If it is purposed for humanity, eventually, inevitably, and fortunately, even the very best or legitimate of orders, do come to an end, or, and at the least, submit to the will of humanity. The balance of power underpinning any political order will get to a state of imbalance, as a condition of humanity. The voter preference for leadership turnover, albeit along a continuum of an established pattern of templates, does put even the legitimate of any order under pressure to adapt, note not change or transform, to new conditions. This is what South African Metropolitan Cities, and more acutely the capital city, has pronounced to South Africa's politics that in these our Cities, 'there shall be Metropolitan Municipal Governments of Unity', to trail-blaze our national in 2024, until we are mature enough to risk a one dominant party system again.
Reminiscent of the events that followed the arrest of its former President, the governing ANC saw the largest single 'looting' of its political power in KZN and Gauteng, this time through a formal and constitutional process, an 'insurrection of a special type'. Whilst the other 'insurrection' could be associable to factional fault lines within the governing party, and characterised as spontaneous and organised, this 'insurrection' was presided over by one of Africa's respected independent elections commission. Voter discontent with the governing party, as manifest in vote withdrawal and reassignment, is the single most message to the ANC that 'for the nation to thrive, inconvenient tribes may have to die'.
The implications of these Metropolitan voter pronouncements on how they want to be governed, albeit spin doctored, and yet true in many ways, as voter apathy and/or sheer abstention, is an inevitability our politics should be ready to deal with. The management and control of public affairs in Metros is now the newest program whose outcome will redefine South African politics into posterity. The voter verdict calling for coalition arrangements in their name is going to wreak havoc to established patterns profiling South Africa's social and political fabric. Voters have thrust politicians into experiencing convulsions out of which both a desire and compulsion for something new is now an inevitability, or they will be irrelevant.
As the political balance of power is tilted by voter efforts to truncate the tide of (local) state failure, the most consequential outcome of these efforts, will be new permutations of political power in favour of a non-nostalgic democratic will being born around us. The attendant service delivery dynamics will (also) be consequential to almost all aspects of human governance reminiscent of open society pursuing democracies. As voters direct the birth of a new metropolitan municipal government universe, they are also signalling a new urgency to end whatever rubbish existed.
The appointed, and incumbent, cohort of officials that were facilitating what voters have repudiated in the political, will have to either fold and exit, or adapt to new conditions, as the political mandating process has lost its character to be obvious. The plummeted supply of services to local communities, as a result of low to no consequence management, will have to seek new trajectories to rise to the occasion, lest the mandate will be hollow to what voters have directed.
Resembling human birth, the new metropolitan municipal government order of coalitions will be painful, it will disrupt the routine of government at all spheres of government. National and Provincial government tendencies of super-ordinance will henceforth be mediated by the constitutional demand of 'distinctiveness' and 'warning' not to encroach on the institutional integrity of government in another sphere. The success of nationally construed programs will now be dependent on political coalitions that might be hostile to the ideological intents of a proposing sphere, yet obligated by the exigencies of their mandate to change in the name of voting citizens.
As these intergovernmental relationships change, so will the relations between metropolitan municipalities and other spheres change. Provincial government will require new mindsets, chief amongst them will be a quick realisation that together with all that possess public power, they are organs of (one, sovereign, and democratic) state, constituted as national, provincial and local spheres of government which are distinctive, interdependent and interrelated.
Given the combined budget size and gross geographic product of all metropolitan municipalities, it is indisputable that the impact of new coalitions on the whole of government, and the political economy, will be unprecedented. Given that the unprecedented confounds understanding, it is expected that all political, economic, and administration lenses will, and as a default, illuminate the familiar which generally obscures the reality we are facing, thus turning the unprecedented into an extension of a threatened past instead of a promise of the future. Bureaucratic responses will in this context, and if we are not careful, be about normalization of the abnormal, which might make fighting the scourge of incompetence, including post-elections reconstruction, and capable local state building tasks, an uphill battle.
It is at this point, and South Africa has been before, that society is expected to raise 'new breeds of leadership' whose ear will be constantly attuned to the echos coming from within the chambers whence the new mandate to be better originated. A new cohort of leaders that will navigate this delicate phase of our democratic existence should emerge. A political ecdysis should be avoided as new species of elected and appointed leaders are induced to epidural birth. The time to do politics outside the demands of our constitution is gone, and fortunately for us it is voter imposed, and those parties whose policies are centrist in outlook should see and read the warning signs, lest they are courting further irrelevance. Public Service competence development will, and without a doubt, be irrelevant, if it does not entail compulsory modules on intergovernmental relations. New attributes for public service by elected and appointed officials will define the new normal.
Because every post-crises intervention begins in careful knowledge of what needs to be corrected, the logic of solution development will in the process become a liability to the resources. The time frames required to ethically and realistically come with a solution all point to the reality of a national recession, notwithstanding its muted tones, and thus constraining to the requisite resources. The configuration of a broad coalition government consisting of all parties in the municipal council, and in this context at the instance of the prevalent service delivery emergency, is going to require a complete revision of the intergovernmental relations system, and practice. The skill, knowledge, and attributes demand is unprecedented.
Premised on a definition of IGR as the transactions and interactions between and/or amongst organs of state in the three spheres of government, such a revision should instruct not only transacting, but interactions based on relations defined by political mandates that are now variously sourced. The 'proverbial church' that reigned upon our intergovernmental relations system and somewhat rendered the chapter 3 principles of cooperative government ineffective and dysfunctional, is no longer broad within its walls only, voters have invited new gorillas on to the 'proverbial dinner table' (pun intended).
Public policy will more and more be about monitoring algorithms that create a IGR dispensation that has the citizen as the driver of all variables instructing to what government, the dominant agency of the state is all about. The definition of intergovernmental conflicts to be mediated will have as a base the interests that need to be managed and protected. Our inherent diversity as a keynote of social condition and opinion will have to be coded. The th!nc Foundation, a not-for-profit Public Policy Research, Analysis and Engagement Organization based in Tshwane, Republic of South Africa, is ideationalizing on several aspects of the post-elections reconstruction matters from a profoundly IGR biased perspective.
Through this rendition, The th!nc Foundation raises matters with which it interrogates at a high level a number of issues relating to the changing intergovernmental relations landscape. We will ask questions that will be instructional to the various opinion papers and roundtable discussions which will be organized as part of our inputs to a coalition government and IGR intense South Africa. Supported by a Master Class Program on Intergovernmental Relations and delivered through the Thinc Academy, a variously accredited training service provider, The Thinc Foundation addresses the competence gaps associated with IGR.
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti pfampfarhutela, ndzi humesa ribye mati.
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