The new Constitution could give local government a better place in the hierarchy, writes Marion Edmunds
The new Constitution is likely to raise local government from its Cinderella status to a position in the new South Africa where it can compete with its two ugly sisters, national and provincial government, for revenue and political status.
The fairy godmothers breathing new life into local government are the two key negotiating political parties, the National Party and the African National Congress, which have been meeting in secret bilaterals this week to design a chapter on local government for the final Constitution.
This chapter has been hardly touched publicly in this round of negotiations and has remained frozen from draft to draft as energies were directed toward resolving political disputes around the form of provincial governments and the Bill of Rights. From the outside at least, local government appears to be the lost chapter, the forgotten tier of government about which few national politicians and the public care.
Not so, says Pravin Gordhan, an ANC MP who has made local government development something of a personal mission since coming to Parliament in April 1994. What the ANC has been pushing for, through him and negotiators such as Deputy Constitutional and Development Minister Valli Moosa, is to make local government an autonomous tier of government, which is not controlled by provincial governments as it is now, and which has its status guaranteed in the Constitution.
“Local Government is recognised as a key to development and the implementations of the RDP,” said Moosa this week. “Central and provincial governments must not be able to take away its power to raise revenue or its slice of funding from national revenue.”
This constitutional guarantee would be an international first in many ways. Moosa quotes the example of India, where, after independence, provincial governments whittled away local government to such an extent that two years ago, a special chapter was introduced into the constitution to strengthen the power of local government. Similarly, constitution-makers who went on a tour to Germany earlier this year reported back that the Germans had failed to make sufficient provision in their constitution for local government development and were now struggling with the absence of constitutional guidelines.
The Democratic Party also believes that the parameters of local government need to be written into the Constitution to prevent provincial governments invading the territory of local government. The DP’s chief negotiator Colin Eglin said this week: “Provinces have to abandon some of their own powers in order to respect local government’s powers. It is unlikely that provincial governments, which are wanting more power, will do that unless local government’s parameters are prescribed in the Constitution. However, we still believe that the first line of communication for local government should be the provinces, and not central government.”
It is on this latter point that there could be some difficult negotiations with the ANC, which is looking forward, in years to come, possibly to establish a national ministry of local government or to include local government in an intergovernmental relations department attached to the president’s office, thereby controlling local government from the centre.
But this will take a while to unfold. All politicians and relevant government officials know that local government transition will take years and have laid out a rough timetable that will probably extend into the 21st century. While the Constitution will provide principles and parameters for this change almost immediately , the rest of the transition will be written firstly into transitional bridging legislation — which is currently being drafted — and then into a White Paper which will take the process further.
But, in the meantime, the negotiators want to give local government a national platform by giving it seats in the new Council of Provinces which is set to replace the Senate. The NP and the ANC in particular are exploring the idea of giving a local government delegation a permanent place in the council, so that local government concerns and needs can be articulated in national legislative and policy debates.
“We are speaking about bringing the voice of local government right into the central political processes,” said Moosa. “With a proper Constitution, I believe that local government will be able to argue its case more effectively and politicians will have to consult local government in earnest.”
Moosa and others are hoping that raising local government’s status constitutionally will also increase its public profile. One of the major problems facing local government enthusiasts is that it is “not a sexy subject” and the media are slow to report on it because it is seen as boring and often inconsequential.
Moosa reckons that this might change: “With the first wave of democratisation the public and the political parties believed in a strict hierarchy — the higher up you were, the more status you had. People are beginning to see now that while there is still a hierarchy, local government is less and less regarded as a backwater and politicians in local government metro councils, such as the Johannesburg Council, are starting to be seen as being important as they control large budgets.”
After all, the Johannesburg Metro budget is larger than the budget of the Northern Cape’s provincial government. However, in the minds of political wannabes, more often than not, local government positions are seen as stepping stones to greater things, and it would be difficult to convince the present parliamentarians that the position of mayor is better than that of MP.
One political grouping that does value local government is the traditional leaders. They attach an enormous importance to it, because it is the last tier of government in which they have a toehold.
The consultation of traditional leaders by the Constitutional Assembly has been something of a farce, and they have not been included in the latest round of bilaterals. The only party that does insist that traditional leaders have a stake in local government, by virtue of their blood line rather than the ballot, is the Inkatha Freedom Party. As the IFP is out of the Constitutional Assembly at the moment, it is unlikely that its views will make an impact. The battle over the form of local government in the rural areas of Kwazulu-Natal is being waged through Kwazulu-Natal’s own constitution-making processes and is considered one of the hottest areas of dispute.
The parties in the Constitutional Assembly are secretly hoping that they will complete the chapter on local government before the chiefs realise that they and their colleagues are being written out of the equation.