Parliamentary panel says voters should elect MPs directly: report
A high profile parliamentary panel has recommended that South Africa’s current party-voting system be replaced by one which would allow voters to directly select their MPs.
The panel was created by speaker of the national Assembly Baleka Mbete in 2015 and was designed to evaluate the success of a number of laws introduced since 1994. Its findings were based on a series of public consultations held throughout the country.
According to TimesLive, the panel, which was headed up by former president Kgalema Motlanthe, found that political party leaders are too powerful in the current system and can prevent MPs from acting independently when holding the executive to account.
This led to a system which was doomed to “reproducing the ills of the apartheid era”, it said.
The panel recommended that the legislature amend the electoral act to provide for an electoral system that “makes MPs accountable to defined constituencies on a proportional representation and constituency system for national elections”.
Under this new system, 50% of seats would be allocated to constituency MPs and 50% to MPs party-nominated by proportional representation.
South Africa’s main political parties were yet to respond to the findings of the panel at the time of writing.
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