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game in town and when no-one can imagine acting outside the democratic institutions”
(Hague et al. 43).
6) “At a minimum, democracy requires: 1) universal adult suffrage; 2) recurring, free, competitive, and fair elections; 3) more than one serious political party; and 4) alternative sources of information (Larry Diamond and Leonard Morlino 2-3).
7) Diamond and Morlinoexplains:[…] defective democracies […] are ‘exclusive’ in offering only limited guarantees for political rights, or ‘dominated’ in allowing powerful groups to condition and limit the autonomy of elected leaders, or ‘illiberal’ in the inadequacy of their protections for civil rights and the rule of law. We can also expect the quality of democracy to be quite deficient in delegative democracies, which have electoral competitiveness and
relative civil and political freedom, but whose officials, once elected, are only minimally responsive to citizen preferences, constrained by other agencies of government, and respectful of the rule of law (Diamond and Morlino 3).
8) “The electoral imbalances in the party system and the static and predictable nature of voting outcomes have raised concerns that elections fail to act as an accountability
mechanism. This has raised deeper concerns for the quality of democracy. An extended period in power can gender complacency, arrogance and even corruption in a dominant party. When parties cease to ‘fear the ballot box’ they are likely to become unresponsive and ideologically entrenched. A dominant party, such as the ANC, is able to take the citizenry’s vote for granted because it is not seriously threatened at the polls. If there is no threat to prospects for re- election the value of elections as a means to discipline elite behaviour is eroded” (Schulz- Herzenberg 2).
9) Schulz-Herzenberg describes this when stating that: “The electoral dominance of the ANC has also led scholars to suggest that ANC voters, in particular, are an unquestionably loyal and enthusiastic group. As such, the ANC government’s economic and political performance, however fair or poor, is likely to have little impact on these voters. The implication of an impervious majority of voters is dire for government accountability. If ANC supporters continually disregard or pay little heed to government performance, accountability is diminished (Schulz-Herzenberg 2).
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10) This ‘struggle legitimacy’ gives them [the ANC] a much stronger political, economic and moral mandate than that of governments in most other developing countries […] But, if such power goes unchecked, it also means that they can get away with service delivery failure, autocratic behaviour and wrongdoing in the name of advancing the liberation or independence project (Gumede 11).
11) ) Gumede recalls: “COSATU General Secretary ZwelinzimaVavi summed it up when he said: ‘The election of a progressive leadership [does not] mean the end of the struggle and that we must now step back and hand over everything to these progressive, trusted leaders as though they are messiahs and will deliver everything on a silver platter, while we are in our beds sleeping’” (Gumede 14).
12) “[…] many users cannot afford to access the network to the extent that they need.
Universality will be realised only once people can access the network whenever they want to.
Communication must be ubiquitous: that is, users should be able to access information anytime, anywhere, anyhow, depending on the choice of the user. Currently, users are restricted in their choice of how to access information they need, either at home or on the move. Communication must also be dialogic: that is, users should have the ability both to receive and impart information. They should not simply reproduce old methods of
communication where a few talk and the majority listen. Everyone should have the right to privacy and anonymous communications, which include the right to encrypt their
communications” (Duncan 215).
13) “The growing ubiquity of the internet requires an examination of the state of internet freedom. More governments are securitizing and militarising the internet [and we need to]
explore […] whether electronic communications have entered the public domain as security concerns in South Africa too, and to what extent ICT policy is being structured around security concerns” (Duncan 216).
14) “If the electronic communications system aims to be a democratic one, it should be designed to give effect to [being ubiquitous and dialogical]. However, such a communications system is profoundly threatening to securocrats, as it ensures that communications power is democratised and placed in the hands of the citizenry” (Duncan 215).
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15) Harrop and Hague expound: […] even when elections have succeeded in the delicate task of replacing a governing elite, most new democracies remain distinctive; the question is not whether they will consolidate but what exactly they are consolidating into. The difficulties facing new democracies can be grouped into two clusters: the political problems associated with an illiberal inheritance and the economic problems caused by the combination of limited development and extreme inequality (43).
16) The Ministry of State Security has argued that the Secrecy Bill is needed to counter what it refers to as rising cases of espionage and the peddling of state information […] The Bill defines espionage as providing classified information, which the person knows or ought reasonably to have known would directly or indirectly benefit a foreign state, and information peddling as providing information that is false and fabricated to a national intelligence
structure, knowing that it is false or has been fabricated. The prescribed sentences are stiff:
between three and five years for espionage offenses involving the leaking of confidential information, between 10 and 15 years for secret information, and between 15 and 25 years for information classified top secret, while information peddling can attract a sentence of up to five years (Duncan 56).
