Time to Close the Open Till and End the Era of the Permanent Politician

Somewhere in South Africa, a Grade 11 pupil stands before a school assembly and promises longer breaks, lunchtime music and credit at the tuck shop. The applause is thunderous. The teachers at the back of the hall already understand the problem: they will spend the year running the school around that applause.

The joke works because the country recognises the pattern. Politics, too, has become a contest in which the central performance measure is not delivery but survival. Re-election is not quite the right description in South Africa. The more accurate target is remaining employable in politics.

At national and provincial level, voters generally do not choose individual candidates. They choose party lists. An MP’s future depends less on the views of voters in a particular place than on where the party puts that MP on a list assembled behind closed doors. Independents have been allowed on national and provincial ballots since 2024, but party lists remain the main route into office.

The recent registration crisis involving the governing party offered a vivid illustration. In the days before the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s deadline for the November elections, party leaders moved from one emergency meeting to another over the list: who appeared on it, who had been removed and whose name had reached the system before the deadline. The party missed the deadline, as it had in 2021, although a changed election timetable provided a lifeline then. This time, the commission said the door was closed, leaving the party at risk of exclusion from contests for which it had failed to register.

The crisis focused on the list, not on water, potholes or any voter’s priorities. Other parties use the same machinery, the article says, but operated it more effectively this time. The proposed remedy is to treat public office as a tour of duty, backed by term limits, cooling-off periods and deferred pay. The aim is to make a clean departure more attractive than holding on indefinitely.