As I write this, South Africa is looking at a dialogue “process”. This is the National Dialogue, a project close to President Ramaphosa’s heart. It is meant to be a big, bold conversation about who and what we are as a country and what we envision as a society.
This plays to a great myth of South African politics: that as a country, we have a unique capacity for dialogue. Not only is this a national myth, but it is intimately bound up with President Ramaphosa’s personal brand. He was, after all, the man whom we tend to associate with transition negotiations and the writing of the Constitution.
It was certainly an achievement to negotiate a settlement as South Africa reached breaking point in the late 1980s. it was also no mean feat to produce the constitution that we as a country did. But those points in our history denote a response to a particular set of circumstances, and a willingness to rise to a difficult occasion with maturity and a recognition of mutual dependence, not the exceptionalism of our national character.
Indeed, as I’ve argued before, South Africa’s history argues strongly against the claim that there is a particular propensity for negotiation as a means of settling disputes. The previous government had scant interest in doing so with organisations representing the black population until the 1980s. It wasn’t about to concede their core demands, and in any event, it didn’t believe it needed to do so.
For the ANC, negotiations were a largely instrumental process, and when the opportunity presented itself, it saw them as part of what it regarded as a “terrain of struggle”. Those with long memories will recall that the ANC was prepared to call off talks and “take to the streets”. In a way, one can’t condemn it for having done so: it was in search of a transition that would place it in power in terms as favourable to itself as it could make them. It was willing to use whatever weapons there were in its arsenal (sometimes literally) to achieve this. Ultimately, it was quite successful. But let’s not pretend this was about seeking consensus and seriously taking every perspective into account.
Endless rounds
Post 1994, we’ve had endless rounds of dialogue, discussion and deliberation: jobs summits, racism conferences (“Combating Racism: a Nation in Dialogue”), local government engagements. These principles have even been built into the Constitution and into our institutional set up. Nothing is meant to go ahead without “consultation” and “public participation”, and – again in theory – the South African state is committed to all manner of “social partnerships”, the most prominent being through the National Economic Development and Labour Council.
An obvious question is whether we’ve got anything for it. I’m not so sure. “Dialogue” has at times been no more than expensive sops to buy off demands. The Volkstaat Council of the early years of democracy would be an obvious example. In other instances, it just hasn’t worked very well. NEDLAC gets the various “social partners” into the same room, but to what end? We’ve suffered long-term economic retardation, and often ruinously conflictual industrial relations.
Not a great deal of consensus there.
It’s hardly surprising. Business and labour have perspectives that are often going to be in hard opposition to each other. The pretence of this fell apart with the President’s ill-fated Social Compact. Neither business nor labour were willing to concede what the government proposed, while the government’s commitment amounted essentially to more of the same, just with a little less corruption. Not a great deal of attraction in that either.
More recently, the performance of the Government of National Unity should have put to rest the idea that we have any exceptional abilities in respect of finding one another. The two main parties have never trusted each other, and the ANC has yet to realise that it is now a party without an overall majority. President Ramaphosa, his conciliatory mystique notwithstanding, has repeatedly sought to undermine and insult the DA. Pointedly so.
Very little evidence
And there has been very little evidence that there is any consensus (or even cooperation) between the GNU’s nominal partners on, well, a range of issues, from foreign policy to empowerment.
It is, to appropriate a phrase from Thomas Sowell, a conflict of visions. For the ANC, this is particularly elemental, since the party has long regarded itself as coterminous with the country. It was “the people”, and any compromises implied betraying their rightful interests. When President Ramaphosa said that he would rather be called a weak leader than break the unity of the ANC, he was merely voicing the natural expression of the ANC’s worldview. It explains why he was never going to be a “reformist” president.
But here’s the larger problem: democracies don’t reach national consensuses, at least not on policy issues, The whole idea behind democracy is the management of differences and competition among competing interests. To imagine that a stressed and divided society can come up with a grand vision is not only misplaced; it is delusional, and it misunderstands what motivates and animates a democracy.
Where a society needs to develop a consensus is on the basic rules of the game – on the institutions and processes in terms of which politics is conducted and legitimised and on the political culture that guarantees them.
What confronts South Africa is not only profound disagreements around policy – the President has said that a review of empowerment policy is in the offing, though I tend to think its outcome has already been determined – but about the fundamentals of constitutional democracy. At present, around a quarter in Parliament consists of parties wishing to dismantle this system. Beyond that, the ANC has had a sometimes-on-sometimes-off relationship with constitutionalism.
Constitutional democracy is something that should not be up for compromise, even as it is not something around which we can expect consensus.
National mythology
The National Dialogue will in all probability be an expensive celebration of national mythology.
It’s unlikely that its outcome will be anything that we haven’t seen before, and it will be nothing that the President and his party find unpalatable. In other words, nothing that moves the needle. We’ve seen this before, over and over.
But it’s also a sideshow, no matter how much bandwidth and column inches it comes to occupy. And its premise is wrong: rather than chasing an unattainable consensus, it would be better to take a firm position in favour of constitutional democracy and economic rationality.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentza/53262077351]
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