Persistence of Power
Changing the System When the System Won’t Listen
By Kenneth A. Brown
In 1994, South Africa’s first truly free elections brought Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress to power. It marked an end to apartheid rule and the end of decades of political discrimination and social injustice brought on by the country’s longstanding policy of strict racial segregation. The economic inequalities created by apartheid rule, however, have proved harder to tackle. Five years after the end of apartheid, with an unemployment rate of more than 30 percent and a murder rate six times as high as that of the United States, as many as one-out-of-five black South Africans were telling pollsters they were better off under apartheid rule.
No one, of course, is seriously advocating a return to apartheid rule—but the poll numbers suggest, at least at the surface, how deep the public’s sense of frustration runs.
“What people say is that we have the crown but not the jewelry,” said Mpho Putu, with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa and a former Kettering fellow. What they mean, he explained, is that while democracy is flourishing, the country’s economy is still struggling. “The question is,” he said, “how do you merge the two?”
Beyond Politics: Democracy and Economics
The problematic relationship between democracy and economics issues is a recurring theme among those in Kettering’s informal international network whether one is talking about the unpredictable political and economic world of post-Communist Eastern Europe or the struggling economies of Africa and Latin America.
Meaningful citizen engagement in political affairs, as many in the network term it, is a revolutionary idea—but the idea of meaningfully engaging citizens on major economic questions is an even more radical one. Many, however, suggest that it is impossible to have one without the other.
The question, as Putu suggests, is how to go about it.
Critical economic decisions today are typically made by professionals—the economic and financial elite—with little or no public input. At issue are not only the actions and policies of international groups like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, but also major corporations and private financial institutions.
As one representative from Ghana termed it, “I believe there will be no democracy in Ghana until there is democracy all around the world.”
Economic decisions, like political decisions, they suggest, will be significantly better if they truly engage citizens. Democracy, they say, needs to reach beyond simply political issues into the all-important question of economic development. Power, however, is persistent and this notion will undoubtedly need time to take root and find its way into practice.
Changing the System and Engaging Institutions
Citizen engagement then is not enough on its own if it is not coupled with institutional engagement—if institutions are not ready and willing to recognize the capabilities of citizens for action. That hard lesson has been clearly demonstrated in Latin American countries like Brazil. While the country has a number of innovative aspects of its constitution to encourage citizen involvement and many cities have provisions for direct citizen involvement, there is a growing sense that there is a larger, more powerful, and yet indefinable system in place that makes real public action impossible.
When the current Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, first took office in 2003, he was not only the first left-leaning candidate to win office in nearly half a century—he had also grown up poor himself, leaving school at age 12 and working as a shoeshine boy and street vendor to help support his family. Hopes were high, not only because he had made addressing Brazil’s extreme gap between rich and poor a cornerstone of his campaign, but also because he understood the plight of the disadvantaged so clearly.
Once in office, however, his ambitious plans proved hard to implement, and Lula himself was soon forced to make compromises with the Brazilian congress and international banks.
“After a few years we’re seeing that it’s not that easy,” said Telma Gimenez, a former Kettering fellow who teaches at Brazil’s University of Londrino. The inability to change the system, in turn has created a lot of frustration—with not just Lula, but with the possibilities of politics and democracy as it currently exists. “The question is, how can we—with a diverse country like ours, with this enormous gap between the rich and the poor—make a conciliation of our different conflicting interests?”
Recent events have taught people that “it’s not just a question of replacing one group with another,” Gimenez explained. “It is more complicated. We have learned that politics is not just black and white.” But this is not entirely a bad thing, she said.
I think it helps our understanding of democracy—because we may start thinking in terms of our own engagement instead of just looking for a savior, for someone who’s going to do everything for us—because we know that’s not going to happen.
The question is, however, will people be able to change the system if the system is not willing to listen?
Kenneth A. Brown is an associate with the Kettering Foundation.