COMMENT

On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court ruled the Electoral Act unconstitutional for not making allowance for independent candidates at provincial and national levels.

The Constitution is silent on details of the electoral system, only requiring that it “results, in general, in proportional representation”. At municipal level, this is still required by the Constitution, but with the addition of ward councillors.

The 2003 Van Zyl Slabbert Commission traversed some of the issues of electoral reform, including a constituency system at national and provincial levels, with proportional top-up, much as with municipal voting, but did not address independent candidates.

At municipal level, independent candidates can stand, but only in wards. That leads to a defect in proportionality: in an extreme case, independent candidates could be the biggest voting bloc and not win any wards. Because independent candidates do not have a proportional-representation vote, they are not represented in any top-up to correct the ward result. This violates the principle of proportionality required at all levels by the Constitution.

In addition to the Constitutional Court judgment being implemented at national and provincial levels, this defect should be remedied at municipal level too.

The proportional representation system we currently use is a closed list. The party decides on the order of the list and the voter gets to decide only which party to support. By contrast, an open list system is any design that gives voters some say on the candidates, as well as the party.

Within the current proportional representation design of our electoral system, addressing the defect found by the Constitutional Court would be difficult, because independent candidates would have to agree on a list.

Let’s start by trying to remedy this in the existing municipal system, then generalise to other levels.

If proportional representatives were based on candidates who received the most votes but not enough to win a ward, that would remove the need for independent candidates to agree on a list. A simple model would be to work out how many councillors the independent candidates should have collectively, and construct a proportional representation list of independents who did not win a ward. The order: from the highest vote for independents who did not win a ward, down.

In national and provincial elections, a similar principle could apply. If, for example, independent candidates around the country (with a similar principle applying to provinces) collectively scored 10% of the vote, equating to 40 seats, the 40 independents who scored the most votes would be elected. That could be done in the current pure proportional representation system. Almost: I will get to the caveat later.

The next question: how to qualify as a candidate. Because a candidate can only win one seat, a deposit far lower than that required for a party to register nationally would be fair. This would be refunded to candidates above a certain vote threshold. A new party also requires signatures of 500 voters to register for the first time and a similar requirement for an independent candidate could be considered. The same fee that applies for a party to nominate could also be considered — currently R500.

All of that can be done as a minor tweak to the electoral system; the bar for independent candidates to nominate needs some thought, because setting it too low will result in a flood of candidates; setting it too high will exclude those without resources. To avoid a massive national ballot, an independent candidate should appear on the ballot only in a particular geographic area.

However, this could be a good moment to revisit the Van Zyl Slabbert report and reconsider the value of a constituency plus proportional system at all levels. The Van Zyl Slabbert report recommends a multi-member constituency system with a similar party list to the kind we currently have — closed lists, drawn up by each party.

However, if my idea for accommodating independent candidates is adopted, it is not compatible with a closed list, because the order of my proposed list depends on votes for candidates.

Given that our closed list system has proved to blur lines of accountability — working a party patronage network can get you a higher place on a list with no reference to public preference — we should also reconsider that.

Rather than make the minimal fix to the Electoral Act to accommodate independent candidates, this would be a great opportunity for real electoral reform in which voters are given much more say about who represents them.

Philip Machanick is an associate professor of computer science at Rhodes University

OPEN LETTER

Covid-19 has unearthed massive inequalities within our societies and brought to glaring light the unique burdens which women carry the world over. Response resources should be targeted towards the immediate needs of managing the virus as well as be future-looking to also dismantle the structural, systemic barriers which reinforce inequality and disenfranchisement.

We have been presented the opportunity to reimagine and redesign our society into a vibrant and equitable one. We must place women and women’s leadership at the core of the response and beyond.

Covid-19 has caused huge shocks to both the informal and formal economies in Africa. The World Bank estimates that the sub-Saharan Africa region will see significant economic decline, and plunge to as low as -5.1% this year.

