South Africa

In his latest Op-Ed piece Ray Hartley bemoans the fact that the Zuma rape allegation has effectively "robbed" South Africa of a way to test the mettle of our Constitution. By effectively torpedoing Zuma's chances to mount an effective campaign on the presidency, Hartley feels that South Africa avoided a needed showdown between the populist forces of Zuma and the defenders of Constitutional supremacy :

South Africa has been robbed of a vital and defining political encounter by the rape charge that has been laid against former Deputy President Jacob Zuma. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that the rape claim is part of some Byzantine plot to politically assassinate Zuma. On the contrary, the case must be heard and a verdict handed down without a thought to its political consequences.

 

But the fact is that Zuma’s political career has ground to a messy end and so too has the political contest his ambitions had spawned. Those who are celebrating this turn of events should think twice. South Africa’s soul has been well described on paper in a Constitution that ranks among the world’s most progressive charters. Fine, but the words written in the Constitution mean nothing until they have been forged into immutable truths in the furnace of political battle....

 

The defining conflict was under way and the stakes were high. A simple question was about to be answered: would the ruling ANC be the handmaiden of this irrational populist movement and its attempt to pervert the will of the majority, or would it finally mature into a modern political party and define itself by the standards set out by its voters? It was a very important question, the answer to which would have defined our country and our way of life.

 

The optimists among us believed that right would have prevailed, signalling the end of the populist rebellion and the beginning of a new order in which the morality of the ordinary person would triumph over the venality of the politicians. Then came the rape charge and the end of Zuma. He was, as it turns out, more a tidal pool than a tsunami. And so this great question still hangs in the air. Are our political leaders the servants of the people or do they think they are their masters?

 

We have been robbed of an answer.

 

I have to disagree with this argument. Hartley seems to be really looking for a big battle where the valiant knight slays the dragon and rides off into the sunset with the SA Constitution safely in hand. To me the Constitution is not some kind of big-bang, showdown at noon thing, on the contrary I think it is more a gradual process of accumulation that takes many years. Undoubtedly the South African would have been substantially strengthened by a victory of law and order and Constitutional supremacy over the Zuma demagogues, but consider the opposite. If the populist forces had triumphed in this tussle I really do believe this would have been a mortal blow for our very young and vulnerable Constitution. I am prepared to wait, rather let the small victories accumulate and we can fight the big battles later. For sure, it isn't a glorious triumph or a very ambitious vision, but I do not have the confidence that Hartley seems to display in civil society or our political oversight functions. We are still learning to walk in terms of democracy; we don't need to be forced to run this quickly.