"We
must urgently finalize the social compact between the social partners to
achieve our country's fundamental social transformation to reduce and eradicate
the plague of unemployment, poverty, and inequality".
This is the sentence in the ANC Manifesto that President Thabo Mbeki referred to in a conversation with professionals in Gauteng as part of the build-up to the November municipal elections. Commenting on this sentence, Mbeki submits that as the ANC, and after all the promises and commitments they have made, they "had to answer the question of where are the resources going to come from?" He continues to foreground the fact that the pandemic has spoken to South Africans that "we need to join hands and work together and change the situation".
In this rendition, Mbeki was centering issues of the economy, its players, private capital, and investment a condition precedent to whatever promise or pledge anyone looking to lay firsthand the 'executive authority' of municipalities as organs of (the local) state. Whilst municipalities have the right to govern, on their own initiative, the local government matters of their communities, and as the laws of the land provide, Mbeki angles on how this right should also be a function of the collaborative efforts of all other agencies of a State, other than government. The exercise of the right to govern, it would seem, and as Mbeki sub-texted, his talk requires municipalities to structure and manage their administration, budgeting, and planning processes to give priority to the basic needs of the community and promote the social and economic development of the community. This, and it is, in fact, constitutional, municipalities should do by 'participating in national and provincial developmental programs'.
Because the constitution gives municipalities 'executive authority in respect of and has the right to administer the local government matters it lists in its schedules, as well as on matters assigned to it by laws of the land, the issue of what are the basic needs of the community is defined to the extent that the constitution could have been comprehensive. A forensic look at the functional areas of competence by all spheres of government would reveal that government, or more clinically, organs of state in all spheres of government have limited areas where they have the object and/or function of providing, but that of ensuring, promoting, encouraging, and facilitating. In this complex role of government, the actions, interactions, and transactions it would be involved with would require a capability to enter various compacts with non-organ of state agencies that would have made it their business to provide the bulk of the basic needs of society.
As organs of (the local) state, municipalities, acting with all organs of state, and within a cooperative government context that recognizes the distinctive, interdependent, and interrelated character of all involved, will have to create chunked down to spatial jurisdictional social compacts of and about delivery. Within the confines of their constitutional status, municipalities have an added advantage of using the right to govern on their own initiative, to direct state-wide planning in a manner that directs where these variously provided basic needs of society should be provided. The 'executive authority' municipalities command through their councils, and with which they 'may make and administer by-laws for the effective administration of the matters they have a right to administer', make them the authority of final instance in how citizens experience government and the sovereign state, and all that 'live in' South Africa.
Consequential to the 'sentence' Mbeki foregrounded as being undergirding to the entire manifesto is the nature, form, extent, and character of the social compacts between social partners that need to be finalized. There is or will be a need to reconfigure all other social compacting arrangements in society to accommodate what the pandemic communicated as well as what the voters would have pronounced through the vote how 'their public power' should be used by those it has borrowed to. In their pronouncement, voters have in several jurisdictions spread their public power in a manner that de-risks the power of being an exclusive monopoly of one hegemony over others.
Social compacting that the manifesto
envisaged will make sense to the extent that it ensures the realization of the
delivered dream South Africans have as a preamble in their constitution as that
of,
- Healing the divisions of the
past and establishing a society based on democratic values, social
justice, and fundamental human rights,
- Laying the foundations for a
democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of
the people and every citizen is equally protected by law,
- Improving the quality of life
of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and
- Building a united and
democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign
state in the family of nations.
These traits of the South African
dream, anchored by the values of,
- Human dignity, the achievement
of equality, and the advancement of human rights and freedoms.
- Non-racialism and non-sexism.
- Supremacy of the constitution
and the rule of law.
- Universal adult suffrage, a
national common voter’s roll, regular elections, and
- a multi-party system of
democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness, and openness,
will be the standards with which the social compacts will be benchmarked.
Whist the above have decoded the policy framework that may have instructed the Mbeki line of thought, the question is, if indeed social compacting is the new path, what should it be, how should it be, and what should its minimums be to unlock the potential that South Africa is, and yet, choked by postures that seem to have veered from what the constitution has delivered as a promise.
The issue of corruption and the need to entrust public power into the hands of ‘honest and capable' individuals are receiving attention through instruments created in the state system such as Chapter 9 institutions, and the Judicial Investigation Commissions, as well as the law enforcement agencies and courts. In the manner that this is being managed there is a growing consensus that actions that have been taken thus far have become a new deterrent for corruption and its adjunct state capture to continue unabated. This consensus is a form of social compact whose ascension is obligatory via the civility of society and human agreement that crime should not pay and must be punishable.
What might still require social compacting is the building of South Africa into a strong state trusted by all that live in the country. This compacting would have to include the protection of its sovereign borders against encroachment by tendencies citizenship-based remedial actions might find it difficult to deal with. The issues of a National Youth Service linked to the increase of the country's military budget and resources would create a sense of national interest understood by cohorts of youth from a national interest perspective. This national youth service, if created within 'the dream delivered' by the constitution, will create a pool of young persons who would swell the ranks of other public service callings understanding what is in the national interest. This would therefore mean the social compacting process should define what is a national interest in the South African Context.
The stakeholder matrices that need to be mobilized for such compacting will have to have a 'think global act local' paradigm as the South African economy has entangled itself too deep into the global economic networks, without a shared national interest, because of the deficit of the 'national grievances' the post-Apartheid state still had obligation to deal with. In Mbeki's argument, he submits that what the constitution provides is, in fact, dealing with the 'national grievances', and this, it would seem is what should be items of the compacting process.
In the local state, in municipalities, the South African constitution creates municipalities for the whole of the territory of South Africa. This means there can be no development that happens in South Africa without the consent and or facilitation of municipalities. The District Municipalities, which occupy the largest land area in jurisdictional terms, have the responsibility of regional development planning. They are primarily jurisdictions that could have a spatial view, in a micro setting, of development zones, and how these integrate the provincial spatial development including cross-border provincial overlaps. This view aggregates bulk infrastructure and built infrastructure planning in chunks of regional investment opportunities within which private sector players that have abrogated to themselves, entrepreneurially, the responsibility to define and provide certain of the 'basic needs' of communities. This is a social compacting area that has the greatest contestations, given civil society interest in inclusivity, worker rights protection guarantees by the constitution, environmental protection, climate change and global warming implications of development, and the Sustainable Development Goals targets macro-managing humanity's investment into a world it depends upon.
Central to the Mbeki foregrounding
of the sentence was to sensitize ANC professionals, and South Africa in general
that 'truth and the reality of governing a complex state like South Africa,
requires a beyond sloganeering capability that strips of all nostalgia amongst
those appointed and elected to be organs of state'. He was also calling for an
equal commitment to this compacting process from those whose investment
decisions create a base with which the economy could multiply and create new
employment creators. The base which the predictability of our policy machinery
has thus far created, need securing by a compact to have a symbiosis of
private-public patriotic investing.
Now that the voters have pronounced on their preferences, and clearly the ANC as a preference is now a national 46% issue. This emphatic voter determination confirms the need for social compacting. The country awaits.
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
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