The government of national unity (GNU) offers a watershed opportunity to fix what’s broken in our electoral system. It may not come again, given the decline of the ANC and the rising support for the constitution’s opponents.
An Electoral Reform Consultation Panel (ERCP) was appointed by outgoing ANC home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi last year after the election that cost his party its majority. Its recommendations are due in May. Then it will be up to the GNU cabinet and parliament.
When then-president Thabo Mbeki rejected the recommendations of the Van Zyl Slabbert Commission on Electoral Reform Report 22 years ago, he accepted the minority recommendation to change nothing. Why change? the minority report asked. “Nothing has been said about why the present system should not be retained. What are the evils that will befall us if we do?”
That was in 2003. We’d had only two presidents, Nelson Mandela and Mbeki. Domestic changes were mostly positive, and SA still rode high internationally.
Now, in 2025 we know different. Many evils have befallen us. Since 2008, the year of the global financial crisis and the inauguration of president Jacob Zuma, the record we look back on is dismal. The coincidence of these two events enabled the government to fudge its record. When confronted with bad economic results, politicians blamed “global trends”. But now it is clear: SA’s job-creating and growth records have been the worst on the African continent for more than a decade. Global trends had nothing to do with it. Other countries live in the same world we do.
I had a ringside seat to one of the biggest collapses of a democracy in this century. Seemingly overnight in August 2021, Afghanistan’s democracy crumbled, as soon as the Western troops propping it up left. But my experience at the heart of Afghanistan’s election management told me something not widely known or advertised.
The failure of Afghanistan’s democracy had a major electoral system component. Afghanistan used a flawed system called single non-transferable vote (SNTV), which failed to facilitate MPs’ accountability to constituents. It’s the same problem we have.
Disappointments
I arrived in Afghanistan in March 2005, where I became chair of the Electoral Media Commission. I felt the same excitement I remembered in SA in 1994. Regardless of the pessimism of some foreign observers, I found that the debate about democracy was over. Democracy had won. Afghans were excited at the chance to vote for their first parliament. The streets were lined with campaign posters. On election day, lines of voters snaked across city blocks and the hills around villages, just like in SA in 1994.
Defying pessimists, my commission, consisting of four Muslims and me, protected press freedom. We also set up a system to block all private funding for campaign ads — opium funding would undoubtedly have swamped the system — and provided every candidate equal access to the airwaves, radio or television, free.
Male and female candidates embraced the opportunity. Despite it being perhaps the most patriarchal country in the world and still reeling from repressive Taliban rule, we stipulated a floor of 25% women in each chamber, national and provincial. Women welcomed the opportunity to have their say on TV and benefited enormously. Many were graduates returned home from studying abroad to avoid the Taliban’s restrictions, and many beat powerful local warlords.
This was a powerful moment, but the SNTV has fundamental flaws. The most important was that each constituency is the size of a province, like in SA. So the vital tie between an MP and her voters is severed. Why would an MP help you when it would be impossible to affect their voters because they could come from anywhere?
In the UN, we knew very well the election system’s weaknesses. But the UN is not an independent entity. It can only act if its members take the decision and provide the funding. We were given the excuse that there was no time to produce a voters’ register in such a big country.
Still, the election was exhilarating. We did our job, and I left Kabul feeling hopeful.
I returned four years later to disillusionment. MPs told me they saw little point in running for re-election. Nobody listened to them. Warlords had more power than MPs. Corruption in parliament had become rife, and some Western officials also succumbed to this plague.
UN election experts pointed out the problems in the SNTV system. I could find nobody to defend it. But nobody was willing to reform it. They were too impatient for quick headlines from a successful election. The longer it continued, the less likelihood anyone would take it up.
Democracy’s humiliating outcome in 2021 — when the elected president and former US professor, Ashraf Ghani, fled — had multiple causes. But the melting away of the entire edifice of elected leaders was so easy because they did not have sound, loyal constituencies.
Common element
SA’s system is more mature than Afghanistan’s, and our society more sophisticated. The Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) has been managing elections for 30 years. But the common element is that MPs are chosen by such a large constituency — in SA either the whole province or the whole country — that effectively they represent the party leadership, not their own community. If they do a poor job, the party decides if it matters, and the party is remote from the constituents. Local constituents have no say.
A constituency system is not perfect. No system is. Politicians will be elected who don’t have voters’ best interests at heart. Britain’s constituency system is rightly criticised because the number of MPs often does not reflect the proportion of a party’s votes.
But that problem is easy to avoid. Our constitution requires that proportionality be built into the system. This can be done in many ways. Most proposals include a proportional list as well as constituency MPs, to correct any anomalies, as we already do in town councils.
But it does make it likely that uncaring MPs will be thrown out and replaced, more than once if necessary, to find someone better. Someone who regularly reports back to voters, who has the incentive to tell a minister of their own party if she doesn’t fix something, the party will be embarrassed, and if the minister is from another party, they will be publicly exposed in parliament.
Those are the right incentives to get conscientious people to want to be MPs so they can make a difference.
