Over 22 years after Nelson Mandela walked out of prison to realise his dream of an open and free society and 16 years after the fractious negotiations that gave rise to the country’s Constitution, the Open Society Foundation for South Africa’s (OSFSA’s) latest monitoring index has found that little progress has been made towards achieving these ideals.

Speaking at the release of the second round of the Open Society Monitoring Index (OSMI), on April 11, at the Women’s Jail at Constitution Hill, in Johannes-burg, founder of the Citizens Movement for Social Change Dr Mamphela Ramphele said citizens’ voices had been raised against “attempts to move us backwards into a closed society in the name of transformation”.

“Citizens have challenged not only government but also the private sector in areas where impunity is taking root. South Africans have much to be worried about. The tide towards a closed, unaccountable and corrupt State is too strong for the few who dare to stand up to be counted. Strength in numbers is needed,” she said.
The second OSMI, commissioned in April last year, measured openness in South African society based on four broad dimensions: the free flow of infor- mation; inclusive, accountable and responsive government institutions; fiscal accountability; and the rule of law. Each dimension included several subdimensions.

As in the first round of the OSMI conducted in 2010, not one of the dimensions achieved a score above the midpoint of 5.5 out of 10. Openness was most compromised with respect to fiscal accountability, which was introduced as a fourth dimension in OSMI Round 2. The latest survey showed that this dimension had earned an overall mean score of 3.8, compared with an average of 5.4 for accountable and responsive government, 4.7 for the rule of law and 4.6 for the free flow of information.

“Overall, these scores indicate that South Africa is not doing particularly well in any of the dimensions, and is doing particularly poorly in the area of fiscal accountability,” says OSFSA executive director Zohra Dawood.

Compared with OSMI Round 1 in 2010, there is a marginal improvement in the rule of law from 4.4 to 4.7 in 2012. This may be driven by the 0.7 increase in score for the independence of elite law-enforcing agencies subdimension.
The improved score is surprising, considering that national corruption-fighting unit, the Hawks – successor to the dis-banded Scorpions – faces an uncertain future after the recent Glenister Judgment, so called when Johannesburg businessperson Hugh Glenister challenged the constitutional validity of the legislation that disbanded the Scorpions and established the Hawks within the South African Police Services (SAPS).
Glenister won his case when the Constitutional Court ruled that the SAPS Amendment Bill was unconstitutional on the grounds of insufficient specialisation and insulation from political interference.
“We have reasoned that, despite the existing inadequacies of South Africa’s anticorruption unit, the favourable ruling in the Glenister Judgment represents progress for the rule of law. But we believe the outspoken and courageous voice of Public Protector Thuli Madonsela has gone some way to improving South Africans’ confidence in this regard,” adds Dawood.

Despite minimal movement in the accountable and responsive government institutions dimension, it carries the highest score of 7.2, owing to overwhelmingly positive evaluations of South Africa’s ability to routinely conduct free and fair elections.

The second-highest overall score of 5.5, essentially unchanged from 2010, was allocated to a free and independent news media. Its other subdimensions, public access to information, received a score almost identical to the 2010 score of 4.4.

“This reflects a sense that the Protection of State Information Bill will be revised to allow for a public interest defence of the publication of classified information, or that it will ultimately fail to withstand court challenges. It might also reflect the fact that the existing laws on public access to information are already so complex and expensive to use that public access would not be appreciably diminished from its already problematic state,” says Dawood.

The low score for fiscal accountability masks a significant variation between the 5.0 awarded to the subdimension of national government fiscal accountability and the 2.6 given to political party fiscal accountability, notably the lowest score earned by any of the 11 subdimensions.

“Measuring South Africa’s progress toward creating a truly open society is essential, not simply as a way of gauging its success in putting democratic principles into practice but also as a way of assess- ing the country’s ability to realise its transformative social aims through public policies informed by accurate information, responsive governance and reasoned debate,” said Dawood.