The colonial history that defined South Africa remains one of the
permanent watermarks in any analysis of whatever democratic order it ultimately
settles with. The structural foundations of its state formation process are a
further background of permanence for any concert of reforms and reconceptualisations
of all arguments defining democraticness in South Africa. The basis of creating a state is, in most instances, inextricably linked to the economic purposes of the dominant at the time the State was formed. It is in the details of such
purposes where the potential or otherwise of a democracy lies. The 1994
democratic breakthrough that created a Constituent Assembly, negotiated and drafted a Constitution could only emerge with a state that had to negotiate its
co-existence with apartheid-colonial power rather than fundamentally
overturning it.
The ‘non-racialisation’ of ‘human enfranchisation’ to include the
African majority, and as a process to legitimise a negotiated political
settlement including accords infused therein, generate questions about the
form and character of a democracy the franchise has produced. In South Africa, the form and character of democracy are encapsulated as ‘establishing a society
based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights’,
‘laying the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government
is based on the will of the people’, and ‘improve the quality of life of all
citizens and free the potential of every person’. Whilst this characterisation
is an outcome of the struggles waged by South Africans at various historical
epochs, democracy has not yet gotten to a point where it evolves
independent of its foundational economic purposes, which are by design
truncating to the real aspirations as chronicled in founding statements that
created South Africa.
Creating a democracy is a process. It requires a creative
negotiation of societal interests, functioning institutions, and an ability to
change course when the purpose of a democracy is no longer in sight. In its
perfect form, a democracy is supposed to be about the arrangements with which
‘society’ has agreed to govern (including unconscious misgovernment) itself.
Since ‘each country is a political community with an overwhelming consensus on
the legitimacy of a political system’, it is not easy to sense the degree to
which the basis of the consensus is constraining the actual potential of democracy about its peers. It is this containerisation of
post-colonial democracies that introduces us to the concept of a ‘bonsai-democracy’.
The Ritsumeikan University proffers the definition and meaning of
the word “Bon-sai” as a Japanese term which, literally translated, means
“planted in a container”. It is an art form derived from an ancient Chinese
horticultural practice, part of which was then redeveloped under the influence
of Japanese Zen Buddhism. It has been around for well over a thousand years.
The ultimate aim of growing a Bonsai is to create a miniaturised but realistic
representation of nature in the form of a tree. Bonsai are not genetically
dwarfed plants; any tree species can be used to grow one.
Democracy is defined in Lincolnian parlance as a government of
the people by the people for the people. It is further described in an Unger
Mangabarian one as the arrangements by which society agrees to govern itself. A
South African version of the same concept is derived from the ‘anti-apartheid’
edict that ‘no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the
will of all the people’. In both parlances, the governed are at the centre of
what qualifies to be a democracy, only to be differentiated by the extent to
which the governed find the governing elite legitimate or otherwise.
The completeness and/or genuineness of a democracy is, therefore, a
function of who the people are and to what extent they are partakers in how they are governed. Convention has established participation in
an election as an emerging legitimacy creation mechanism for most democracies.
This legitimisation is, however, truncated by a growing voter apathy related to
the limitations of democracies beyond an election. The centrality of resourced
lobbying and ‘capturing’ of politicians that undermines the truism in political
mandating out of elections is a new denominator to the wholeness of elections
as a legitimate process.
The contest to have the power the people have in a democracy has
been a growing phenomenon in many democracies in the developing world. The will
of the people and the interests of elites in society form a tension-intensive
cocktail that has become the new currency in the political market system. This
cocktail represents how the people’s will as a substrate of
any democracy can be made a scaffolding upon which the very will can be
undermined once it has been secured. In other parlances, this is argued as
‘election-legitimised-dictatorship’, often characterised by the trade of human
hope at the altar of ‘profits’ pursued by those that can buy the few selected
by a democratic process to be defenders of the will of the people.
