Power of S. Africa’s Ruling Party Unnerves Outsiders

As leader of this country’s fastest-growing opposition party, Bantu Holomisa is a man with reason to worry.

Earlier this year, he buried a top party official assassinated in KwaZulu-Natal, a coastal province where supporters of his United Democratic Movement and the ruling African National Congress have been locked in a bloody power struggle since the opposition group’s founding two years ago.

The day after the assassination, 11 ANC supporters were slain in an apparent revenge attack. On Tuesday, army troops were sent into a Cape Town suburb following the political killings there of an ANC politician and four members of Holomisa’s party since Sunday.

Yet when recently asked what concerns him most as South Africa readies for its second multiracial elections, set for June 2, Holomisa did not mention the bloodshed. Instead, he raised a fundamental issue about the independence of the upcoming poll--a theme with troubling echoes from the apartheid era.

“I doubt very much that the elections will be free because the body controlling the elections is dominated by the ANC,” Holomisa said at his party headquarters here. “In that sense, one has reason to get worried.”

Holomisa’s complaint could be dismissed as political posturing, especially since it comes from a former military dictator of an apartheid-era homeland who parted with the ANC on bad terms several years ago.

Almost everyone, including the vast array of international organizations assisting with the elections, says South Africa’s young democracy is fundamentally secure. The ANC says it has earned its position as South Africa’s majority party, and calls naysayers unpatriotic or subversive.

Holomisa’s criticism, nonetheless, is not a lone cry in the dark. A growing number of prominent people outside the close-knit circles of the ANC is raising questions about the ruling party’s overwhelming dominance of political life and whether it is healthy for a new democracy.

The concerns range from the ANC’s heavy-handed influence over the electoral process to the party’s attempt in October to suppress a report by the country’s truth commission because it accused ANC members of human rights abuses during the struggle against white-minority rule.

There have also been public complaints of ANC rule from independent organizations as varied as the country’s Independent Broadcasting Authority and the Human Rights Commission.

“I really want them to succeed and support them, but not at any cost,” retired Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, who headed the truth commission, said of the ANC when releasing the report. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. There is no way to assume yesterday’s oppressed will not become tomorrow’s oppressors.”

The ANC’s “arrogance of power,” as some have characterized the party’s posture, is even being blamed for growing voter apathy, as South Africans unsatisfied with the government’s performance over the past five years conclude there is no point in voting because the ANC will do as it pleases anyway.

Some critics are drawing parallels to the one-party dominance during apartheid, when the Afrikaner-led National Party controlled virtually every aspect of public life.

“The government’s growing intolerance of well-founded and legitimate criticism, the timidity of much of our press, the tendency of many nongovernmental organizations to bow before prevailing political winds, the smallness of the parliamentary opposition and the lamentable disappearance of the critical tradition from our university campuses . . . combine to mean that political correctness is tightening its grip on this country,” John Kane-Berman, director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, said in a speech to U.S. businesspeople here.

“As a society, we are in danger of becoming far more stultified intellectually than we were under National Party rule,” said Kane-Berman, whose 70-year-old organization was a persistent opponent of the apartheid government.

The ANC’s handling of the upcoming elections is a case in point.

The country’s top election official, a respected constitutional judge, stepped down last month after claiming government interference had become so pervasive that the Independent Electoral Commission, or IEC, had lost the impartiality required by the South African Constitution.

In a hard-hitting indictment of the ruling party, Judge Johann Kriegler said the agency, which he headed when it was created in 1993 and later when he was reappointed by the ANC-led government, had “been reduced to supplicants for staffing and funding” because the government refused to give it the financial wherewithal to do its job.

Mbeki Seen as Part of Problem

He also accused the ANC of interfering with the commission’s voter registration drive, the cornerstone of efforts to ensure the next elections are free and fair.

In the first all-race elections in 1994, which Kriegler administered, there was not enough time to register the millions of first-time voters, leading to complaints of fraud and inefficiency. Then, however, a multi-party oversight commission ensured that the ruling National Party did not exert undue influence over the poll.

“We have effectively lost the power and duty to plan and execute the compilation of the voters roll free of governmental let or hindrance,” Kriegler wrote in his resignation letter to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki. “Had I anticipated the role to which the commission has now been consigned, I would not have accepted nomination.”

ANC supporters have attributed the Afrikaner judge’s complaints to the general dissatisfaction among many whites with the country’s new black political order. In his reply to Kriegler, Mbeki denied that the government has meddled in commission business and angrily implied such allegations are racist.

“I am aware that there are some in our society who are fixated on the notion that our government cannot be trusted to abide by the democratic norms enshrined in our constitution and laws,” Mbeki wrote. “Whatever the self-induced prejudices among some of the citizens of our country, that fact remains that those who fought for a democratic South Africa will remain among the front ranks of those who will fight in defense of the democratic order, an important part of which is an independent IEC.”

The problem with Mbeki’s reply, critics say, is that it misses the mark. Race is not the crux of the complaints about the commission, and, furthermore, the deputy president is widely regarded as part of the ANC’s arrogance-of-power problem, they say.

Mbeki, head of the ANC, is in line to succeed Nelson Mandela as president after the elections. His party has already stated its goal of winning two-thirds of the parliamentary seats so that its legislative program cannot be derailed by opposition groups. Such a margin of victory, opposition leaders are quick to point out, would also give the ANC a free hand to alter the constitution, a liberal, democratic document painstakingly negotiated as part of the transition to black majority rule.

“We must have a two-thirds majority to ensure that we are not interfered with by Mickey Mouse parties who have no commitment to democracy except to defend white privilege,” Mandela recently told an audience of foreign journalists. “Some opposition parties oppose every action that is taken by the government.”

Looking at Future Without Mandela

Mandela’s comments were greeted with warm applause, but as Holomisa and other critics emphasize, the retiring president will not be around to ensure that the next five years build upon the emerging democratic pattern of the past five. Critics say the world’s love affair with Mandela has lulled many people into taking for granted that all is well with ANC rule in South Africa.

“People say internationally, ‘Mandela is there and things will go rosy,’ ” Holomisa said. “But there are a lot of people under him.”

In a fund-raising letter last year, the head of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa used an unflattering characterization of Mbeki as grounds for seeking international donations. The private letter, when made public, created a political storm in South Africa, particularly since the institute is regarded as friendly to the ANC and its author is a respected academic.

“Between 1999 and 2004, we anticipate government under Thabo Mbeki to be tougher and more obscure, in need therefore of closer and more demanding democratic and human rights monitoring,” wrote Wilmot James, who has since left the institute for a post at the University of Cape Town.

In an explanation of the letter, James later wrote in South Africa’s Sunday Independent newspaper that he was “embarrassed that Mbeki received my views in such a pithy, blunt and unanalytical manner.” But he went on to raise deep concerns about the road ahead.

“In an unfavorable economic environment that takes us into an election, the material pressures to deliver to the poor will become immense and the temptation to increasingly assert executive power over other organs of democracy irresistible,” James said.

In an indication of how deep distrust runs in the South African electorate, only half of the respondents to a public opinion survey released in November said they trust the IEC “to do what is right” while managing the elections.