2024 marks 30 years since South Africa’s democratic breakthrough. For many analysts and observers, that we still have a democracy to talk about signifies a maturing democracy.
During these years, the country witnessed the ebbs and flows of democratic life through public institutional failure and strength, through private profit wrangling and policy capture, and through social rupture in community protests to fees must fall.
Our rule of law has faced off with lines coloured inside and outside its rubric.
And our political economy has taken some necessary but inadequate panel beating.
However, as is the nature of democracies anywhere, these struggles are not about some definitive end or nirvana.
These struggles are about an unceasing vigilance to ensure that the enablers of our democracy can self-correct while acting against malfeasance.
To this end, this article explores the ways in which South Africa’s democracy is maturing.
There should be no doubt of its maturing. However, we should be sensitive to the ways in which it is maturing.
For instance, the collapse of executive cohesion and capacity across all three spheres of government is palpable, not forgetting the compromised National Assembly.
Though each sphere’s collapse differs in degree, there’s no denying its reality.
And it’s stunted or repurposed public administration. But in some respects, policy has been embroiled in profit-seeking manoeuvrers.
As a result of the foregoing, institutions and people outside the executive, but both within and outside the state, have sought to recalibrate government cohesion.
Accordingly, I focus on three ‘institutions’.
One, media activism is a long-running tradition of both pre-and post-1994 South Africa, though the latter seems to have become ideologically inconsistent.
In other words, while there is a clear embrace of the country’s human rights tradition, media discourse seems to largely sidestep corporate, and private, power.
In many ways, and similar to IV league-type NGOs, this sunk their alleged impartiality in the eyes of the public.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. It also opens room for new entrants to enter the terrain and ensure redress for their target market.
In any case, part of the problem of non-partisan politics is that most people consider their interests catered for.
Secondly, tensions between the judiciary and the executive are not a recent phenomenon in democratic South Africa.
And one should expect this tension given our constitutional architecture. What is curious, however, is the recent judicial activism that’s come to characterise public life.
From the rebukes of then Chief Justice, Mogoeng Mogoeng, against increasing public-sector corruption to the political musings of current Chief Justice, Ray Zondo, South African public life has become much richer.
For some, however, the judiciary has become the ‘escape valve’ from a corrupt elite. Of course, the funny thing about this camp is that they forget the judiciary is largely a theatre for the elite.
Thirdly, and finally, we have a small concentration of political party funders with a wide array of political parties.
It seems like an imbalance. However, this might be by design.
Given the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) moonshot pact, one should not be judged in assuming that the increasing array of political parties means that funders are looking for different shades of already existing ‘mainstream’ political parties, particularly of the DA sort.
That we have a few political parties on the Left spectrum versus the many parties in the centre-left spectrum is telling, with differences between them not necessarily policy but approach and representation.
What these institutions do in South Africa’s public life is isolate the central problem of executive capacity, on the one hand, but they also highlight the preponderant power and influence of media and corporate SA.
Such an environment tends to normalise discourse on the privatisation of government assets.
On the other hand, this can also snuff out the requisite ‘checks and balances’ essential for any democracy. What’s important in these elections is to return to the ballot box and reassert the legitimacy of executive power.
Dr Thapelo Tselapedi is a Political Analyst
