Amandla

The respondent, cde Julius Malema, instituted an application on 30 August 2011 for the quashing of all charges. He advanced 22 arguments in support of the application...

Link to full-text on news24

http://www.polity.org.za/article/da-zille-state-of-the-province-address-by-the-western-cape-premier-western-cape-legislature-19022010-2010-02-19

From Polity.org.za

Electoral performance of the British National Party (BNP) in the UK

This site provides free access to a House of Commons Library briefing note SN/SG/5064 which was published in May 2009. The 19 page report offers detailed statistics on the performance of the BNP in UK general elections from 1992-2005, local elections from 2002-9, European parliament elections and London Mayor elections. It also includes ward-by-ward BNP electoral data for 2008 local election.From Intute.ac.uk

http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/SNSG-05064.pdf

Party system developments and electoral legislation in

This site provides free access to a conference paper by Carlo Fusaro which was delivered at the 2009 Political Studies Association conference, Manchester, April 2009. The 23 page paper analyses the evolution of the political system in Italy, focusing upon the Italian electoral laws in the aftermath of the 1948 constitution.It includes analysis of the 2006, 2008 elections in Italy.From Intute.ac.uk

http://www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/2009/Fusaro.pdf

Down the wrong path? Party reform processes in the institutions of candidate selection and recruitment in the United Kingdom

This site provides free access to a conference paper by Meryl Kenny which was delivered at the 2009 Political Studies Association conference, Manchester, April 2009. The 32 page paper employs a feminist institutional approach to analyse recent changes to political candidate selection by political parties in Scotland. It uses micro level data from an example of a Scottish constituency in the run up to the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections.

http://www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/2009/Kenny.pdf
From Intute.ac.uk

Party members, discontent and theories of political participation

This site provides free access to a conference paper by Emilie van Haute which was delivered at the 2009 Political Studies Association conference, Manchester, April 2009. The 16 page paper uses a case study of political parties in Belgium to examine and analyse theories of discontent among party members. It considers the effect upon party activism and political participation.

http://www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/2009/van%20Haute.pdf

From Intute.ac.uk

Discipline and process: a topography of power in the modern political party
This site provides free access to a conference paper by Danny Rye which was delivered at the 2009 Political Studies Association conference, Manchester, April 2009. The 14 page paper develops a theoretical framework for examining issues relating to discipline within political parties. This involves consideration of structures of power within political parties. From Intute.ac.uk
http://www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/2009/Rye.pdf

Parties and elections in Indonesia 2009: the consolidation of democracy
This site provides free access to a report by Dr Stephen Sherlock which was published as Parliament of Australia, Parliamentary Library research paper no. 35, 2008–09, ISSN 1834-9854 in June 2009. The 29 page report provides a good introduction to the 2009 Indonesian elections. This includes an overview of the main political parties, the results of the April 2009 parliamentary elections and discussion of the issues at stake in the forthcoming July 2009 presidential elections. From Intute.ac.uk
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/2008-09/09rp35.pdf

State of the Nation and responses to this speech:

State of the Nation address, June 3, 2009

President JG Zuma delivers his State of the Nation address at a Joint Sitting of Parliament, Cape Town.

In this video clip, Dr Paul-Simon Handy, of the Institute for Security Studies, speaks to Polity's Amy Witherden about what he calls the "recurring myth of African unity".

 

Below is the original opinion piece on which this discussion was based.

It has become a tradition in Africa and among its Diaspora to celebrate Pan-Africanism on 25 May, Africa Day. On this day, Africans across the world reaffirm the aspiration for unity that formed the basis for many of the struggles in the continent's recent history.
But is there much to celebrate this 25 May? Does Pan-Africanism carry the same meaning today as in colonial and immediate post-colonial times? It is clear that Pan-Africanism has been misdirected, and has become an ideology with symbolic rather than concrete objectives. The idea of Pan-Africanism should be revisited, with the aim of reorienting it towards service delivery, performance and efficient governance.

