The recent municipal elections have ushered in new and exciting times for both our young democracy and the political landscape of the country.
I call it exciting times because I am delighted that our electorate has finally matured and realised that too much power, whether concentrated on one individual or an organisation, is problematic and spells disaster to both democracy and service delivery.
If you give an individual or organisation absolute power without checks and balances, the electorate must know they have themselves to blame and that they will have begun writing the obituary of their own freedom and can thus brace themselves for dictatorial behaviour.
We have seen in the last 21 years how power drunk some people, and an organisation, have become. So much so that they even made pronouncements that are rather irreligious and border on blasphemy and ungodliness.
The nice part is that the same irreverent person and organisation have been forced to eat humble pie; and more humble pie may be in store for them, come 2019. It is no wonder they have now started tearing at each other and calling for the removal of this one and that one, and wanting an early elective conference in the hope that this could be the solution in taking the organisation forward.
They have conveniently forgotten how arrogant they have become, arrogant even to their own constituency of their own branches, zones, regions and provincial structures within the organisation.
A case in point was the imposition on the people of mayoral and councillor candidates which led to violent protests and so forth. These, in turn, were dealt with by the authorities in the most ruthless of ways – in the same fashion as Marikana, making them the same as their apartheid predecessors.
That is what too much power can do to individuals, including political formations.
Look at how power drunk our neighbour Robert Mugabe is. He will stop at nothing to ensure he retains control, even if it means obliterating the very people he set out 50 years ago to liberate from one of the most brutal of colonialist regimes.
I hope the South African electorate has learnt its lessons well and that never again will it centre all the power in the hands of an individual or a single political party. As the electorate, let’s spread that power to various political parties in order to create our own checks and balances without having to resort to Constitutional guarantees which are often flouted, as in Nkandlagate.
Those Constitutional guarantees must be a fall-back in that we can also sue in the case of unconstitutional behaviour. People don’t realise and understand that for the past 21 years, we have been living in a defector one-party state under the guise of democracy.
If you concentrate too much power on an organisation it makes even those guarantees provided for in the Constitution difficult to implement as there are steps to be followed. For instance in a case of impeachment. You saw for yourselves how difficult it was to get the majority to impeach President Jacob Zuma, simply because the ANC has the majority and it uses that to the disadvantage of the electorate and Constitution of the country.
So, it can safely be said that Jesus has begun his trip and is knocking on the ANC’s door for his return to earth. Long live the new dawn, long live!
