allAfrica.com: South Africa: It's Time for ANC to Bridge the Floor-Crossing Credibility Gap (Page 1 of 1)

Floors are crossed the world over, so what is it about the South African system that makes it so morally repugnant?

It is worth stepping back in time for a brief potted history of floor-crossing's recent origins and the actions of opposition parties at the time. Prescient opposition parties - with the notable exception of the DA, which has subsequently revised its position - fought the legislation and constitutional amendments valiantly in the Constitutional Court.

Despite President Thabo Mbeki's commitment earlier this year during questioning that parties must look into the matter, possibly under the auspices of Parliament's constitutional review committee, no action or decision can be expected until such time as the ANC takes a decision on this matter in December.

The recent ANC policy conference kicked the matter into touch. The final resolutions of matters including floor-crossing, electoral reform, the hierarchy of courts and the future of provinces will need to be studied in depth to ascertain the real contours of the decision the ANC will take on the matter of floor-crossing in December.

In practical terms, this means that two Private Members' Legislative Proposals that deal with floor-crossing, one by the IFP and one by the DA, will be stillborn until such time as the ANC decides when to let go of a handy tool that causes mayhem among the opposition and from which the ruling party emerges victorious every time.

When one serves in Parliament under the current electoral system, one never forgets being "disciplined" by a political party for breaking party discipline.

Walking out on the votes amending the Constitution to allow floor-crossing was both one of the most difficult and proudest moments of my brief political career.

It was, however, a qualified moment of pride as the then-DP, the party that had decimated the New National Party in the 1999 election and the party which I served, had to cross the floor en masse under party resolutions to the newly formed DA. It was therefore, substantively, an empty pyrrhic moment. But floor-crossing has entrenched itself and earned public representatives a fair share of disrespect.

Floor-crossing as a neutral concept ought not to be quite as morally repugnant as it has become in South Africa. In many democracies, irrespective of the electoral system, floor-crossing is a tool for politicians who have had a change of conscience or belief system to change the direction of their political careers and convince their voters to follow them.

This is, of course, easier to do in a constituency system where voters can quite swiftly deliver their verdict on such changes of conscience and whether it represents them and their views, and end careers if they so wish. In our case, voters have to wait for a long period before they can exact their eventual verdicts, as they have done in destroying, time-and-time again, the various little one-person parties that spring up like wild mushrooms during every floor-crossing period.

In South Africa, as in India historically, floor-crossing in a dominant-party democracy has posed many challenges to the opposition while the governing party has mostly benefited. This is not the "fault" of the largest part. It is due to the combination of the sheer power and attraction of patronage and the opportunism that appears to be present in some individuals serving on opposition benches. The moves of conscience, associated with floor-crossing in other systems, have largely been absent during our window period of party change.

But why is floor-crossing quite so objectionable due to the manner in which it has been practised?

Firstly, as politicians play musical chairs, the distance between people and public representatives grows, risking discrediting the voice of representatives in the public space.

Secondly, the frustration at lack of service delivery and the perceived delayed dividend of freedom stand in stark contrast to the opportunism displayed by politicians evident in floor-crossing.

Thirdly, floor-crossing has served as a highly effective tool that contributes to the constant fracturing of the opposition. While this may favour the ruling party in a dominant-party democracy in the short-term, it harms the very vibrancy of our democracy in the long run and builds fault-lines into political parties. These we can see in the ANC's internal discussions about floor-crossing and the career boost it appears to give former outsiders when they join party ranks.

Fourthly, it encourages careerism in politics. As American author Joel Klein points out in Politics Lost, voters are already cynical and disillusioned by modern political parties that focus-group and poll their "political messages" to death and no longer offer a set of beliefs or a belief system to anchor their behaviour.

Floor-crossing simply exacerbates the disregard in which public representatives are increasingly held, especially after the Travelgate scandal in South Africa.

Whatever the ANC decides to do with the system of floor-crossing, as other parties do not have the power to change it by themselves, it must, at a bare minimum, do away with the artificial 10% threshold that keeps individuals prisoners of conscience in parties they can never leave under the present threshold system. The first prize would of course be a substantive interrogation of the electoral system and the floor-crossing system to ensure that the growing distance between the people and their public representatives is reduced. But this is asking a political party to possibly act against its short-term interests.

One can but hope that the long-term interest in ensuring that processes of public representation and institutions of representation retain credibility and the risks of this not happening in a 13-year old democracy will be seen as core to the interests of the ruling party in debating and deciding about these matters in December.

But, in the interim, voters have to watch the unseemly spectacle as the floor-crossing season opens next month and the clown-crossers are sent into the arena once more at all levels of governance.

Raenette Taljaard is the director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, and a part-time lecturer at the Wits Graduate School of Public Development Management.

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