Parliament has been more effective than current rhetoric implies

By Steven Friedman

Key voices in our national debate care about democracy — but only if it produces the result they want. Which is much the same as not caring about democracy at all.

Ironically, at a time when Lesotho is in danger of losing its democratic Parliament (for a while), some of us seem determined to show how little we value ours. Few of these voices would acknowledge that they don’t take parliamentary democracy seriously — but that is what their words imply.

The immediate cause is the arrival in Parliament of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and its use of tactics that reject Parliament’s rules — chanting rather than debate, sit-ins rather than committee sessions, physical action rather than words. This is not how Parliament has worked or is meant to work: it is meant to be a forum in which elected representatives look after the interests of those who voted for them by debating law and policy.

We would expect democrats to oppose tactics that reject reasoned debate. But many who call themselves democrats — including quite a few who are on the opposite end of the political spectrum to the EFF — have hailed this new turn. It is, we are told, far more effective than anything the opposition has done before — it is "shaking up" Parliament and showing the official opposition how an opposition should function. In effect, this says that the way Parliament has operated for 20 years has failed and that something new is needed.

An obvious reason for this common ground between unlikely allies is that these tactics have been used against a common enemy — the African National Congress (ANC) in general and President Jacob Zuma in particular. Because Parliament has not removed Zuma and his party, it is dismissed as a rubber stamp rather than a voice of the people.

The evidence tells a different story. Yes, the governing party has a majority and can use it to block some actions that it dislikes — sometimes at the expense of citizens. And yes, parliamentary debates are settled by who has more seats, not who has the most support or stronger arguments. But majority parties always have advantages in Parliament — they do, after all, get more people to vote for them. We would also have a more vigorous Parliament if MPs were directly responsible to voters and the governing party was more worried about losing the next election. Despite this, Parliament here has done far more to serve voters since 1994 than today’s trendy rhetoric would suggest.

The fact that the majority party can outvote its opponents in parliamentary debates does not mean they are a waste of time. Opposition parties can and do use them to give those who vote for them a voice and to send messages to the society, which may influence events. To name but one example, Patricia de Lille used her status as an MP to place the arms deal on the agenda.

MPs can also use questions to extract information from the government. Although this tool has not been used enough, it can be an important weapon in the hands of citizens who want to hold government to account.

Most important, the real action in Parliament does not happen in debates on the floor, where members speak past each other to voters. It happens in the committees, where they are more likely to speak to each other and to those citizens’ groups that attend committee hearings. Committees have often changed laws after hammering out agreements between the government, opposition parties and citizens’ groups. They also oversee ministers: not long ago, the ANC leadership was so worried by the independence of some committee chairs that it shunted them out of their posts — Lindiwe Sisulu, then defence minister, refused to appear before the portfolio committee overseeing her department. Why would that have happened if the committees were powerless?

So Parliament has served citizens, despite the lack of chanting and sit-ins. Nor is it clear why the EFF’s tactics are meant to be more effective at forcing the ANC to account than those opposition parties have used before. What has the EFF forced the ANC to do that it would not otherwise have done (besides yelling at the EFF)? What progress has it made on Nkandla that has eluded the rest of the opposition, the media and the public protector? Why does Parliament become more effective because it is less inclined to settle issues through debate?

The claim that chanting and sit-ins achieve more than normal parliamentary behaviour is not only false but worrying, because it says that shows of force count for more than argument — a deeply undemocratic view. Anger at Nkandla, the use of parliamentary stratagems to deflect debate and the fact that the Speaker is chair of the governing party are understandable — the claim that force is better than argument is not.

Democracies have fallen before because those who wield influence thought it was more important to get rid of those they didn’t like than to defend everyone’s freedom. Hopefully the present round of Parliament-bashing will not consign ours to the same fate.

This article first appeared on Business Day (BDLive), 3 September 2014.