Coincidence naturally stimulates thought. No sooner had I heard An Expert’s disillusioned analysis of African ex-liberation movements as dominant government parties riddled by factionalism, than I received a book from my long-term South African friend Lorna de Smidt entitled “FACTIONAL POLITICS. How dominant parties implode or stabilize” by Françoise Boucek.
The expert explained that factionalism in parties such as Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF or South Africa’s African National Congress has little to do with ideology, but is due to rivalry over lucrative posts. Dr Boucek, an international political scientist, focuses on four dominant parties in rich countries in Britain, Canada, Italy and Japan. She concludes party unity is essential but hard to keep up and lists several reasons why this is threatened by factionalism:
- Electoral success causes competition which pressurizes partisan resources.
- Dominant parties are heterogeneous giving rise to ideological claims leading to splits;
- Career politicians are attracted to dominant parties causing rivalry for available posts;
- The balance between a party’s collective goals and individual careers is altered by the security of the office.
I’ve shortened Dr Boucek’s reasons a bit, but these don’t sound all that different to the expert’s assessment: the politicians are hungry for power and all the goodies that go with it. The struggles within a long-lasting powerful party need therefore to be kept in check to prevent implosion. Inevitable factions are formed leading to the formation of dissidents who fight against the leadership to effect change. It is essential for the party wishing to remain all-powerful to quash such dissent.
All of which makes one think of dominant parties one knows in any part of the world and that’s precisely what we see: in the USA there are the Republicans who see unity by accepting Trumpism, with the Democrats facing their own differences, in Great Britain Boris Johnson triumphed within his party with his Brexit, Covid vaccination policy and success in dividing the country. As for southern Africa: no matter how bitter the rivalries are within the ruling party in Zimbabwe, the desire for continued dominance unites the politicians at election time. The expert predicted a possible new army putsch in that country so that others could feed at the resources trough. In South Africa, the present warring within the AC could lead either to implosion or successful suppression of the dissidents against the current leadership. Some parties are brought down because of power struggles, others succeed in controlling them.
All of this begs one question: how do these personal ambitions and rivalries and dominant ruling parties serve the people they are supposedly representing and whose welfare is allegedly their main concern?
We can all instantly cite examples where this is not merely of secondary importance – or even more sadly – of none.
A subject that inevitably leads to debates on the style of governance and the everlasting discussion of how democracy functions or is dysfunctional on the ground.