Women have been hit particularly hard by this economic downturn. Emerging evidence from the International Labour Organisation on the effects of Covid-19 suggests that women’s economic and productive lives will be affected disproportionately. They have less access to social protections and their capacity to absorb economic shocks is very low. And, as the economic toll of the crisis is felt, there is also an increased risk that girls will be turned into a source of quick income for families and the number of child marriages and early pregnancy may increase.

It is no surprise that our food systems will be dealt a significant blow, resulting in the dangerous exacerbation of food insecurity and nearly doubling current levels of widespread hunger. Covid-19 has disrupted supply chains and thrown the global food economy into disarray. As border closures, production stoppages and export restrictions limit supply, demand has surged, inflating prices and impacting the world’s poorest and most marginalised people.

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Women are central players in the food chain and key to agricultural output In Africa; 50% of the agricultural activity on the continent is performed by women, who produce about 60-70% of the food in sub-Saharan countries

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Studies reveal that the cost of malnutrition has a tremendous effect on a country’s economic growth. A lack of adequate nutrition is a key contributor to unacceptably high levels of both maternal and child mortality as well as stunting — and therefore to the loss of human capital for the overall economic, social and political development of the continent.

The fragility of African health systems is revealing itself and women and children are most vulnerable to the dearth of attention and adequate specialised services the diversion Covid-19 is causing.This has resulted in a surge in child and maternal mortality.

Gender-based violence (GBV) has increased by upwards of 25% in some countries as a result of lockdowns because victims of domestic violence face limited access to protective services.

A call to bold action:

• All responses must take into account gendered effects of Covid-19 and be informed by the voices of women:  women and women’s organisations should be at the heart of decision making and designing health and socio-economic policies and plans. An intentional focus on the lives and futures of women and girls is an essential part of breaking structural practices which have been marginalising them. A system for collecting and disaggregating data needs to be put in place to ensure that the effects of the crisis on women is informing the redesign of fragile and inequitable socio-economic and health systems into fully inclusive, equitable ones.

• Government and development partners must implement gender-lens economic policies and sharpen the capacity of women as engines of economic growth: give women and female businesses direct access to credit, loans, tax and social security payment deferrals and exemptions, and preferential procurement. Structural barriers to finance, inheritance and land rights must be removed. Create and support an enabling environment for information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure so women are able to contribute to the digital economy and access online platforms to facilitate e-commerce and e-health/education/social exchanges.

• Invest in women along the local food chains to improve food security: response resources should target female-owned small, medium and micro enterprises and rural women’s associations to increase productivity in both formal and informal economies, eradicate hunger and malnutrition. Boost local food production and confront head-on the indignity of Africa importing its food. Food security is a fundamental investment in the building of healthy societies.

• Recognise and implement equal rights in the workplace: provide equal pay for equal work.

• Narrow gender-based education gaps: build ICT infrastructure for online learning to bridge the inequality divide and retrain teachers on virtual curriculum so every African child, especially the girl child, has access to quality education. Efforts to protect girls from child marriage and early pregnancy, and provision of safety net resources for households to keep girls in school are also needed.

• Strengthen health systems, gradually implement universal health coverage and provide mental health services as key strategies to the improvement of health systems and citizen wellbeing.

• Comprehensively strengthen the criminal justice system and increase efforts around survivor support and protection: prevention/protection efforts must be deemed as essential services and intentional mass media efforts to spur a fundamental change of mindset whereby GBV is rejected and deemed socially unacceptable and intolerable.  

Covid-19 presents us with unprecedented opportunities for the regeneration of the African socio-economic landscape and the movement towards a just, equitable and sustainably prosperous continent. Let us dare not squander this opportunity for a rebirth.

Signed: Graça Machel, founder of the Graça Machel Trust and the Foundation for Community Development;

Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, board chair of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, African Union special envoy to mobilise international economic support for the fight against Covid-19, and former finance minister of Nigeria;

Dr Vera Songwe, executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa; and

Maria Ramos, co-chair of the UN secretary general’s task force on digital financing of the sustainable development goals and former CEO of Absa Group Limited