Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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well for the future: ‘Any system of representation will contain elements<br />
of these different models and how they interact with each other will go<br />
a long way to determining how the state evolves over time’. [39] The exact<br />
causes of the poor health of South Africa’s polity and economy may not<br />
be plain for all to see, but what is currently unambiguously clear is that<br />
large cracks are beginning to appear in the ruling alliance’s representation<br />
of ‘the people’. Ever since before the FIFA Football World Cup<br />
of June-July 2010, the country has been wracked by prolonged strikes<br />
and service delivery protests. The lucky few that have employment as<br />
well as those that are supposed to be reaping the benefits of a party<br />
‘for the people’ in terms of the satisfaction of vital needs such as the<br />
provision of water, housing, electricity and so on are contesting the<br />
image that the ruling alliance has tried to conjure up of them. Outrage<br />
over years of jobless growth and very poor service delivery driven by<br />
corruption and incompetence is manifest and there is evidence that<br />
the three parts of the ruling alliance no longer portray the same unified<br />
image. The possible outcomes are revolution or a successful decoupling<br />
of the alliance and the institutionalisation of effective and meaningful<br />
representation for all groups. [40] Needless to say, the latter choice<br />
would be better for all concerned. South Africa must change now the<br />
power relations that exist between groups, their representatives and<br />
the people’s formal political representatives; and in order to <strong>do</strong> that it<br />
has to transform not only its electoral system and the structure of its<br />
ruling party, but also its property ownership, distributive mechanisms<br />
and macro-economic policies. My main submission in this paper is<br />
that few will see this unless and until representative democracy is<br />
understood in terms not just of individual and state free<strong>do</strong>m and<br />
representation, but also of group free<strong>do</strong>m and group representation,<br />
linked together via an account of free<strong>do</strong>m as power, in particular the<br />
power of individuals and groups to determine their economies and<br />
polities via the relative power of their representatives.<br />
147<br />
FREEDOM, POWER AND<br />
REPRESENTATION<br />
Lawrence Hamilton<br />
39<br />
Vieira and Runciman, Representation, pp. 143-4.<br />
40<br />
Cf. A. Mngxitama, ‘Tripartite Tussle? Get real, it’s just a game’, Mail & Guardian<br />
September 3 to 9 2010.