Let’s face it: South African democracy has failed. There may still be the trappings of people voting every five years and the annual ritual of parliament being opened, but it has turned out to be just a white elephant.
Every election is a racial census. The average “voter” is answering to a vague ethnic calling of voting ANC in order “to show those goddamn whites”, but has no inkling what the economy, foreign policy or the myriad laws streaming out of parliament are all about. You might as well ask him to vote on the latest theory in astrophysics. He is voting on the colour of the document’s cover, not on the contents thereof.
But the ignorance of the electorate is only the start of the problem. This system of government, the so-called Westminster system, was designed in Britain to suit British people. South Africa is a jumble of languages, races and ethnic groups, a real multiethnic society that has nothing in common with the British isles except that we use British spelling conventions. If anything, we should have had the Swiss cantonal system as Leon Louw and others have suggested, where each district could rule itself and even secede from itself if it no longer found the cantonal policies to its liking.
It is true that the National Party was stupid. But the stupidest thing it ever did was to concede to this insane political system that is destroying our country and leading to massive waste, corruption, genocidal violence, books in rivers or rubbish dumps and a small number of politically connected people living like the mediaeval Pope while the rest of us only scrape by.
Both Aristotle and Plato were skeptical of democracy and considered it even outright dangerous. There are other ways of deciding issues than having a bunch of would-be parasites put their faces on placards and making a cross next to their names, knowing full well that these people are going to steal from the very parliament where they are making laws that we are supposed to obey. I am here referring to the parliamentary travel scandal, of course. But the constant stream of scandals around South Africa’s “leaders” reads like a report from some pirates’ island in the Caribbean, in the days when being a buccaneer was nothing to be frowned upon.
There is no moral principle like “democracy”. An elected leader is no better than a king or an aristocrat or a dictator, unless he behaves better of course. Evidently, South Africa’s elected representatives comport themselves like robbers and the state is their Cave of Ali Baba.
Democracy, at least in theory, should lead to good government. With all the apartheid revisionism going on at the moment, most thinking, honest people are starting to agree that we actually had better government, education and health services when the Afrikaner minority governed South Africa from 1948 to 1994. A Canadian political scientist, Heribert Adam, actually called the thing by its name, an oligarchy. It would have warmed Aristotle’s heart. Or that of Nietzsche, who saw in democracy the most degenerate system ever devised by man.
The old system was an oligarchy and it served us fairly well, a lot better than the current, criminal free-for-all. Of course, in some respects it was slightly feudal and unfair. But no more unfair than the present system, with its “modern”, liberated appearance but dark, primitive underbelly.
The only concept that adequately describes the South African political system is sadism, or taking pleasure in hurting people. It is the rule of people over others who are aware that such rule will cause the others pain. You have to take the punishment and follow ever more complex rules, while they, being sadists, are above the rules.
Our South African rulers are a law unto themselves. Who could disagree with that statement?
Democracy, like any system, is a means to an end. It is not end in itself. To make it more understandable: a political system is like the operating system of your computer. You choose the most functional one that gives you the least problems. If Windows had to crash every second day, then you would change to a Mac or Linux or whatever. Ultimately, you need the system that will run the most smoothly. It must be there in the background and not bother you with constant error messages or sudden freezes, slowness and mood swings.
In the ancient Greek city of Athens democracy existed for less than 200 years before it was done away with under the Macedonians Phillip and Alexander. Even in modern Europe, democracy has not been universal. In Africa, as in South Africa, it remains an experiment and has caused more wars and problems than it has solved.
Apparently one third of all our taxes get lost due to corruption, “tenderpreneurs” and the like. Financially, democracy therefore costs us a third of the annual budget or about R330 billion. This must be the most expensive system we could ever think of, which is destroying the country bit by bit. Even a dictator like Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe would be cheaper as no dictator could possibly embezzle such a large amount every year. In a certain sense, South African democracy means having 5000 dictators raping the country all at once.
Democracy has failed us utterly. Whosoever would deny that, is either stupid or dishonest. Or both.