The 2021 Municipal Elections have evoked all sorts of emotions, commentaries, analyses, and theories about the future of the ANC as a governing party. Ramaphosa in the process come out as one of the coolest of ANC Politicians. He wrapped his electioneering season by accepting a free and fair election verdict of the IEC and lauded the vibrancy and dynamism of South Africa's democracy, somewhat like saying, 'let us go back to work'. Fact is the ANC has lost significant executive authority in the country, the Metropolitan type.
Vintage Ramaphosa started the 'negotiations' process to establish coalition governments where the ANC could and accepted the outcome where his overtures were rejected and or repudiated. At the opening of these negotiations it became clear that in almost all hung municipalities, the posture of opposition parties was 'either extort the ANC or don't vote with it'. The opposition complex prevailed in most Metropolitan municipalities of South Africa, resulting in a loss of municipal executive authority in the country's strategic economic nodal points.
He immediately started with his program as head of State. He reviewed Cop26 mandates, supported the negotiating team in Glasgow, hosted a function to issue national orders, and programmed his order for various reasons. He became a head of state and focussed on the tasks at hand. The questions that are being asked are what should Ramaphosa do to stem the tide of a collapsing South African State, how can he use the outcome of the elections to start a new recovery path to make South Africa competitive again, and how he does this with a governing party that believes its power base has disintegrated.
On the what to do to stem the tide of a collapsing state, Ramaphosa should look at the ascendance of the opposition complex as an opportunity to perfect his intergovernmental relations strategy. Governing South Africa should have always been a collaborative effort between and amongst spheres of government, save for it being choked by a centrist thinking national executive that was enjoying the honeymoon of being dominant in most municipal jurisdictions. The political permutations that have emerged out of the November 1 elections should be seen as an opportunity to create a 'race to be the best in service delivery amongst municipalities'. His political party must start changing its internal discourse to be more about service delivery to South African citizens. A fresh approach to government should be hatched and become a dividend of the new political configurations.
Ramaphosa has the President Coordinating Committee as a strategic center of influence to use in pursuing a change process to propel the economic nodal points that the Metropolitan Municipalities are to make good to his still to be implemented new Dawn. The implementation prowess that comes with the spirit of being new and wanting to show your worth by these coalitions, might require him to set up a team of technocrats that are going to proffer advice on the interacting and transacting complexities that come with the new multi-mandate political jurisdictions characterizing a post-November 1 South Africa.
With a template that has now changed, intergovernmental grants for strategic infrastructure investments which must be implemented by municipalities will force relations and relationships that require a bureaucracy that must 'redeploy' its posture into a realm of being about South Africa. The hegemonic danger of a party's political etched cadre deployment into the bureaucracy will require an accelerated intervention to get officials understanding that working within political mandates of different political parties to deliver public services is a mark of a good public servant. The new 'we in government' by its spokespersons should no longer mean the 'governing party' but organs of state operating out of public power given to them by law and the constitution.
Writing to the journal of public administration on intergovernmental relations, Mathebula submits that when the relationship between spheres of government changes, the relations between organs of state operating therein will change. Worse, he continues, when organs of state in the form of persons assuming authority over the executive, which is the locus of intergovernmental relations, change, all other relations and relationships can only survive or be sustainable if they were based on a normatively arrived at an arrangement. It is a known fact that in South Africa intergovernmental relations were not developed into a democracy stabilizing operating platform with which what has now emerged out of the November 1 outcome could be managed and mediated. Policy instruments such as legislation envisaged in sections 100 and 139 of the Constitution to regulate national and provincial interventions, and by extension, the conditional monitoring and support before the intervention, have still not been promulgated. IGR enrolment tools such as intergovernmental compacts, project charters, grant conditions, and many other similar tools are missing features in terms of standardized operating procedures on how to interrelate.
Ramaphosa has his task cut out if he does not want to be remembered as a President who facilitated negotiations of a Constitution he could not make it work. His District Development Model is, and in true IGR analysis, good hot air, unless it starts to address the institutional fissures it has ignored. At best reads more like a wish statement than a model. If a model is an abstraction of reality to allow scalability in different contexts when variables into the model changes, what is model about the DDM. The new permutations should create space to talk about what organs of state should be doing to make their programs have impact to households, and households are found in municipalities, there is delivery happening at national or provincial, it happens in local government.
To be in charge, Ramaphosa should focus on the central departments of Treasury, CogTa, DPSA, Monitoring and Evaluation, and SOEs that are inextricably tied to the core government delivery system such as ESKOM, SANRAL, PRASA, TRANSNET, WATER BOARDS, and BROAD BAND. His capability to turn things around is dependent of how his bureaucracy at National responds to how society has reconfigured political power. It will be the synergies that his Presidency creates that will take South Africa to high order objectives chasing. Great leaders, and this Ramaphosa should make his legacy too, create such a higher objective that all other diversions below it either become irrelevant or are attuned to achieve the set higher objective. The fluidity created by the various mandates is in fact a call for him to rise up to the challenge. His character must now come out, or he might have to face calls to ship out even from those that still believes in him and his 'leadership'. CUT!!
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
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