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, as organs of state, at the national and provincial spheres of
government would now agree that their IGR portion of the Constitution is
served, courtesy of the November 1, 2021, elections outcome. The relationship
between governments in the three spheres has changed. Intergovernmental
transacting will require overt respect of the constitutional status,
institutions, powers, and functions of government in other spheres.
Organs of state, and at the behest of voters, are
expected to cooperate with one another in mutual trust and good faith and
exercise their powers in a way that does not encroach on the institutional
integrity of government in another sphere. The coming 5 years will, in local
government, begin decades of consensuses and compromises for service delivery’s
sake. Irrespective of what strategies the national sphere of government puts in
place, the tension and competition with governments in other spheres, and 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 the confidence to the effect that by the end of the 2020-2030 decade, their electoral support would surpass that of the governing ANC, the complexity of governing South Africa will henceforth be about how to build an intergovernmental relations system that recognizes coalitions in government as the new, and fluid, political power. Post liberation elites, or rather the thinking complexes of the governing party, might dismiss the significance of the shifting template of IGR. For the opposition, the size of their combined influence as a bulwark with which IGR practice could be shifted has always mattered, and considered a dominant political motive force, though various in character, to turbocharge their confidence and assertiveness that put them to be where they are today, November 1 speaking.
As new nodes of proven political power, when combined to the exclusion of the governing party, their dealings with the fiscal center will henceforth be leveraged to start tweaking budget allocations to be reflective of the new power permutations. The spatial demands of society, and represented through a provided democratic and accountability service in local government, might redefine how the national budget as policy should start to reflect the various political mandates in South Africa. Bureaucratic discretion of budget spending will be the new order, as they change administrations.
The dominant political parties in the opposition complex, and political coalitions, essentially created as a bulwark to neutralize the chronically feared power of one party majority, will continue to advance in the many fronts the governing center has thus far demonstrated it is failing. For instance, the strategy to invest in a youthful leadership has appealed to a voting youth which has been abandoned as a key political power motive force since the 'expunging' of the 'Freedom if our lifetime' youth cohort that went on to establish the Economic Freedom Front as a political party. The magnet to ideation that is found in youth, lost platform at the center of governing elite politics, in fact, veterans and stalwarts ascended as the cognitive center of political thinking, more of nostalgia, than it had traditionally been. Interestingly these stalwarts parade credentials they earned as a youth, by the way. The technology of organization, though still in abundance in the governing center, is choked by an unconsciously defended refusal to modernize the governing party, and by extension democracy. The opposition complex has in the meanwhile been harvesting a politically stranded youth representing a future that might be in decline in a governing party in which youth is those with a history of being youth, than those seeking to make history.
The National (and Provincial) government must decide how it is going to respond to the assertive agenda of the opposition to control municipal spaces into which all statewide planning is dependent if the full logic of integrated development planning is taken to its conclusion. The general posture has in the past been that of opting for administrative decoupling, with the center, and where it had the 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 federalized through inch-by-inch court decisions is real.
Consequently, municipal jurisdictions will take sides, and the risk of intergovernmental relations conflicts being propelled by policy differences will escalate. The natural question will thus be, 'can a national government that has demonstrated a capacity to flirt with 'command council' convenience as we saw in how they centralized 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 response to COVID19 has put South Africa at the doorstep of a Constitutionally sanctioned dictatorship by a 'professional discipline' elite. The incentive of fear that engulfed society relegated our natural guard to oppression that we lost an ability to question even our shrinking freedoms of association and assembly. Organs of civil society have lost their luster; political parties are technically governing without proper mandates from their own structures. The economic activity got relegated at the altar of fear of an inevitability of humans. Our ability to see opportunity in driving government programs through the determinants of health as cost and policy drivers indicated policy poverty, only the electorate could pronounce on.
The centrist posture of planning 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 endeavor 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 which 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 center becomes the new problem.
The essence of
the new IGR template will be managed by 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 the 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 organized 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.
🤷🏽♂️Se ku ta tirhiwa manje
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