Despite the tangible successes the African Union (AU) has enjoyed in its brief history -- its impressive record in organising a collective security framework with a peace and security architecture and its growing importance as a generator of common norms to regulate an African way of "living together" -- paradoxically it appears that the idea of Pan-Africanism is in a deep crisis. This conclusion is based on more than a criticism of the flamboyant excesses of the current President of the AU, who in many aspects symbolises the antithesis of all the major achievements of the last decades. Rather, the perceived crisis of Pan-Africanism derives largely from the persistence of the myth of African unity, which paralyses African dynamism within the continent and, increasingly, in international forums. The consequence is the absence of an efficient and respected body to lead the continent intellectually, politically and economically by authority and example.

If there is a commonly shared belief among much of the African intellectual and political elite, to the extent that it has become a dogma, it is what we can term the myth of African unity. This myth is derived directly from the African experience of the colonial period; it is a collective reflex of the weak, which suggests that by uniting, Africans can resist the colonial and neo-colonial hegemony. It is principally a reactive idea, born of the painful African experience of colonization. It has generated a huge body of literature, which constitutes the foundation of academic and political Pan-Africanism. This mythology constitutes the driving ideology of the AU, even though many have forgotten that the birth of its progenitor, the Organisation of African Unity, represented the failure of Kwame Nkrumah's ‘African unity' dream. The most recent product generated by the Pan-Africanist dogma is the African unity government, championed by Libya and its President. This myth has become dominant and in some ways even totalitarian, in that it has become difficult to question the usefulness of an African Union Government without being considered an enemy of Africa. However, most defenders of the ‘African unity' government are unable to articulate logically why a continental bureaucratic monolith would be in any better position to solve issues of socio-economic delivery than national and local structures.

Proponents of the highly symbolic idea of ‘African unity' generally proceed from two highly debatable postulates. The first of these is that Africa's artificial borders lie at the root of most of the continent's problems. The second is the assumption that race, linguistic parenthood and a common past of suffering make us automatically brothers and sisters who share the same values and ambitions. These two arguments of the Pan-Africanist mythology are erroneous. This does not mean that African states' borders are not artificial, nor do I intend to contradict the legacy of the respected Senegalese historian and Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop by proclaiming that African cultures are not linked by a profound common substrate. The two principal arguments of academic and populist Pan-Africanism are in error because of the conclusions they imply.

Since the modern state began its successful career of expansion after the Westphalia treaty in 1648, states' borders have generally been shaped by wars, treaties and other encounters. In short, there are no natural borders in the modern world. States' borders are by definition artificial and the only difference in Africa's case is that these artificial borders drawn by non-Africans. So it is less the artificiality of the borders than their heteronomy, their reflection of a foreign agenda that could be problematic. Even here, however, there is no African exceptionalism, as the same principle also applied to Latin America following Spanish colonisation. In reality, artificial borders are in and of themselves neither good nor bad. The only certainties are that they exist and have generated deeply rooted national identities that have to be taken into account in any serious attempt to create unity. Although the African Union is itself a combination of national states, adepts of the African unity still consider African states to be an accident of history.

Regarding the link between Pan-Africanism and race and linguistic community, the numerous wars, violent conflicts and even genocide across the continent amply demonstrate that there is no transcendental sense of brotherhood unifying Africans. Rwanda and Somalia remind us that sharing a common language, history and culture affords no protection against barbarism. Basing a sublimated unity on race and culture is to ignore the reality of contemporary Africa, which is more than just black, rural and consensus-oriented. The century-long presence of whites in Southern and Northern Africa, of Indians in East Africa and of "Arabs" throughout the continent indicates a more cosmopolitan, diverse and integrated continent than many of the apostles of ‘Blackness" would like to acknowledge.

Unity does not necessarily need sentimentalism and geography to be effective. It rather needs values and norms; shared beliefs in specific rules of the game, which still have to be invented.