17) In their Submission to the Ad-hoc Committee of the National Council of Provinces on the Protection of State Information Bill, R2K explains how:
∙ The Act burdens all of society with what should be a state problem, namely the keeping of state secrets. Ordinary people should not be criminalised for possessing and disclosing classified information—to do so will edge South Africa towards a “society of secrets”, where free information exchanges and debate are
inhibited by a culture of fear.
∙ The alternative means of protecting the public and a key demand of civil society, a public interest defense, remains absent from the Act.
∙ The Act’s supposed remedies for public access, such as
whistleblower protection and access to information/declassification procedures, remain seriously defective.
∙ The State Security Agency remains the beneficiary of
unjustifiably heightened protection, not only for its work but its organisational being. This stretches the veil of secrecy beyond what is acceptable in a Constitutional democracy such as ours.
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∙ The Minister and State Security Agency’s role as “guardians” of other state departments’ valuable information remains a problem.
∙ The Classification Review Panel is not independent enough and not accessible to ordinary people.
∙ Bad drafting in a number of instances has left the Act in its current form wide open to abuse (Hunter 2).
18) Duncan describes why leak-driven media is still popular with journalists, even in the uncertain times of sensitive communicative freedom within the media: “Leaks can be attractive as they can create the impression of exclusive access, but they can also encourage scandal-driven journalism rather than journalism that encourages intelligent debates on policy issues. A related danger is that news agendas are likely to be driven even more by corruption scandals; while these stories are important, they tend to individualise the problem and have not been effective in addressing systematic corruption” (Duncan 59-60).
19) “[…] the existing protections afforded by existing whistleblower legislation, in the form of the Protected Disclosures Act (2000), are too narrowly conceived to make a significant difference, as they extend protection from occupational detriment for a very limited period only. The Act protects only those who make disclosures in the workplace; community whistleblowers are not protected” (Duncan 60).
20) “[…] One of the key reasons why political assassinations appear to be on the increase is because of the relative impunity that the perpetrators enjoy: according to policing researcher David Bruce, only one in ten political killings have led to conviction […]” (Duncan 62-63).
21) “There is a real and present danger in the country of wealthy criminals being able to buy themselves out of convictions, effectively putting themselves above the criminal justice system. This could lead to the creation of a two-tiered criminal justice system, where those with money can evade justice, while those without it who are charged with a crime are
imprisoned on the flimsiest of grounds. In fact, by the late 2000’s, it had become apparent that organised crime had begun to extend its tentacles into the upper most echelons of government.
Former police commissioner Jackie Selebi’s corruption trial, which began in earnest in 2010, revealed how he had been bribed by convicted drug dealer Glen Agliotti in return for political favours, including selective investigations and prosecutions. Agliotti was also accused of the murder (or the ‘assisted suicide’) of mining magnate Brett Kebble – he had put Kebble together with Selebi in an attempt to buy political favours […] The Kebble/Selebi incident
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pointed to the broader dangers of crony capitalism for South Africa’s national stability.
Kebble had asset stripped several listed companies he ran for many years, but had managed to buy himself positive publicity and prevent exposés of his activities. In spite of his shady business practices, Kebble became a friend and financier of a number of top politicians, and also began to back the faction in the ANC that wanted to put Zuma into power, including the ANC Youth League. At a broader level, the fact that senior ANC leaders proved to be open to influence by a corrupt businessman is bound to have a corrupting effect on the direction of the country’s politics. Yet, corruption barely receives a mention in State Security documents as an intelligence priority, especially high level corruption where business figures buy influence from politicians in return for political favours. This phenomenon, which Patrick Bond has dubbed ‘Kebbleism’, and which he has argued has intensified rather than subsided under Zuma, remains one of the most serious threats to national security, yet one of the most unrecognised” (Duncan 65-66).
22) Castells describes this space as “[…] a space of sovereign assemblies to meet and to recover their rights of representation which have been captured in political institutions
predominantly tailored for the convenience of the dominant interests and values” (Networks of Outrage and Hope 11). Within his formulation, Castells describes the space of social
movements within our new network society as a “hybrid space” that is between the internet social networks and the occupied, urban space that we find ourselves in (Networks of Outrage and Hope 11). This forms a central node that has the property of connecting the digital space of protest and the urban space that connect with each other in “[…] relentless interaction, constituting, technologically and culturally, instant communities of transformative practice (Networks of Outrage and Hope 11). Here, a decentralised form of power seems to be
dominant; one where activists seems to dominate. This is evidenced within the shift of power from centralised and institutionalised governance of parliament back to the exploited
citizenry. But in order for this to work, there would need to be a drastic change in the current methods of social government. Castells suggest:
[…] for the networks of counterpower to prevail over the networks of power embedded in the organization of society, they will have to reprogramme the polity, the economy, the culture of whatever dimension they aim to change by introducing in the institutions’
programs, as well as their own lives, other instructions, including, in some utopian versions, the rule of not ruling anything.
Furthermore, they will have to switch on the connection between different networks of social change, e.g. between pro-democracy