of relying on national government allocations. This undermines independent policymaking and therefore limits the scope of innovation in governance.
We should do a better job of aligning taxation with the privilege (not the right) of voting. It is disastrous that millions of people who don’t pay any taxes but receive grants and other forms of welfare can vote themselves more and more benefits without having to worry about the sustainability of the spending policies they vote for.
These reforms would both strengthen our institutions and help us solve our economic challenges by giving to the individual more freedom to seek solutions to these problems. Giving over the country to the people with the biggest guns will not solve anything, nor will giving it to a man with a red beret. These people do not have any special knowledge. We need to unleash the creative genius of all South Africans by getting the State out of their way.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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