In reality, the Pan-Africanist myth is the profound expression of a deep-seated African "lamentation", which makes it difficult for Africans to think about a post-post colonial time in which we cease to become mere objects fated by historical circumstance, and strive to become the agents and shapers of our destiny. The intellectual constructions around race and artificial borders have not yet generated shared values around the continent after some fifty years of independence. That Africa's leaders are now discussing the creation of a continental government structure, despite our inability successfully to manage our local and village councils and other small-scale governments is telling.

Neither race, history nor widespread under-development are sustainable grounds for unity. The real foundation of African unity should be based on efficient governance norms and practices, democratic consensus and economic prosperity. Literature indicates today that though there is no direct causal relationship between these three concepts, each constitutes a good in its own right. To be effective, these norms do not require the support of a Pan-Africanist ideology caught up in the toils of obsolete and misguided debate.

Since the Pan-Africanist ideology has been unable to articulate a vision beyond hollow concepts such as "Ubuntu" or other collective therapeutic slogans, because sentimentalism and mythology instead of ideas and scholarship continue to dominate the African unity debate, there is an urgent need to revisit the Pan-Africanism. A possible way to do so is to revisit the African unity debate along the utilitarian lines of efficiency, common values and service delivery, thus bringing the idea of African unity back to the people and avoiding the elitist trap in which Pan-Africanist discussions are caught. The Pan-Africanist dream has to be articulated along material (trade, ‘free' movement across borders, better communications between countries, access to each others good and services) and immaterial (establishing the conditions for the rule of law, peace and security) incentives that will make sense to the common man.

One of the weakest links of the Pan- Africanist discussion today is that it is not accompanied by a sound scholarly debate on African integration. Such discussion is currently dominated by politicians, development agencies and certain scholars scattered around the world, and has failed to produce a structured research area within which various and contending schools of thought may find expression. With the notable exception of the South-Africa based African Renaissance Centre and maybe the Julius Nyerere Chair at the University of Dar es Salam there is no credible African Integration research centre in the continent (and yet they exist in Europe and the US) able to provide policy-makers with research based analysis and policy-options on African unity and integration. For all their faults the African renaissance debate and Nepad attempted to address these issues but were later caught up in the current logic of false consensus.

Modernising the discussion about African integration, and giving it a deeper analytical substance, would allow for the exploration of new ideas and options. Without deeply involving African thinking and thinkers, without a critical interrogation of the major assumptions and postulates of the Pan-Africanist myth, African unity will remain an elitist idea and aspiration. The complexity of development challenges and the needs of Africa's peoples deserve and require far better than this.

By: Dr Paul-Simon Handy, Head of the African Security Analysis Programme, Institute for Security Studies, Tshwane (Pretoria)

Party policy in modern democracies
This website provides free access to the materials relating to the book Party Policy in Modern Democracies edited by Kenneth Benoit and Michael Laver which was published by Routledge in 2006. ISBN 978-0-415-36832-2. The 306 page text critically analyses party policy in 47 modern democracies. Section 2 offers discussion of how to measure and compare policy positions of political parties. Section 3 contains detailed data on party competition and policy positions in the 47 nations. It includes tables and graphs comparing policy positions of left-right and between nations of Western Europe and the former communist Eastern Europe. It also considers isues relating to EU integration and party policy positions. The website contains the full text of the author draft of the book, as well as a collection of associated data sets which may be downloaded. Copyright information is displayed on the website. From Intute.ac.uk
http://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/ppmd/

http://www.congressofthepeople.org.za

http://www.anc.org.za/elections/2009/manifesto/manifesto.html

Popular attitudes to democracy in Ghana 2008
This site provides free access to Afrobarometer briefing paper no.51, published in June 2008. Afrobarometer is a series of public attitude surveys conducted in African nations. It is a cross-national survey research project, coordinated by the Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), and the Institute for Research in Empirical Political Economy (IREEP, Benin). This 7 page report considers how satified Ghanaians are with the state of democracy in their nation, what threats they see and their attitudes towards popular democracy in general. It is a useful background on the run up to the 2008 elections.
http://www.afrobarometer.org/papers/AfrobriefNo51.pdf