Another problem has emerged in the current parliament: when President Cyril Ramaphosa reshuffles his cabinet, the pool of MPs to choose from does not have the right skills and experience. Most recently, he couldn’t find a lawyer to be justice minister. That should be a bright red flag. An unqualified party hack as justice minister will torpedo reform.
If you’ve solved voters’ problems, they are more likely to remember to vote for you again. Your career is tied to your effectiveness.
Constituency MPs are likely to be of better quality because the incentives are correct. They have better control over their own success. An ambitious constituency MP builds loyalty in a defined community. If you’ve solved voters’ problems, they are more likely to remember to vote for you again. Your career is tied to your effectiveness.
SA is full of competent and hard-working people of all races who recoil in horror at the thought of going to parliament. When I meet outstanding community organisers building successful youth and education or health centres, or top-quality professionals, I ask about their relationship with local politicians. They invariably say they keep them at arm’s length. Their verdict is that most MPs aren’t helpful to them, whether because of corruption or incompetence or just lack of commitment.
Accountable MPs are key to meaningful SA reform.
Apartheid
Under apartheid, white MPs were accessible to their voters. They followed up on complaints, called ministers, raised hell in departments, and used parliamentary privilege to make allegations free of court action.
After a parliamentary session, MPs returned to their constituencies for a report-back meeting in a local school hall. Voters could lodge complaints, and MPs would be obliged to follow up. Helen Suzman’s report-backs at the Lower Houghton Primary School were famous for the standing room only crowds who wouldn’t miss the event, and she followed up afterwards if voters raised issues. That was why she had a safe seat even though she fought hard on anti-apartheid issues some of her white voters may not have cared as much about.
The point of becoming a democracy was to bring that effectiveness to all citizens, to create an equal society. Instead, whites got worse service and blacks did not benefit as intended.
There is no better example that parliament is failing us than what happened to SA’s road map to the future, the National Development Plan (NDP). This seminal government document promised to get unemployment to 6% and growth to 5%. It’s 12 years old and it’s a monumental failure.
While many presenters called for urgent reform, some in the ANC-led tripartite alliance said they were satisfied with the status quo. Nobody should be. It’s not working.
What happened was the opposite. Instead of unemployment going down and growth going up, both went in the wrong direction. Instead of 6% unemployment, we are above 33%; instead of a 5% growth rate, growth is below the population growth, rarely even hitting 2%.
If the system was working properly, every parliamentary committee would examine the fine print in the NDP, to question ministries about what is in fact an almost universal failure. MPs would have the details at their fingertips, at least the good ones. They would question why every proposal didn’t work. If they did that, they would find most recommendations were never seriously implemented. That is as much parliament’s failure as cabinet’s.
From watching other political systems at work, to me it’s clear. None works perfectly, but in a democracy failure on such scale should bring forth new leaders with expertise who get to the root of problems, meet their ministers, call their departments — national provincial and local — and iron out disputes or bring them to parliament, with detailed, informed focus.
This should lead to wide-ranging, government-defying debates about the collapse of its seminal policy. Complaints are raised in communities, but nothing changes. As a result, steam is let off in another way. With MPs failing to make a difference in the corridors of power, voters express themselves in hundreds of service delivery protests every year. Often politicians in the governing party join the protests, wielding protest banners instead of solving things.
That in itself is a sign of failure. In effect, they are protesting against themselves. But they are paid big salaries to fix problems inside government, not hold banners protesting their own leaders. Why else are they there?
Twenty years ago, I testified before the Slabbert commission in favour of some form of constituency system, with either single-member or multi-member constituencies. Since the constitution requires the principle of proportionality be maintained, most proposals recommend that some MPs be chosen proportionally, to maintain that balance.
Last month I testified again, at the electoral reform panel. In 2002 I had witnessed or observed many elections, headed the SABC election coverage in 1994 after a few decades on the SABC blacklist, and been an Independent Broadcasting Authority councillor with some election oversight responsibility. This time I could add my Afghanistan experience.
At that first electoral reform consultation in Cape Town, the panel heard evidence from numerous NGOs, churches, academics and other election experts. Most supported constituency-based elections. Multi-member constituencies would reflect the proportion of the electorate voting for that party better than single member MPs. They pointed out that under the current system most people in the room did not know who their MP was.
Panel members seemed receptive to the proposal, spending much of the time asking questions about the relative advantages of single- versus multi-member constituencies.
The main constitutional provision that is relevant to the nature of reform provides that the principle of proportionality should not be lost. In practice this means that if most MPs are elected from constituencies, a number would still come from party lists to ensure that the proportion of MPs from each party matches the proportion of voters voting for the different parties.
While many presenters called for urgent reform, some in the ANC-led tripartite alliance said they were satisfied with the status quo. Nobody should be. It’s not working.
The committee will schedule its first meeting for early February to receive the report and consider the draft motion. It’s worth watching closely. A lot is at stake.
• Matisonn is the author of ‘Cyril’s Choices, An Agenda for Reform’.
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