SA's selective democracy

30/03/2009 09:02  - (SA)  

Almost exactly 15 years ago, Nelson Mandela took the oath of office as President of the Republic of South Africa and our country immediately became the world's most shining example of a constitutional democracy at its best.

We smiled, walked tall and generally looked down our noses at far less perfect democracies like the USA, UK, and Europe.

Today, we are not the world's best example of a constitutional democracy. If anything, the only sort of democracy we can lay claim to is a Selective Democracy, which is probably the worst kind of democracy there is.

Selective Democracy is so bad that it's actually almost better to come right out and admit to being a one party dictatorship of a country in which the favourite national pass time is social one-upmanship.

You know you live in a Selective Democracy when:

Politicians vociferously commit themselves to upholding the independence of the judiciary until a judgement goes against them and then they publicly say that all judges are racist idiots.

When politicians who fought for decades against the iniquities of apartheid and struggled for human rights, ban someone like the Dalai Lama just because his presence in this country might annoy China.

When politicians are seen to uphold the rule of law by watching as their friends go to jail for fraud, then use their clout to set them free on all sorts of flimsy grounds before they have spent more than a couple of minutes in a cells.

When politicians are found guilty of a crime and their political party carries them shoulder-high to the gates of the prison while behaving as though the guilty party had just scored the winning goal in a World Cup final.

When political party youth leagues rant and rave about their democratic right to go and address crowd in opposition strongholds and then talk about killing anyone who doesn't agree with their leader.

When politicians create a special task team to combat crime and then disband it when they find it targeting them.

When it takes prosecutors five minutes to stick a shoplifter in jail and almost ten years to get to first base in a legal action against a high profile politician in spite of claiming for years and years that they have cast-iron evidence of his guilt.

When a bunch of politicians appoint a board of directors to the national broadcaster and within a few months those same politicians want to fire them due to a sudden apparent lack of confidence, but actually because those politicians now have a new boss who doesn't like the old boss and therefore doesn't like the board of the national broadcaster not because they have suddenly become bad people. Then, when they can't fire them they just make up a new law to let them do it.

When the most visible result of a decade and a half of affirmative action and black economic empowerment is 500 exceedingly rich fatcats and just as many unemployed as there were before. Now, because of these fine examples set by politicians, the whole country is getting in on the Selective Democracy act.

Ordinary

To ordinary people, Selective Democracy means:

If you are poor you are entitled to steal electricity even if this kills your neighbours.

If you are poor you can steal just about anything because your are entitled to. Even steal from other poor people.

If you are homeless, you can just move into houses in spite of some equally poor people being on the list ahead of you.

Driving unroadworthy taxis like manic madmen, causing accidents and killing passengers right left and centre just because you feel entitled to.

Disrupt traffic, destroy property and assault innocent passers-by just because government wants to introduce a better bus service. Selective Democracy to the taxi industry means competition only works when they are competing against poor bus and rail services and absolutely not the other way round.

Driving your new BMW at 200kph on a freeway while at the same time changing lanes without indicating and chatting away on your cell phone because you have spent R500 000 on your Beemer and feel entitled to get your money's worth out of it.

Selective Democracy means being able to drive any car at any speed and any old how no matter how dangerously because if the taxi drivers can get away with it then why shouldn't you.

Selective Democracy means you can beat another motorist to death with a hockey stick for cutting you off, but at the same time feeling entitled to give the finger to and/or shoot anyone who has the nerve to hoot at you when you cut them off.

It also means that if you run a business where a lot of cash is involved, paying tax is optional. And if you opt not to, you can still bitch like hell when your rubbish isn't collected or a pothole in the road isn't fixed within minutes of appearing.

If you run a big business and a senior executive rips you off, you can give him a golden handshake, ask him to resign and then promise not to say anything if he doesn't, and then sweep it all under the carpet. You don't have to lay a charge of theft even though the law insists you must, because you don't want to damage the image of the company with controversy. Then, you complain at dinner parties about politicians flouting the rule of law.

