Small political parties need to learn when to quit
· Citizen
There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a small political party and nobody should be calling for those small parties to be delegitimised due to size. But there is something to be said about vote absorption and if they’re not giving anything relevant to the zeitgeist, why bother keeping them around?
It’s a line the DA seems to align to but it’s rather undemocratic, even if it’s pragmatic.
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Anyway, who’s to say what is or isn’t relevant to the zeitgeist? Without the ATM, there would be no more push towards moral regeneration. Without the Bolsheviks Party, we wouldn’t know that you could host a website on something called Yola… trusted by 1 407 customers.
Redundant political parties
This isn’t a call to say we should rid ourselves of seemingly redundant political parties. This is a call to those seemingly redundant political parties to start identifying as such and do something about it.
As much as I love skipping down the ballot list having a chuckle at the level of branding gymnastics some take to put “Africa” into their name, how many of us actually know anything about them, or even care to?
No cheating. For 50 points, what is the difference between African People First, African People’s Convention, African Transformation Movement, African Movement Congress, African Heart Congress, African Independent Congress and African Independent People’s Organisation?
They’ll probably argue that it’s the responsibility of the voter to get to know the various parties and what they stand for but the struggle for free education continues and nobody is going to waste it on doing a master’s thesis titled, “A Critical Comparative Analysis of the Differences between South African Political Parties that get fewer than 10 000 votes”.
So what do we do with these micro parties? We can’t banish them because that would be undemocratic but surely we can ask them to step up or ship out.
Do we still need Cope?
Cope, for example, came out in 2008 with a bang; securing over 1.3 million national votes and 30 parliamentary seats. That’s better than what the EFF did in its first outing.
Since then, Cope’s been in decline and recently, its biggest contribution to our national discourse has been occupying our brains trying to figure out who is leading Cope.
Surely, somebody inside must be asking whether their continued existence means anything substantial to South Africans. If they did, they’d probably reach the conclusion that it doesn’t.
Contrary to what many may think, that’s a great place to be; once you’ve acknowledged you lack appeal, it’s easier to figure out the next step. Either one should pack it in or change course to become more appealing.
That should be the barometer. Political parties need to acquire some semblance of maturity and ask themselves what they’re doing on the political scene. If they contribute so little that their media space is occupied by internal issues, they should voluntarily go away… even if it is for a short while to reconvene and review.
One simply cannot convince a country that you care so much about the country that you want to lead it and then spend the time you have with the country fighting internally. That doesn’t take us anywhere as voters.
What will take us somewhere is for small parties to drop their egos, figure out that the number of votes they’re getting isn’t worth the ballot paper and ink and find a way to speak to more South Africans.
Perhaps their 5 000 voters do really believe in them and who are we to tell them otherwise? It just doesn’t do much for the country (and municipalities) to have tiny parties that exist so friends and family can vote for them every couple of years. There should be a duty on these parties to show that they actively do more than merely hold some obscure ideology and a website.
By the way, has anybody seen Willie Madisha lately?