Citizens Voices: An Election Roundtable

On November 2nd at the District 6 museum in Cape Town, ECES faciliatated an Election Round Table discussion. The round table was moderated by IECs Provincial Electoral Officer (PO) of the Western Cape, Rev Courtney Sampson and Dr Kondwani Chirambo, ECES. 

The panellists were Mrs Ntutu Mtwana, Mr Eldred De Klerk, Mrs Fatima Swartz, Mr Ghalib Galant and Ms Razaan Baily.

A Delegation from the European Parliament was visiting EU funded initiative in the province and spent the afternoon at the District 6 Museum. The Delegation, supported by key staff from the EU Delegation to South Africa, consisted of three Members of the European Parliament namely Sabine Verheyen, a German Member of European Parliament with the European People’s Party (EPP). Verheyen is currently serving as the 2nd Vice-Chair of the European Parliament’s delegation with South Africa. Michael Gahler, a German MEP for the EPP. Along with being a member to the delegation to South Africa, Gahler is the current Vice-President of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and serves on the Subcommittee on Human Rights. He has headed EU Electoral Observation Missions to Tunisia in 2011 and Pakistan in 2013 and Maria Gabriela Zoana, a Romanian MEP with the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (PSD). Zoana is the Vice Chair on the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, as member on the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality and the delegation to South Africa. Together, they supported the election round table and handed out certificates to participants who completed the LEAD workshop.

The round table discussion aimed to lift up diverse perspectives on some of the main sources of election-related conflict in South Africa in general and in Western Cape specifically focusing on;
i) Intra-party conflicts 
ii) Political Party factionalism
iii) The “causality” of instability in political party leadership and how that transmits to the electorate in terms of civic unrest - or vice-versa. 
iv) Criminality and electoral integrity: blurred lines between the key actors meant to prevent and manage crimes with a political aim.

The discussion was in turn driven by the primary discussion question namely that the increase of intra-party conflicts and factionalism in South Africa have given rise to electoral conflict and violence: how and under what circumstances can mediation prevent or manage such conflicts?

The overall objective of the round table was to explore whether or not mediation can be effective in preventing certain electoral conflicts in a given electoral context. Discussants used self-lived encounters with electoral conflicts, their root causes and explore why and how mediation could be employed to resolve electoral-political conflicts and potential violence.

A few more words about the round table venue are warranted. District Six was named the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867. It was established as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants. By the beginning of the twentieth century, processes of removals and marginalisation had begun after having been declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950, and by 1982, the life of the community was over. More than 60 000 people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas aptly known as the Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers.