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This past weekend, SA celebrated 30 years since the country’s constitution was adopted. Though there were no festivities to mark this milestone, a major ruling by the Constitutional Court served as a great reminder of what it means to live in a constitutional democracy.
In recent years, largely due to the general disappointment with the liberation dividend, there has been a growing tendency to blame the 1996 constitution for all that is going wrong — from unacceptably high levels of unemployment to the government’s failure to deliver a land reform programme that uplifts the lives of the majority.
Some have been hankering for the past — arguing that parliamentary sovereignty as practised in the Union of South Africa and under apartheid would yield better results than constitutional democracy.
Subjecting the decisions of a democratically elected parliament to Constitutional Court reviews, they claim, curtails the will of the people.
Yet the Phala Phala ruling — in which the Constitutional Court found that parliament had acted unconstitutionally when it voted against starting an impeachment process against President Cyril Ramaphosa after a probe appointed by the National Assembly found that he had a case to answer — has vividly demonstrated why constitutional democracy is the best system of governance.
Under parliamentary sovereignty, the word of parliament, no matter how wrong, would have been final as long as it was rubber-stamped by a majority vote.
But in this case, as was the case in the Nkandla matter, the EFF could approach the country’s highest court because it believed that, while it lost the vote in the house, the constitution was on its side.
We can only hope that in this episode, as in a couple of others before it, all our public representatives have learnt to appreciate what it means to live in a constitutional democracy and why it is important to abide by the rules.
We also welcome Ramaphosa’s indication that he is willing to abide by the court’s ruling and subject himself to the processes that are to follow as parliament finally gets to the bottom of how US dollars, worth millions of rand and stuffed in a sofa at the president’s private farm, got stolen and the theft was not immediately and officially reported to the police.