National Democratic Congress (Ghana)
The National Democratic Congress is a leading political party of Ghana. Its website provides information on its aims, history, membership and recent activities. It includes access to recent press releases, party maniestos and other political policy documents. It also contains coverage of involvement in recent elections in Ghana.
http://www.ndc.org.gh:8080/ndc/home.do

New Patriotic Party (Ghana)
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a major political party of Ghana. Its website provides information on its political policies, membership and recent activities. It includes press releases, political policy statements and current manifestos as well as calendars and photographs of recent events. These include coverage of involvement in recent elections in Ghana.
http://www.npp-ghana.org/

Ghana elections 2008: web dossier
This site has been created by the African Studies Centre, University of Leiden. It provides free access to a web dossier of information and materials relating to the December 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections in Ghana.It includes some background on the context of the elections, the full text of the constitution, a bibliography of references to selected journal articles and books, and links to important websites and blogs monitoring the events.
http://www.ascleiden.nl/Library/Webdossiers/GhanaElections.aspx

European Union Election Observation Mission to Ghana
This is the official website of the European Union delegation which monitored the December 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections in Ghana. It provides information on the aims of the mission, its composition and methods as well as background details on the electoral system of Ghana. Users may access press releases, photographs, and full text monitoring election reports from the website.Thes einclude statement on the conduct of the elections and state of democracy in Ghana.
http://www.eueomghana.org/EN/default.html

Ghana: Carter Center resources
This site is maintained by independent research organisation, the Carter Center. It provides free access to information about its development and peace and democracy programmes in Ghana. Users may access press releases and full text reports. These include parliamentary and presidential election monitoring reports from approximately 1992 onwards.
http://www.cartercenter.org/countries/ghana.html

The recently formed ANC breakaway party, Congress Of The People (COPE), has launched a new website and Facebook group.

The new website, hosted at http://www.congressofthepeople.org.za/ , provides information about the new party such as its declaration, membership details and media statements. 

The Facebook group – which complements the party’s news website - has attracted 1 242 members so far.

From:

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Isandla Institute and the Open Society Foundation for South Africa invite you to a Development Dialogue on 

 Speaking truth to power: Politics and jurisprudence in a young democracy 

 Thursday 6 November 2008, 16h30 - 18h00 

Centre for the Book, Cape Town

(tea and coffee served beforehand, please be seated at 16h30)    

In recent months, the role and independence of the judiciary in South Africa has come under scrutiny. The debate seems to have become polarised around two extreme perspectives. On the one hand, some hold the view that the judiciary has involved itself in, and has allowed itself to be influenced by, the politics of the day. Others, however, are of the opinion that the state and the ANC have sought to interfere with or compromise/discredit the judiciary, in particular the Constitutional Court. What is at stake is the autonomy of the judiciary and its credibility in speaking truth to power. In our new democracy, what is the relationship between politics and jurisprudence? Are the checks and balances in place to avoid undue political interference with the judiciary? And to what extent can the judiciary tread on the terrain of politics, without fear or favour, but at the same time without exceeding its mandate?

 

Justice Dennis Davis (Cape High Court), Rhoda Kadalie (Impumelelo Innovations Awards Trust) and Prof Pierre De Vos (University of the Western Cape, t.b.c.) have been invited to share their perspectives on these questions.  

 

The Development Dialogue will be held on Thursday Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 6 November 2008 from 16h30-18h00, at the Centre for the Book, 62 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town. Tea and coffee are made available between 16h00-16h30. Kindly note that the event will start at 16h30. Afterwards, there will be an opportunity for informal interaction over drinks and snacks. 

