To cross or not to cross?
2007-09-18 19:45
Cape Town - Now that South Africa's floor crossing season is over for two years, or maybe forever, it is possible to see what harm was done after all the sound and fury.
As the dust clears, it looks as though the only real harm has been to the very small parties. Big parties have only benefited.
In the national parliament two little parties disappeared altogether, but they are unlikely to be missed.
One was the United Independent Front (UIF), which was founded by Malizole Diko when he crossed the floor from Bantu Holomisa's United Democratic Front.
He subsequently died, and the party's reason to exist basically died with him. The two MPs who were sitting for it a fortnight ago left to rejoin the ANC.
Serial floor-crosser
There is still a UIF member sitting in the National Council of Provinces, but he is unlikely to be there for long as a floor-crossing in his home province, the Western Cape, has reduced the party's representation there to one.
The Progressive Independent Movement, founded by the serial floor-crosser Craig Morkel, has also disappeared from the house as he too joined the ANC.
Another one-man party represented by Stan Simmons, a former New National Party member who declined to cross to the ANC with the rest of his colleagues, has also disappeared, but Simmons is still there with a different one-man-party label - the National Alliance.
Two of the three members of the Pan Africanist Congress left to found their own party. The most prominent of them is Themba Godi, who is chair of Parliament's standing committee on public accounts.
The one remaining member, however, is already in deep trouble with the PAC. He is the former leader of the party, the unbending Motsoko Pheko, who out of principle declined to cross the floor, and is now open to be replaced.
ID lost one MP
Patricia de Lille's Independent Democrats lost one MP - Vincent Gore - to the ANC. De Lille's party sacked two other members - Avril Harding and Florence Batyi - before they could defect.
The ID has not fared quite so well at local government level, with three members defecting in Cape Town. But the coalition they were supporting led by DA mayor Helen Zille still stands.
Badhi Chabaan, for all his fulminations, failed to gather up more than the three ex-ID members, and falls a long way short of delivering the city to whoever it was who was backing him.
Chaaban has taken on the leadership of the National People's Party.
It looks as though there may well be some changes of control in a few other municipalities, at Drakenstein and Breede River in the Cape for example, but these are knife-edge jobs and may still depend on the outcome of court cases.
Almost has majority
One or two other councils change in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and Gauteng.
The defections in Parliament have brought the ANC a step further to being able to rewrite the whole Constitution, so carefully put together by negotiation between all sections of South Africa.
The total of their seats is now 297 - three short of the three quarters majority needed to override even the most firmly entrenched clauses.
Imagine what could have happened if the ANC fell into the hands of another Mugabe in December's conference.
The physical damage to democracy is slight then, but all the same the moral damage could be huge.
The period of defections has allowed the electorate to think of all politicians as money-grubbing, power-seeking villains. Cartoonists have had a field day depicting for example, the chairperson of the ANC fishing in a lavatory for new members.
A lack of respect for elected politicians does not help engender respect for the institutions of democracy, or indeed for democracy itself.
The whole idea of floor-crossing is now to be discussed in Parliament, and it may be that wise counsels within the ruling party will see that even though they may amass gargantuan majorities, the perception of legitimacy of their power may suffer.
As the dust settles on the floor-crossing season, we take a look at what it means for SA politics. To cross or not to cross?