When the correctness of your policy eats your votes

 When the correctness of your policy eats your votes

Election winning has become the most important path to winning the ultimate prize of politics, state power, in multiparty democracies. What attracts voters to a particular party is the new vector of political power definition, irrespective of the broader normative implications to society. Globally, political parties have been defined by what is popular with the voters than what is correct for society and human co-existence. This has foregrounded the paradox of appropriate policy and winning votes. 

The rise of populist parties anchored on anti-immigrant sentiments, most of which border on the legitimisation of veiled racism and xenophobia, has and is still defining electoral fortunes of several political parties in the world. The appetite in politics to find fault in those you see through the window and not on your mirror has made emotive issues such as immigrant deportation, territorial expansionism, nationalist-inspired imperialism, racism, and xenophobia to be fashionable in political mandate procurement activities, including elections. 

History records the most maverick and human destiny defining leaders as those that have either created human suffering through the advocacy of the above emotive issues. Genocides, wars, and territorial annexations with global map redefinition implications have all been as a result of the pursuit of political power at all costs. The fear to lose political, and ultimately state, power, has somewhat left political parties, including center-left and left parties, obliged to embrace hard-line political lines, and by default surging to the far right.

Worse still is the instance where political formations and movements defined by the content and character of their policies have to contend with a context where the correctness of their policies eats their overall capacity to win an election. In South Africa, a society that has embraced non-racialism, non-sexism, and anti-xenophobia as part of what defines the founding provisions of its constitutional order, alongside the rule of law and universal franchise, these have begun to be vote-accumulation costly to parties that religiously stick to these principles. 

The inconvenient truth is that South Africa is an injustices of the past recognising polity, a race-as-a-vector defined society, and the most intense immigrant attracting democracy within the region it finds itself. As opportunities accrue to the most vulnerable, who would naturally compete for jobs at whatever costs, including below set minimum thresholds, the immigrant component of the population becomes attractive to a cheap labour experienced economic system. 

While the matter of immigrants, especially the undocumented, require policy positions and supporting political rhetoric to anchor it, the liberation movement character of the dominant political party in RSA, arguably the nexus of politics, presents limitations to how this matter should be addressed. The disconnect between the inherited geopolitical space and the realities of the exigencies of a borderless regional approach has become a correctness maverick politicians would exploit to grab the votes of an otherwise vulnerable voting citizenry. 

The ANC has for the past three decades navigating a political context that required pragmatic responses that would have made it veer off the rails of its defined central objective of creating a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, united, and prosperous society. The paradoxes of recognising injustices of the past, healing the divisions of the past, establishing a democratic society based on social and economic justice, and fulfilling the rights in the Bill of Rights, have all been the sophistication the democratic order has been struggling to live up to. As a consequence, the non-accrual of the liberation dividend trapped in the constitutional order has made the Constitution a target of myopic activism that now calls for the supremacy of parliament. 

It is true that the degree of sophistication required to run the democratic order based on the current Constitution requires the advanced of democrats or officials (elected or appointed) to facilitate the liberation dividend it carries for South Africans; the proverbial “we the people”. The edicts in the Constitution and the supporting legal framework obligates the state, and by default the governing party, to act as the law provides, a context that is often at variance with the populist demands associated with an election process.