If you are interested in attending this event, please r.s.v.p. on admin@isandla.org.za by Friday 31 October. You will receive confirmation of your attendance.

 

Thanks to Fareeda Jadwat for this.

Political parties in conflict-prone societies: regulation, engineering and democratic development
This site provides free access to the full text of a book edited by Benjamin Reilly, Per Nordlund which was published by International IDEA and the United Nations Press in 2008. 978-92-808-1157-5 . The 326 page book contains a collection of articles which discuss the trend in conflict-prone societies towards promoting stable and inclusive politics via state regulation of political parties. It offers case studies from around the world including nations in Africa, Asia Latin America and considers the impact of the trend on democracy and democratization in the regions. Intute.ac.uk
http://www.idea.int/publications/ppcps/index.cfm

Arab Political Parties Studies
Arab Political Parties Studies (APPS) is a research project launched in 2006 by The Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS- Beirut) with the partnership of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC-Canada). It focuses on the 6 nations of : Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, and Yemen, analysing the development of political parties in these regions and their role in the democratisation process. A major focus of interest is the rise and role of political Islam in the Middle East. The website provides information on the aims and progress of the project. It includes some full text papers and reports. Intute.ac.uk
http://www.appstudies.org/

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/conf/conference52/index.html.

 

General documents
•	Press statements
•	Discussion documents
•	Conference News
Conference documents
•	Conference Programme
•	President's Political Report
•	Secretary General's Organisational Report
•	Speeches
•	Messages of support
Conference decisions
•	Conference Declaration
•	Resolutions
•	Constitution
•	Strategy and Tactics
•	Newly-elected National Executive Committee

 

Isandla Institute and the Open Society Foundation for South Africa invite you to a Development Dialogue on

 

 Positioning power: Alliance politics at play   

 

 

Thursday 22 November 2007, 16h30 - 18h00 

(tea and coffee served beforehand, please be seated at 16h30)    

Venue to be confirmed, Cape Town
 

The build up to the ANC National Conference in Polokwane in December shows that the internal politics between and within the ANC, COSATU and SACP are intensifying. Alliance partners have recently expressed robust statements on key issues, suggesting that they are seeking to position themselves as ‘kingpins’ with respect to leadership and policy direction of the ANC. But the positioning does not only happen between alliance partners; we also see significant internal manoeuvring of groupings/factions within each party and this is likely to intensify in weeks to come. Clearly, the forthcoming ANC National Conference is significant not only from the perspective of the leadership question, but (and intricately linked with the leadership issue) also for marking future policy in the post-Mbeki era and in suggesting who/what will be the dominant ideological and strategic forces in the fourth democratic dispensation (2009-2014). Are these dynamics a sign of a healthy, vibrant political culture or is it indicative of problems with the current political culture and existing systems and procedures for engagement and debate? The Development Dialogue will seek to shed light on the current dynamics, what they mean for the future of the Alliance and for democratic politics more broadly.

 

Yunus Carrim, MP (Member of the SACP) and Prof Sipho Seepe (political commentator, t.b.c.) have been invited to share their perspectives on these questions.

The Development Dialogue will be held on Thursday 22 November 2007 from 16h30-18h00 in Cape Town. The venue will be confirmed. Tea and coffee are made available between 16h00-16h30. Kindly note that the event will start at 16h30. Afterwards, there will be an opportunity for informal interaction over drinks and snacks. 

If you are interested in attending this event, please r.s.v.p. on admin@isandla.org.za by Thursday 15 November. You will receive confirmation of your attendance.

 
We look forward to seeing you there!

 

 

Isandla Institute
PO Box 12263
Mill Street, Gardens 8010
Tel: + 27 21 465 8751
Fax: + 27 21 465 8769
Email: admin@isandla.org.za
Website: www.isandla.org.za

IDEA's database of political party reports

...It provides information on political parties worldwide. This includes coverage of rules relating to political donations, state funding and regulation....

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