Eddy Maloka, the South African historian, diplomat and academic, argues in his latest book the case for South Africa to forge a “second republic”. What is meant by this is left undefined, but emerges as the making of a new constitution, establishing new institutions.
Maloka’s argument is that South Africa’s transformation since 1994 – the overthrow of an unjust political, economic and social order – has benefited only a few.
Today the country is in crisis – “think load-shedding (power cuts), potholes, economic decline, rampant corruption, collapsing state institutions etc” (p.ii).
This is not unusual, he avers. It is customary for post-revolutionary countries to encounter a crisis. South Africa must now overcome its own and move to a higher stage of development. It can do this by
reconstituting itself into a second republic.
As a social scientist, I have enjoyed Maloka’s previous work, notably his valuable history of South Africa’s Communist Party.
But his latest offering, The Case For a Second Republic – South Africa’s Second Chance, disappoints as ill-thought out, unable to rise above liberation movement theology. It fails to pull together its many interesting ruminations into a coherent whole.
Nonetheless, it is worth exploring his central argument about the need for South Africa to have a new start. It is one which has substantial popular currency – rarely spelt out in detail, but often expressed on social media, radio chat shows and in speeches by politicians who should know better.
Justification for a second republic
The storyline usually goes something like this: the former liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), and the National Party, which had been running South Africa since 1948, negotiated a political settlement in 1994. This has been undermined by the economic compromises which were agreed behind the scenes by large-scale capital and the ANC.
The incoming ANC elite was bought off with goodies such as directorships proffered by large firms, so that capitalism could continue much as usual.
The result has been that, despite the transfer of political power, the structure of the economy has been little changed. Whites continue to enjoy the major portion of the country’s wealth. Although the black elite has been enriched, the black majority continues to carry the burden of massive unemployment, poverty and inequality. It follows that South Africa needs to revisit the political settlement made in 1994.
Because there are significant elements of truth in this analysis, it has gained considerable traction. Witness the call by former president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe party for the rewriting of the constitution. Zuma argues parliament should call the shots without being subject to the judgments of the constitutional court.
It’s a tempting call. However, it’s too simplistic. Yes, much of South Africa is broken, but there’s no easy way to fix it – and certainly not by an ill-informed transition to a second republic in the way Maloka suggests.
Out with the old, in with the new
The call for a second republic, declares Maloka, is a call for a strategic break with the 1994 dispensation. He cites the examples of African countries like Mali (where an attempt to re-found the state was made after a military coup in 2021) and Kenya, where after the political violence that followed the 2007 elections, there was an effort to revisit the constitutional foundations of the post-colonial state.
In both cases, new constitutions were drawn up and approved by electorates voting in referenda. In both cases, the re-foundation was principally about the state –
how it is constituted, its territorial governance, the powers of the executive, the separation of powers, and so forth.
But then Maloka admits that the re-foundation process is always going to be contested, and there is no guarantee that it will succeed.
Maloka views the liberation struggle as having been intended to establish a state based on “people’s power”, a vision endorsed by the ANC’s erstwhile Reconstruction and Development Plan. However, once it came into office, state power was appropriated by Leaders (capital “L”) acting only in their own interests. The people were disempowered, and now wait passively for government to deliver services to them.
There is therefore an urgent need for a post-1994 paradigm. This should:
- re-mobilise people politically at a local level, so that they address local problems themselves
- install a technocratic and meritocratic state led by performance-driven leaders
- allow the direct election of representatives to provide for a parliament that holds the state to account.
Refounding the South African state
How to achieve all this?
Our approach should not be piecemeal … we should be decisive and overhaul the entire dispensation to align it with the times.
People’s power must be its central pillar. To do this, Maloka makes just three major recommendations.
First, he wants the machinery of government to be restructured. Provinces have not proved their worth. They should now be merged into the current system of local government, which could be incorporated into a new three tier state system (although we are not told how), with street committees as its third tier.
Second, the existing electoral system of proportional representation has made parliament and provincial legislatures accountable to party bosses, not the people. A reformed electoral system providing for public representatives and the president to be “directly elected” is necessary. (He dodges more precise discussion of electoral reform.)
Third, for these changes to be achieved, Maloka calls for the drawing up of a new constitution that should be validated through a national referendum. This should be achieved within two years.
No need for a second republic
What is so remarkable about Maloka’s book is that after delivering punchy critiques of the state of South Africa today, it fails to come up with a substantive case for a second republic, which is laid bare as an empty slogan.
If Maloka were to read paragraph 4 of chapter 3 of the existing constitution, he would find that there is already a carefully laid out provision for how bills to amend the constitution may be passed.
Why is it that this process cannot achieve the sort of changes that Maloka wants? If there is a need for wider social dialogue (there may well be), how is this to be achieved? He does not tell us.
However, there is a far more fundamental objection to his call for a second republic. That is that it would call into question the very foundation of the present constitution – its statement of the principles on which the democratic state is founded: human dignity and equality; non-racialism and non-sexism; supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law; and universal suffrage. The bill of rights affirms and protects all these values.
If Maloka wants to jettison these, he should tell us. As it is, his call for a second republic would put them up for grabs.
Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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