More information about elections is needed

By Mukelani Dimba

On 19 June 2014, 490 Members of Parliament will hear President Jacob Zuma give the State of the Nation Address, which will also mark the opening of the Fifth Parliament. On 21 May 2014, these individuals stood before Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng to swear or affirm their faithfulness to the Republic and their obedience to the Constitution. Likewise, 430 more individuals across the nine provinces took a similar oath or affirmation in provincial legislatures. By so doing, these individuals became the custodians of our dreams as a nation, at least for the next five years. Yet, very few of us that voted on May 7 know who these people are, where they come from, what their skills are, what their experience is and what makes them qualify to carry our dreams. As voters we simply do not know enough about the men and women we have sent to Parliament and provincial legislatures to be able to claim that ours was a fully informed decision when we made our electoral choices.

Our system of electing public representatives – except at local government level – is broken, broken by its opaqueness regarding who the candidates are. This is a product of South Africa’s party list system for electing public representatives; it does not allow maximum transparency regarding the electoral choices that the voter has to make. As voters we rely completely on the political party’s determination on what or who is good for South Africa.

The issue of lack of information about candidates for election into Parliament and provincial legislatures is a small part of a bigger issue regarding transparency in the conduct of elections. Access to information is not merely a public good to be dispensed at a whim of the ruling class, but it is a fundamental human right which is recognised in international human rights law through legal instruments such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, and legal precedents such the Inter-American Court’s landmark judgment on the Claude Reyes v Chile case.

The clear connection between the right of access to information and the exercise of the right to vote is irrefutable. It is now generally accepted that human rights are indivisible. The Indian economist and Nobel Laureate, Armatya Sen, has said that, "freedoms of different kinds can strengthen one another.” The Turkish academic and former prisoner of conscience, Mumtaz Soysal made a similar assertion that all types of rights complement one another. He said: “when those deprived of their socio-economic rights cannot make their voices heard, they are even less likely to have their needs met. If a person is deprived of one right, his chance of securing the other rights is usually endangered. The right to education and the right to information and open debate on official policies are necessary to secure full public participation in the process of social and economic development.”

The question to ask, therefore, is how do voters exercise their right to vote to the fullest extent, if their right of access to information is limited? Lack of access to information about who the candidates are, (mere publication of a list of names is not enough), breaks the link between the right to information and the right to vote. Transparency and (or through) right to information will lie at the core of the exercise of the right to vote and the extent to which people feel they are able to exercise their right to vote.

The same danger exists regarding the lack of transparency regarding the conduct of the elections. Such lack of transparency regarding the electoral process creates a crisis of integrity of the process. This is not say that our recent round of elections was not transparent, far from it. However, there must be acknowledgement that the more transparent the conduct of elections is, the more credible they are perceived to be. The problems that our continent has recently experienced in terms of conduct of elections, sometimes with tragic consequences such as the elections in 2002 and 2008 in Zimbabwe or the 2008 elections in Kenya show what consequences there might be if elections are not conducted in transparent manner. While it must be granted that there are no perfect elections, without transparency we cannot begin to define the problems and go about solving them, as Eva Waskell of the League of Women Voters puts it.

The simple fact is that not enough is known about the electoral process and problems that arise during the conduct of an election. The government, political parties, press, civil society and election management bodies (EMBs) can and should play a critical role in helping improve transparency on the conduct of elections. With national and provincial elections behind us, now may be a perfect time to take stock on what can done to increase the infusion of transparency principles within the conduct of elections, starting with more information regarding candidates being made available to the voting public.

Mukelani Dimba is the Executive Director of the Open Democracy Advice Centre, Cape Town.