The edited version was published in the Sunday Times on 1 December 2024 under the headline. "Capable municipalities are the ultimate coal face of governance."
South Africa is a multi-jurisdiction
democratic state. While many would want to believe that it operates within a context
of separation of powers, it is, in fact, a democracy that has defined itself in
terms of the authorities it requires to govern. It defines where each authority
is vested and digs deeper to clarify where each authority lies at the
subnational level. RSA has no legislative, executive, or judicial power; what
the Constitution promotes is where such authority vests.
This
authority we allow freely elected public representatives to govern with is a
legal expression of "we the people's" power. It is derived from our
will, which legitimises them. Because we also allow the authority to further
vest in provincial and local government jurisdictions, it is by design derived
from distinct, interrelated, and interdependent political mandates. To the
extent that these mandates are in jurisdictions, these authorities can never be
central but federated. This is why RSA, as one sovereign state, constitutes a government
in the three spheres. The unfolding permutations of the government of the day
where there is no absolute power to govern has reopened the ‘how central or
federal’ is the constitutional order.
Spheres
of government, unlike tiers, denote a framework where national and sub-national
jurisdictions do not have a hierarchical but a cooperative or collaborative
relationship regarding service delivery. It respects the politically derived
mandate of freely elected representatives from "we the people" at 44
district municipal, 8 Metropolitan, 205 two local municipal, and 9 provincial jurisdictions,
including an overarching national one. These jurisdictions can, and it is
constitutional, all have different governments of the day, including coalition
arrangements from different political parties. This makes cooperation and
collaboration the foundation upon which state capability should be construed, anchored,
and practised. It is the quality of systems that will yield heightened capability.
The
constitutional order or system expects spheres of government and the organs of
state (elected or appointed) therein to interact and transact with each other
to implement policies of the various politically mandated governments of the
day. In these interactions and transactions, negotiations, tradeoffs,
compromises, and concessions will be made by the organs of the state in spheres
of government and the accompanying maze of relationships. This makes RSA a profoundly
intergovernmental relations-intensive and multiparty political mandates-sensitive
constitutional and democratic order.
All
sovereign states, the end-experience of all public policies is firms and
households. No firms and households are in the national and provincial spheres;
all are in the local sphere. The RSA Constitution, in particular, formalises this
by establishing municipalities for the whole territory of South Africa. Whilst
firms and households are citizens of RSA, they have a domicile relationship
with it through the local government sphere. It is, therefore, the state's
capability to synchronise whatever policy from other spheres with
municipalities as the ultimate coal-face jurisdiction of government.
In
almost all instances where national public policy could or was not implemented,
evidence is there was insufficient follow-through on what role municipalities
should play and what enablement tools were deployed to give support. RSA
Auditor-General reports provide substantive proof of collaboration-deficient
governance, which has resulted in chronic poor to no service delivery. Municipalities'
legal and political jurisdiction character creates a sub-national autonomy
context that imposes a state-wide cooperative and collaborative obligation. The
Municipal Systems Act obligates all statewide planning to start at that level
through an integrated development planning process. Organs of state, elected or
appointed, human or otherwise, are the ultimate state capability-carrying
institutions whose mandate is incomplete if not underpinned by the RSA
Constitution's cooperative government principles.
State
capability is, therefore, about or entails the doing aspects of government. It
assumes an already existing framework of the "what to do's" and
"where to do's" of the state. It assumes approved budget values and
itemisations the state’s capability must deal with. Being capable means seeing measurable
outputs that define overall policy outcomes. In a capable state, a maze of
distinct, interrelated, and interdependent standard operating procedures define
the government culture, public service and public sector work ethic. Until practical
implementation is expressed by a capable state institutional and collaborative
framework, no public policy will have the desired impact.
Capability
must condition a state bureaucracy in as much as a bureaucracy expresses its
existence through it. The institutionalist character of state capability should
make the politics that define state priorities important. In its capable mode,
the state should be a productive environment wherein its functionaries master
the art of loyally executing the lawful policies of any government of the day
in all spheres of government or political mandate carrying jurisdiction-based
government of the day.
The
terrain of collaboration and cooperation in a capable state comes through the
interactions and transactions between and amongst organs of the state. These
ultimately define state-wide relations and relationships that complete the
capability journey of a state. It is equally important to insist on the
qualifications of the public service as it is to build the public service
system to generate a capability stimulus for those that enter it as a
vocation.
The
convergence of state-wide agencies and across the three spheres of government
to deal with illegal mining presented South Africa with a practical terrain to
deploy its multi-jurisdiction state capabilities. The Zama-Zama syndicates have
united state agencies into one of the most elaborate intergovernmental and
intersectoral projects since COVID-19. The state's capability is not
theoretically demanded in Stilfontein and other places; it is applied and lived,
or the anarchy persists. The GNU's ambitious targets have a test site regarding
cooperating and collaborating capably. CUT!!
Dr FM Lucky Mathebula is a public policy analyst and the
founder of the Thinc Foundation. He is a research and innovation associate at
the Tshwane University of Technology
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