Cape Town — The Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) hosted a discussion in their Critical Dialogue Series, evaluating the role civil society will play in the 2024 national polls, a landmark event that marks 30 years since the first democratic election in 1994.
The NMF believes the 2024 polls define the nation's trajectory, coming as the ruling African National Congress faces mounting criticism based on rising cost of living, service delivery and continued power cuts. The NMF also voiced concern over a perceived lack of organisation and co-ordination among civil society who may also not fully capitalise on the opportunities the polls represent.
Former vice chairperson of the Electoral Commission of South Africa, Terry Tselane, said in a keynote address that there are five areas that civil society must be active in ensuring a successful election process. These are:
- Democratic Culture: Advocacy around civic education and ending problematic practices such as disruption and political killings.
- Advocacy around electoral policy: Such as the work done to allow independents to run without belonging to a political party.
- Capacitating Parties: Especially around coalition governance towards stabilising the political space.
- Election Monitoring and Observing: Ensuring that the elections take place and that they are free and fair.
- Combatting Disinformation and Misinformation: Particularly around digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence that have the potential to capture an election by manufacturing ignorance and conspiratorial thinking such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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Tselane emphasised that civil society must defend its space against political parties threatened who may feel threatened by efforts that may undermine their role, particularly those with an alleged history of assaulting activists who question their credibility.
A panel comprised of Noncedo Madubedube, Secretary-General of Equal Education; Lindiwe Mazibuko, former leader of the Opposition of the Republic of South Africa; Qaanita Hunter who is the Assistant Editor of Politics and Opinion at News24, as well as Jaap de Visser, law professor at the University of the Western Cape, continued the discussion. Facilitator Lukhona Mnguni examined the hands-off approach civil society has normally taken in in politics, qualifying it by saying that politics is too volatile a subject and with political funding being a key reason for this. "This has meant some of our best leaders, our brightest minds and our most motivated activists are not interested in investing their skills and expertise in the state," Mnguni said.
As a result, Mnguni posits that this has has left the state starved of effective leadership, something notable in that it stresses the importance of civil society's role in politics by brokering relationships with organs of the state, and stabilising the political space with their skills and expertise.
According to Hunter, South African poltical culture is "saviour-based" and that citizens have outsourced responsibility to political figures to fix problems they are responsible for causing, adding that "politics are too expensive to be left to politicians" as the stakes are far too high and the failures of the increasingly incompetent state rise and rise.
