With a gut-feel logic that it usually seems impolite to question, it is often suggested that the poor, the needy, the jobless, “can’t eat the vote”.
Democracy, by implication – “freedom” in a setting defined by a long history of political denial and material deprivation – is not very nourishing. In a hungry society, how could it really be the recipe for sated contentment?
I have no doubt that a lot of people really do think this line of reasoning is persuasive. After all, they might argue, no amount of freedom – grandly underwritten as it may be by our defining post-1994 legal instrument, the Constitution of 1996 – can put dinner on the table.
In a sense – though only a limited sense – they are quite right; it can’t, not on its own. Not automatically. To think as much, to think anyone can “eat the vote”, is actually to completely misperceive what the democratic menu offers. The testing quality of freedom is that the relief it promises can only ever be a burden of responsibility; every step requires a choice, and every choice has consequences.
I ran into trouble once* as a leader writer on a daily metropolitan newspaper for having the temerity to make this very point.
In my 290-word draft leader of March 2010 − it was titled “Remembering Sharpeville” – I expressed disquiet at the idea that people had been led, or had allowed themselves, to believe that “rights are measurable by the material benefits that well from them (and) if there are none to speak of, the rights are hollow and meaningless”.
But the pressing question, I wrote back then, was “who will have the courage to tell (them) … that their hard-won human rights have placed much of the responsibility in their own hands. If they want a better government, they have to vote for it.”
This, after all, was – abstractly, at least − what people died for in March 1960. By 2010, it was the inalienable right of all their inheritors, fraternal and otherwise. Which is quite something.
A little over two years ago, Ken Opalo, an associate professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, wrote a piece for An Africanist Perspective titled, fittingly, You Can’t Eat Democracy, in which he argued for “an urgent need to make democracy work for voters in African states”.
“Favored by autocrats”
Opalo noted that the claim “You cannot eat democracy …is favored by autocrats who proselytize the false choice between democracy and development, and often dismissed by those with strong normative attachments to democracy as an end in itself”.
He went on: “Yet the claim resonates with real voters in the real world. Surveys show that voters’ assessment of political institutions and processes is closely tied to perceived impacts on material outcomes. The answer to the question what have you done for me lately? is a common motivator of vote choice. From rich to poor countries, when the rubber meets the road most voters think of politics in material terms.
“The implication of this reality is clear: democracies that aren’t visibly effective in addressing citizens’ demands and that cannot improve their material conditions risk collapse. This is especially true in low-income countries (like many across Africa).”
Opalo is entirely correct.
If there’s a straight line to be drawn between any two things in a free society, it’s between hunger and the ballot box.
For a long time, the blind faith – for want of a better term to describe the conviction that free people produce a better society than unfree people – may have seemed questionable.
Just last week I happened (in the course of pursing a compulsive archivist impulse) to come across the 2020 sentiments of fellow liberal Gareth van Onselen (which I quoted in my Daily Friend piece of 23 August of that year).
“Some wild fervour”
“’ANC voters,’ he wrote, ‘… delivered unto us not once, but twice a Jacob Zuma-led administration. … Even if you were to ignore the first Zuma administration as the consequence of some wild fervour, the second was literally elected to office in 2014 on the back of the public protector’s Nkandla report.’ He went on: ‘It was hilarious to hear Jackson Mthembu, after the ANC fell to 54% in 2016, say the ANC had lost contact with the people. No it didn’t. What happened was, you said, “Look, public, your president and his cabinet effectively stole R200m and spent it on his private property. Then, to a man, defended this and tried to cover it up.” And what 10 million members of the public said was, “Sure, no problem, here, have another majority.”’
I observed at the time that “(t)his is what worries people – however bad things get, however obvious it is who is to blame, the voters, and perhaps especially the ones who have it worst, keep backing the delinquents”.
Yet I did go on to add: “But despair is not entirely justified. As Van Onselen points out, having got 10 million votes in a country of 60 million people in the 2019 election, ‘the ANC is a minority stakeholder’.
“And there are signs that more people are waking up to the truth about the source of their problems, and are recognising that the country is back in the struggle space.”
Funnily enough, just a week earlier in 2020, I ventured the idea – which may well have seemed inconceivably optimistic at the time – that “(t)he biggest mistake lies in imagining that the case is hopeless and that there’s no point in making an argument for something better. South Africans are not dumb and insensible, nor are they so fixed in their ways that change is impossible.”
Nearly five years later, how different our fate seems. We live still with the depredations of some three decades of one-track-mind ideological thinking, but the ideological hegemony is losing ground by the minute.
South Africa is a new country. Freedom may not be edible, but its nutritional value is indisputably high.
*My editorial was pulled at the last moment (I think the only time an editorial of mine was axed … remarkably, perhaps, as the bulk of them were in much the same tenor). As I recalled in a Business Day column a few years ago, I somewhat recklessly penned a note to the editor, chiding him for ditching my editorial “and offering in its stead what I felt was ‘a nicely enough crafted piece of sentimentality at a time in our history when this sort of romanticism is a dangerous affliction’.” I did concede, however, that he was gracious about it — and that I was at least wise enough to acknowledge that, as editor, it was “his call” to make.
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