The people must take charge of managing SA Inc

ANC members of the Matatiele town council were ordered by their party last week to reverse a majority vote to sack mayor Ntombovuyo Nkopane and two other executive committee members.

The vote to remove her had not been sanctioned in advance by the party's Eastern Cape head office.

"We decide on who holds which position and who should be removed, not people who have been deployed themselves," ANC provincial secretary Oscar Mabuyane said afterwards.

The decision to remove an unimpressive mayor had as little to do with performance as the instruction to reinstate her. This was ANC internal politics at play on a micro level, just as it is at the macro level in the race for victory in Mangaung.

But is this the democracy that we celebrated in 1994 and after the adoption of our new constitution in 1996?

Though the ANC makes much of its very strong electoral mandate, the party makes no bones about that being a binary decision - ANC yes or no, and then back off for the next five years.

The electorate's role is to give the 100-odd elected and ex-officio members of the party's national executive committee a blank cheque.

There are public hearings from time to time on legislation and some policy issues, but, as we have seen with the Protection of State Information Bill and others before, if the public mandate is not what the party wants, it is ignored.

The details of governance will be decided in Luthuli House, the party headquarters in Johannesburg, or in the various provincial head offices, subject to the guidance of the national leadership.

The people deployed to the national, provincial and local legislatures are there only to do the bidding of the ANC executive.

Political analysts confirm that this is quite legal. It is a consequence of the system of governance that we approved in the adoption of the 1996 constitution.

The negotiators who drafted the constitution adopted a system of proportional representation, which gives power to political parties in direct proportion to their share of the vote. But they did not mean to leave it there.

That system was to be used for the first two elections in 1994 and 1999 and then replaced by a more considered one to be adopted by parliament in time for the 2004 election.

Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, the academic and former opposition leader who died in 2010, was appointed to head a commission in 2002 to review the electoral system and make recommendations for a better permanent system.

The majority of the commission members reported the next year that a hybrid system of proportional and direct election should be adopted, while a minority recommended that the existing system should be retained.

The government opted to listen to the minority and stick to a system which left absolute control in the hands of the party leadership, and which denied voters any mechanism to enforce accountability between elections.

We saw the effect of that in 2007 when, after a lengthy process of interviews and horse-trading, parliament's communications committee finalised a list of 12 nominees for the SABC board, only to have it changed at the last minute on instructions from Luthuli House.

And in its most extreme exhibition of centralised control, the ANC used the same power to get rid of Thabo Mbeki eight months before his second and last term as president was due to end.

Mbeki had centralised power in the office of the president and paid little heed to Luthuli House or parliament. Now power has been centralised in the ANC national executive committee, loosely mandated by the resolutions of the Polokwane conference.

Under our constitution, we indirectly elect 400 members of parliament, 90 members of the National Council of Provinces, 430 members of the nine provincial legislatures and half of the 10055 councillors - a total of nearly 6000 representatives. The other half of the council members campaign under their own names, but are expected also to obey the ANC leadership on all matters.

The assumption should surely be that all of them will apply their minds to the task of developing the country with the growing wisdom that experience brings.

In parliament, after all the hearings and committee deliberations, the decisions of ANC MPs stand only if they have the blessing of the party's executive committee.

We don't need to gerrymander the constitution to fix this problem. The electoral system is prescribed by an ordinary act of parliament.

It is time to draft a new one that will empower representatives at every level of government to apply the wisdom of their experience and the dictates of their own consciences to the business of South Africa's proper management.

Brendan Boyle is the editor of the Daily Dispatch