The IGR Template has Shifted
'In the Republic, government is constituted as national, provincial and local spheres of government which are distinctive, interdependent and interrelated,' declares the South African Constitution. Officials at the national and provincial spheres of government would now agree that their IGR portion of the Constitution is served, courtesy of the 1st November 2021 elections outcome. The relationship between governments at municipal, provincial, and national spheres have changed, and transacting would require interactions that respect the various political mandates. The coming 5 years will, in local government, begin a decade of consensus and compromise for the sake of service delivery. Irrespective of what strategies the centre of government puts in place, the tension and competition with government in spheres where it is not the governing party will intensify; it is inevitable. Fortunately the Constitution drafters envisaged this eventuality and proffered principles of cooperative government as guardrails that would prevent government catastrophe and allow for strategic collaboration, and competition, to be the template of intergovernmental relations.
As the political party opposition complex gains confidence that be the end of the 2020-2030 decade, their electoral support would surpass that of the governing ANC, the complexity of governing South Africa will be how to grow into an intergovernmental relations system that recognises coalition government as the new centre of political power. Post liberation elites, or rather the thinking centre of the governing party, might dismiss the significance of the shifting template of IGR, for the opposition the size of their combined influence has always mattered, and being a dominant political motive force, though various in character, is what turbocharges their confidence and assertiveness. Their dealings with the fiscal centre will be leveraged to start tweaking budget allocations to be reflective of the new power permutations. Bureaucratic discretion of budget spending will be the new order.
The dominant political parties in the political coalitions, essentially created as a bulwark to neutralise the chronically feared power of one party majority, will continue to advance in the many fronts the governing centre has thus far demonstrated it is failing. The strategy to invest in a youthful leadership has appealed to voting youth that has been abandoned as a key political power motive force since the 'expunging' of the 'Freedom if our lifetime' youth cohort that went to establish the Economic Freedom Front as a political party. The magnet to ideation that is found in youth lost platform at the centre of South African governing elite politics, in fact, veterans and stalwarts ascended as key future planners that it had traditionally been. The technology of organisation, though still in abundance in the governing centre, was choked by an unconsciously defended refusal to modernise the governing party, and by extension our democracy, by a ageist leadership cohort the current factions are created in its image.
National (and Provincial) government must decide how it is going to respond to the assertive agenda of the opposition to control spaces into which all statewide planning is dependent on the integrated development plans they have a mandate to drive. The general posture has in the past being that of opting for administrative decoupling, with the centre , and where it had political power to impose its will, intervening with section 139 powers, instead of working through the cooperative government principles. In the current context, the possibility of constitutional court cases with which the country would be federalised through inch-by-inch court decisions is real. Municipal jurisdictions will take sides, and the risk of intergovernmental relations conflicts propelled by policy differences will escalate. The natural question will always be 'can a centre that has demonstrated a capacity to flirt with 'command council' convenience as we saw in how they centralised COVID19 response to a level where vaccination performance is in fact a function of intergovernmental, private sector, and civil society coordination failure, be able to deal with the new context.
The centrist posture of panning that has been settling in South Africa, might be the immediate risk to how the country progresses into its new world of coalitions. Intergovernmental relations, even within a sphere, or between spheres that are governed by one political party, is an endeavour requiring the most diplomatic of skills to build relations and relationships. Central departments such as CogTa will have to up the ante and start issuing IGR practice notes and provide IGR enrolment tools with with intergovernmental compacts could be developed and implemented. Treasury has for a while been in this game, they have developed several playbooks in the intergovernmental fiscal relations space, especially in the build environment space. With political power increasingly being spatial, budget planning and all other intergovernmental granting systems should start attuning to spatial political demands, otherwise the centre becomes the new problem.
The essence of the new IGR template will be managed strategic collaboration, and competition. There would be a need to foreground how the country establishes the hard limits to municipalities in a way that they do not find themselves operating as little sovereign jurisdictions with policies that are in variance to the values undergirding our democracy. Competition for political hegemony through demonstrations of ability to govern, should not be allowed to be acute in areas that might result in repugnancy tensions characteristic of hard core federal democracies.
In this changed template of IGR, an audit of how centrist have the country's IGR structures been might be necessary. This will yield data with which these institutions could embark on a re-engineering process of attuning to the changed template. The need to devise work procedures with which general standards of IGR are created, is established. The federal character of organised local government might have to be sharpened to accommodate the new system shocks that will come with a diverse 54% majority of minorities in local government.
The Thinc Foundation, in a collaborative project being developed with the University of Venda will be starting a series of knowledge translation activities within which the new IGR template will be unpacked.
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