The list of examples of Selective Democracy goes on and on and, let's face it, not only politcians and businessmen, but a huge number of ordinary folk who are guilty, even in some small way, of manipulating democracy to suit themselves.

But, who is to blame? Who the heck started it all?

Well, there is only one answer to that. It starts by the people who lead us. Politicians and businessmen.

The examples they set by being so patently selective in the way they either vociferously uphold democracy or simply ignore it when it suits them can't help but have an impact on society.

It is the start of a process that has more and more ordinary law abiding people thinking: "Well, if they can do it, why can't I."

SOURCE

Lekota says ANC hurting democracy

January 30 2009 at 11:23AM

By Michael Georgy

The head of South Africa's new COPE party has accused the ruling ANC of undermining democracy by seeking a political deal to save its leader Jacob Zuma from prosecution on corruption charges.

Zuma is expected to become president after an election, due around April, that the ANC is almost certain to win despite revived graft charges against him.

Mosiuoa Lekota, leader of the newly formed Congress of the People (COPE) and a former defence minister, said on Friday that the ANC would use its domination of South African politics to seek a political solution to Zuma's legal problems.

"You have no guarantee that after the elections they will not do that," he said. "And I can tell you Zuma does not want to go to jail and so they will do this thing."

Zuma's allies say he is the victim of a campaign to ruin his political career. The ANC denies it will try to help Zuma in a way that undermines South Africa's constitution.

COPE, made up of disgruntled ANC members loyal to former president Thabo Mbeki, who the party pushed out of power, has vowed to challenge the ANC in the poll.

"We must make sure that the security forces are neutral and loyal to the constitution, and depoliticise the public services. If we lose on this, South Africa is going to go down the route of Zimbabwe," said Lekota.

South Africa has been criticised for not taking a tougher line on Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe to ensure that a democratic government is created after a disputed election, although the ANC has called for strong action against him. - Reuters

 

source

DA: Mbeki out of touch with reality in Zim

April 07 2008 at 04:25PM

Opposition parties on Monday criticised President Thabo Mbeki's assessment of Zimbabwe's elections.

Mbeki's remarks made in Britain on Sunday indicated he was either woefully out of touch with reality in Zimbabwe, or he was attempting to "deliberately mislead the world's media about the extent of the crisis in that country," the Democratic Alliance's Dianne Kohler-Barnard said.

Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille lambasted Mbeki's "flawed logic".

"To suggest that Africans are claiming their space and that African leaders are taking full responsibility for their problems at home and in the same breath to refer to Zimbabwe as an example of this is not only misleading, it borders on the delusional," De Lille said.

The argument that Zimbabwe's election process had been "more satisfactory" this time around was just not good enough for the people of Zimbabwe.

"The fact is that the people of Zimbabwe may indeed be claiming their space and voting responsibly to deal with their problems, but [President Robert] Mugabe is doing everything he can to deny them their rights."

The delay in releasing the presidential vote outcome was just more evidence that Mugabe was a tyrant, and as long as Mbeki continued to remain silent and failed to act on his Southern African Development Community (SADC) mandate, he would remain a silent partner of Mugabe's tyranny.

Mbeki should be at home in Africa lobbying African leaders in the African Union and the SADC to speak with Mugabe as a matter of urgency and insist he allow democracy to take its course, De Lille said.

Kohler-Barnard said to ensure Mbeki did not remain misinformed about how flawed the elections were, the DA would provide him with a copy of its minority report on the elections.

Kohler-Barnard was one of two DA MPs in the SA delegation in the SADC observer mission.

The report detailed the material flaws in the way the election was conducted, and showed there was "no way that the poll can be judged as having been free and fair", Kohler-Barnard said.

"The reality is that the elections were held in conditions where the odds were heavily stacked in favour of the governing party, Zanu-PF.

