Mysterium inequitatis: Truth, elections, autonomy in the southern African politic

Abstract

This article considers, against the background of an extended discussion of Claude Lefort's conception of the birth and specificity of ‘the political’ (le politique), the African National Congress's (ANC's) endorsement of Robert Mugabe's electoral ‘victories’ in Zimbabwe since 2002. The article suggests that this reveals far more than simply bad foreign policy but, more troublingly, is suggestive of a partial if not hostile attitude to political society and the contingency and pluralism upon which democracy, necessarily, rests.

Acknowledgements

The arguments advanced here were developed in large part whilst I was a visiting scholar at the Development Studies Institute (DESTIN), London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2003. I am especially grateful to Peter Hudson and David Moore for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. Cited in the Mail and Guardian (South Africa), 22–27 March 2002, p. 25.

2. In addition to the well known examples of fraudulent behaviour—the violence preceding the elections, the effective closure of all critical media, the closure of voting stations in urban areas, etc.—it now appears that the election results were tampered with, and that at least 114,779 votes were added to the final total by the registrar-general, Tobaiwa Mudede. On this, see the coverage in The Sunday Independent (South Africa), 7 April 2002; and The Star (Johannesburg), 2 April 2002.

3. ANC Youth League, Statement on Zimbabwe Elections, 14 March 2002. The language used, albeit clumsy, is suggestive: an election whose purpose it is to re-elect the President!

4. In addition to the Mbeki government, Sam Nujoma, the President of Namibia, also saw fit to endorse Mugabe's electoral victory, describing this ‘clear majority’ as a development that offers ‘the region great hope and optimism for economic progress and socio-political stability’ (cited in The Mercury, KwaZulu-Natal, 21 March 2002).

5. For a discussion of the parliamentary elections and their aftermath, see International Crisis Group (2005, 2006) and Moore (2005).

6. For an in insightful analysis of the reasons why Mugabe is able to hold onto power in Zimbabwe, see Moore (2005). For historical background to the so-called ‘war veterans’, see Krigler (2003, esp. pp. 201–208).

7. This was said at the press conference after the Victoria Falls Summit, 21 April 2000.

8. This is the view of Professor Tom Lodge. Personal communication with the author, March 2002.

9. The two members are Eddy Maloka (CEO, Africa Institute of South Africa) and Itumeleng Mosala (Director General, Department of Arts and Culture).

10. Both the SACC and Tsele have since tempered their enthusiasm. Tsele in particular has been criticised by other church leaders for his statements.

11. For a recent book-length study of Lefort, see Flynn (2005).

12. This entry into public life, it must be insisted, is of necessity prior to the distinction often drawn between a public and a private sphere. In an important sense, by directing our attention to the preconditions for political life, Lefort is able to avoid the trap of liberal democrats, who fetishise the public/private distinction, removing supposedly private relations (especially within the family) from the realm of public scrutiny. This latter has correctly been criticised from within the feminist tradition.

13. Althusser makes a similar point when he argues that, although we should criticise the limitations of humanist explanations, i.e. that they conflate explanans and explandum, we should not dismiss this belief in the creative power of humankind as insignificant idealism, or lose sight of its historical significance. In feudal society, for example, it was on the basis of the claim that ‘men’ make history that the bourgeoisie was able to challenge the dominant belief that God made history (Althusser, 1984, p. 78, note 9).

14. Ironically, given his general hostility to democratic government, one of the most astute commentators on the radical potential of such declarations is Milton Friedman, who points out that the claims embodied in the Declaration of Independence (1776) were mobilised in ‘the struggle over slavery, finally settled by bloody civil war, to the subsequent attempt to promote equality of opportunity, to the more recent attempt to achieve equality of results’ (Friedman, 1992, p. 2). However Friedman is no democrat, and the essence of his work revolves around a persistent attempt to prevent this ‘logic of equality’ from being translated into a struggle for an ‘equality of results’, or, in our terms, to prevent the extension of base-equality into other spheres of the social. If there is a single feature which unites the ‘new right’ it is this: the desire to roll back the ‘excesses’ of equality.

15. This reformulation need not entail an extension of base-equality, and could (just as easily) take the form of a struggle to substitute this with new ‘markers of certitude’ that arrest change and prescribe the character of power.

16. Author's interviews with two members of the 2002 ANC Observer Mission.

17. Not only are these rights acknowledged and widely accepted in liberal democratic societies but, and significantly so, they have been written into their constitutional fabric, and are (to varying degrees) guaranteed in law. Although such guarantees are not necessary for base-equality to exist, they help to make it possible for individuals to enjoy the autonomy, and equal right and power to seek to contest the identity of the social, which marks the presence of a base-equality between citizens.

18. Author's observation from meeting.

19. The ANC's reaction to its recent (2006) electoral defeat in the City of Cape Town, and reflexive rejection of the Democratic Alliance's politics in the City as racist, tends to bear out this point, and does little to suggest that it would be willing to accept a loss of power at a national level. For a discussion of the ANC's portrayal of the new executive mayor, Helen Zille, as the ‘monster’ ‘Godzille’, see Dixon (2006).