Councilor floors all crossed

Well the recent two week floor crossing window for local councilors is now closed and the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) have announced that 486 councilors crossed the floor with the ANC being by far the biggest winner.

What I found most interesting is that all parties, except for the ANC and NNP, have roundly decried the floor crossing legislation (and I agree that it is a blight on our democracy) but when all is said and done they’re more then happy to accept crossing councilors!

Further Helen Zille (DA spokesperson on Education) was on SAFM on Friday denouncing the process but seemingly she has conveniently forgotten that firstly the legislation was to save her party (and kill off the NNP). Without floor crossing legislation the NNP and DA would still be living very unhappily within the DA at local level and at national level only parted ways earlier this year during the recent local election. So frankly without the floor crossing the DA would have torn itself apart by now.

That said an entry on the DA Mal blog suggests that in future the DA will only accept floor crossers when the crosser is directly elected rather then proportionally elected, in other words only at councilor level. From the post I’m not sure if this is merely an internal policy or whether they will try and get the floor crossing legislation changed.

However what I really want to address is a the comments made by the new ANC premier of the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool when he suggested (in early May, blog entry here) that there needs to be a public debate on the floor crossing legislation. Well since then the public has made their feeling known and almost exclusively they are against it. But where’s the debate at governmental level?

Bottom line we need to have a very serious look at the floor crossing legislation. It has served its purpose (enabling the DA/NNP split) and we now surely need to ditch it (except in cases of directly elected as proposed above) and move on.

Comments

[zaBlogger]

More on the change of heart by the DA here.

[Nick]

Great post.

zaBlogger - an update which I hope is more explicit about what I meant. I apologise for my lack of clarity.