"The net result of this fundamentally undemocratic environment was that any opposition victory could occur only in spite of overwhelming odds designed to mitigate the possibility of such an eventuality," she said.

Mbeki had also suggested to the world community that it should wait for the results of a Presidential run-off before judging the situation in Zimbabwe.

"This position is nonsensical for a number of reasons including, most obviously, the question of how a run-off can be mooted before the results of the presidential poll have even been released.

"Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly such a run-off is likely to be held in an even less democratic environment, and one in which there is a real chance that all available measures (including violence and torture) will be used to stifle the democratic will of the people."

It was high time that Mbeki be honest and open about the true extent of the crisis in Zimbabwe, Kohler-Barnard said. - Sapa

Source

Former President FW de Klerk: South Africa is NOT a democracy

Date Posted: Monday 22-Oct-2007

Oct 22 2007, Telegraaf newspaper, ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands.

Said ex-Pres. De Klerk to the Dutch journalist: "South Africa is not a democracy either - in a living democracy one never knows in advance which party has won."

He made the comment at a gala fund-raiser in Rotterdam for the charity KidsRights on Saturday-night, of which he is the patron.

KidsRights raises funds to help Aids orphans worldwide, including in South Africa. De Klerk is a patron of the charity.

The evening's fund-raising auction among the Dutch elite was interrupted so that the overjoyed former SA president could watch the live-TV celebratory scenes after the Springbok rugby team's phenomenal victory over England that night.

De Klerk was actually talking about the new democratic movement which has just been launched by former Russian president Michael Gorbatsjov when he made the comment about South Africa.

He was quoted as saying: "Russia needs a living democracy, and that's a democracy in which one does not know in advance which party is going to win. Such a (living) democracy also does not exist in South Africa,' he said.

His comments were quoted in the popular Stan Huygens column on page 4 of De Telegraaf newspaper on 22 October.

link to page:
http://telegraaf-i.telegraaf.nl/daily/2007/10/22/TE/TE_2S_20071022_4/pagina.php

The evening's auction -- attended by the creme de la creme of the wealthiest Dutch captains of industry and trade -- raised a whopping one-million Euros in just a few hours of bidding.

"We can do so much with this money,' said jubilant KidsRights' founder Marc Dullaert, Dutch tv-producer and CEO of D&D Media Groups.

. "Every Euro is worth three times as much in South Africa. And this money will go 100% 'to support the Aids-orphans in South Africa -- no creaming off the top for expenses such as other charities are doing,' he said.

"Some of our other sponsors actually pay all the running costs for KidsRights so that 100% of our donations go directly to the kids.'

The Dutch-based KidsRights -- not to be confused with the discredited ChildRight group in SA -- also maintains a very open information policy, which is required by Dutch charity foundations.

Give no more money to ChildRight warns the Dutch Central Fundraising Bureau:
http://weeswaakzaam.punt.nl/index.php?r=1&id=410402&tbl_archief=0

Their 2006 statement by their accountant shows that many Dutch artists also donated their talents with free concerts. One of the charities supported is Nkosi's Haven, run by Gail Johnson -- whose highly-publicised adoption of the Aids-infected child Nkosi even drew the ire of president Thabo Mbeki.

Nkosi was near-death when Gail adopted him legally because his AIDS-infected mom could not care for him. The bright youngster lived a happy life on antiretrovirals until the age of 12 -- and his personality shone brightly at his frequent public appearances.

The little boy also famously accosted president Mbeki at a highly-publicised international conference about his anti-AIDS policies, clearly angering Mbeki.

link:
http://www.nkosishaven.co.za/

Nkosi Johnson link

http://www.kidsrights.info/indexfull2_home.php?action=&lang=en&id=723&category=1585

2006 Annual Statement of KidsRights charity:
http://www.kidsrights.info/doc/StichtingKidsrightsDef.jaarrekening2006.pdf
Source URL: http://telegraaf-i.telegraaf.nl/daily/2007/10/22/TE/TE_2S_20071022_4/pagina.php