Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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