Johnathan Paoli
THE Congress of the People (COPE) has expressed its desire to amend the Constitution to allow citizens to vote directly for executive leadership positions such as presidents, premiers and mayors.
COPE held a media briefing on Tuesday at the provincial headquarters in Johannesburg to expand on their idea.
Party general secretary, Erick Mohlapamaswi, said they wanted to prevent the common situation where parties protected their leaders at the expense of the people.
“We feel because they have been accounting to their political parties, we need a leader who is accountable to South Africans as a whole. If he does something wrong, South Africans can hold them accountable,” Mohlapamaswi said.
Currently in relation to the country’s electoral law, votes are regulated by the concept of ‘proportional representation’, in which citizens vote for parties and the public representatives of those parties appoint the heads of administrations throughout the different government spheres.
Mohlapamaswi said that the current party list system only promoted party interests above those of the people, and that President Cyril Ramaphosa, like his predecessor, had failed to uphold his oath of office to always discharge his duties with all his abilities and to the best of his knowledge.
“He has shown neither total strength, commitment, nor true conscience in the service of the nation. Even the constitutional values of accountability, responsiveness and openness have not been respected and strictly adhered to,” the spokesperson said.
The party said the current voting system had managed to keep Ramaphosa in power when he should have long resigned or be removed from office, and that the social contract had been broken as illustrated by the government’s failure to delivers all its promises to the country due to failures in governance, transparency, accountability and responsiveness.
Among the fundamental issues the party has with the current government include, public services that have collapsed and the collapse of many state-owned enterprises and most municipalities.
The spokesperson said the trust deficit between political leaders and ordinary people has reached parliament and that the country would be better off with a vote of no-confidence debate being initiated in the new parliamentary year.
Mohlapamaswi said that ministers would remain consumed by political infighting and that incompetence and corruption would continue, as the president has failed to hold ministers accountable for their lack of performance and lost the courage to disclose the outcome of the performance assessments.
This follows on the decision by the ruling party last year, not to reveal the performance assessments of the ministers, with presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya defending the action as an attempt to protect ministers from blackmail and political weaponisation.
Mohlapamaswi said that the country was reeling from the tyranny of the dominant political party and that if the electoral system did not change, the lives of South Africans would change for the worse.
“Our future is in the hands of the voter, our longer term future hinges on how our president, premiers and mayors are elected,” Mohlapamaswi said.
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