Regional premiers have come to imagine they have powers the constitution never gave them, writes Mark Swilling
PROVINCIAL governments are not what they think they are. Members of the executive councils (MECs) call themselves cabinet ministers with departments — but the constitution gives them different titles and powers. And it is this confusion that underlies the crisis in provincial government.
Press reports abound with news of frustrated premiers who want their powers, and of national ministers who look down helplessly on their powerless provincial colleagues. There is talk of creeping federalism as provincial ministers are said to be breaking from mainstream ANC policy by demanding powers for provinces that will weaken the unitary centre. And there is a great focus on the gravy train.
But these reports miss the point.
In terms of the constitution, a provincial executive is made up of a premier and an executive council. The 10 members of the executive council are called MECs. The constitution provided for provincial administrations, but the structure of these administrations was never specified. This was left to a policy decision.
If you talk to the average MEC (to use the technical term) in a provincial government, one could expect his or her political lexicon to contain terms like MEC, executive council, provincial administration and other elements of our constitution. You will be disappointed.
Instead, MECs call themselves ministers, and they refer to meetings of the cabinet. They write cabinet memorandums in the format used in the national cabinet and they have been known to refer to their premier as the prime minister.
As far as their policy advice is concerned, ministers do not get this from the officials in the administrations they have inherited. Instead, they appoint strategic management teams that occupy a space between the minister and the administration – – a space that is often filled by legally or constitutionally defined policy advisory structures in other parts of the world, but which our constitution has neglected.
In the past, ministers had only their senior officials to rely on because in reality these were political appointments regulated by the norms and practices of the Afrikaner tribal elite that controlled both political and administrative power.
With a change in political power coupled to the protection of public service jobs, it is not surprising ministers want an alternative source of policy advice. This is where strategic management teams come in and, by all accounts, play a vital role in managing the change process. To focus only on the incomes of strategic managers, as the media has, is to miss the point.
But the crisis goes far deeper than a mismatch between the perceptions of provincial ministers and the provisions of the constitution. This is most apparent when it comes to the structure of the provincial administration.
At national level, each cabinet minister has his or her own fully-fledged department, complete with a director general to head up that department. This means director generals are accountable to their respective ministers for policy direction and they are responsible for managing their departments to ensure the implementation of policy. This is, after all, what a government really is.
When one goes down to provincial level, every minister you meet will talk about his or her department. The expectations of ministers is that their departmental heads are accountable to them and that each minister has at his or her disposal a fully-fledged department to implement policy. But is this in fact the case?
The provincial administrations are not structured like the national governments administration. Proclamations issued in the Government Gazette have defined provincial administrations as departments. Each department has a director general. In other words, the Orange Free State provincial administration is not a series of departments corresponding to ministries, it is in fact a singular department which is divided internally into branches of the same department. And the administrative head of the OFS is the director general who is in charge of the entire OFS administration.
This sounds harmless enough — especially when one remembers that it means we only get nine director generals at provincial level. However, built into this is a fundamental contradiction. What provincial ministers do not realise is that all they really have is a branch of the provincial department and that the head of the branch is not directly accountable to them as ministers, but to the director general of the province. The director general, in turn, is accountable to the premier.
Now how did this all happen? The answer lies in what preceded the provincial governments. After the provincial councils were abolished in 1986, they were replaced by provincial executive committees appointed by the president. They were defined as MECs and they had beneath them a provincial administration headed up by a director general. This administration had branches headed up by deputy director generals who were accountable to the director general. This is precisely the model that has now been replicated in the provincial governments. The only problem is the executive is not appointed by the president, it is democratically elected by the people of the province and is held accountable to policy by a democratically elected legislature.
So, in short, we may be facing a mismatch between what the constitution says provincial governments are and what provincial governments think they are. But, more importantly, by defining provincial administrations as unitary departments accountable to a single director general under the authority of the premier, MECs are having to accept a relationship to the administration that differs markedly from their counterparts at national level.
Given that the provincial governments will play the central development management role in the implementation of the reconstruction and development programme, these constitutional, political and institutional dislocations are cause for some alarm. What provincial governments do to resolve these problems must surely be the kind of thing that the press should be monitoring. Gravy trains are merely a sideshow.
Mark Swilling is acting director, public and development management, Wits Business School