In South Africa, and because of its conflictual past, mainly for
land and all its capital properties, the will of its people has been translated
from first being ‘Imvo za baNtu’ to the Freedom Charter and, ultimately, the
1996 Constitution. In the 1995 Constitution, African Claims have had to be
guaranteed in a context of human rights that protect the rights of
all who live in South Africa. In this way, the obligatory role of the State to
protect the property rights of its citizens has to co-exist with the
‘ritualised victory’ of the struggle to repossess land that was ‘truly’ being
dispossessed of Africans in the past and intervening historical period.
The collateral role of land, the mineral resources underneath it,
its central role in food sovereignty and security, and its politico-cultural
importance have made the restitution of land a ‘national grievance’ whose
source of pain was borne out of wars of dispossession and treaties signed in
favour of the victorious. The craftiness that characterised the 1996
Constitutional Settlement created out of a conflictual’ liberation struggle’ a
‘no-victor-settlement’ whose ritualisation had all the trappings of the
traditional ‘march-to-victory’ grand entrances towards the capital after a
punishing war. The choices of the then Political Leadership, notably Nelson
Mandela and FW de Klerk, chose to converge their political capital bases into
an accord only representable through a ‘checks-and-balances-based’
Constitution.
The power and force of the Constitution would, in this arrangement, be the conduit through which aspirations of ‘the people’, ‘real, manufactured,
and/or otherwise’ could be marshalled. Through the Constitution, all
imaginations of liberation and status quo protection were instructed to be
subjects of its sovereignty. Disputes that would emerge in the process of negotiating
the co-existence of the rawness of ‘pre-1994’ accumulated political and
economic power, with the rawness of ‘franchise-earned’ power to
redefine the new political economy, were subjected to the adjudicative power of
the State vested in its courts manned by an independent judiciary. The raw
nature of law and its context and disrespectful jurisprudence would be the final
arbiter of disputes requiring interpretation of constitutionality or any claims from within society.
Like a Bonsai tree, the South African democracy is planted in a
container. It is a miniaturised yet fully fledged, if not realistic, representation of its nature in its standing form. Whilst to those with claims out of it, as a democracy, it is not in any way dwarfed to
accommodate all claims, save for changing its container, thus allowing its root
system to expand sufficiently enough for it to carry the totality of the weight
characterising all demands from it. In Bonsai terms, it can, in fact, and like
any of its type, be calibrated through a meticulous process to grow into a
model of how a miniaturised democratic order can overtime become fully fledged
in scale from a fully-fledged substrate of matured principles.
Its path to being fully fledged in scale would have to recognise
its limitations of scale caused by the inequality characterising the
socio-economic landscapes. In this recognition, those bathing in a sea of
history-defined and accumulated advantage should accept the inevitability of being expected to volunteer access where they are in control and/or allow
the establishment of parallel spaces for economic expression by the
historically marginalised. In this delicate path, the State, as an organised power
representative of the people’s will, will have to be interventionist and
direct the political economy to create new commanding heights with which
equities can be converted into opportunities for all.
Like a Bonsai, the leadership attributes of those manning it
should be of such a meticulous nature that no stems should be allowed to grow
beyond what the ‘container’ can carry, up until it is replanted onto the ground
to grow naturally and yet anchored. Otherwise, the alternative is for the tree
to break free from the ‘container’ and hope to replant itself on the ground or
find a leadership cohort that will manage the breakaway from the container
and replant it in a way that does not choke the very tree to stay
natural.
This breakaway from the container needs to be about the tree
itself and what will sustain those who want to be on or inside it and the tree itself. An attempt by a youth cohort of the dominant
political coalition in South Africa, the ANCYL under Julius Malema, to posit a
vision of Economic Freedom in Our Lifetime through the very containerised tree was pruned off as an undesirable beach to co-exist with one and inside the tree.
Calls related to the pruned-off version were reincarnated as Radical Economic
Transformation and/or Radical ‘Socio-Economic’ Transformation. The essence of
all versions is about recalibration in the Bonsai Democracy, all that which
keeps it bonsai, even if it is a baobab tree.
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