Peter Leon admits he has no local government skills, so why, experts wonder, was he appointed to oversee the area?
Jaspreet Kindra
Three months after Peter Leon, the former Democratic Party leader in Gauteng, was approached by Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi to head the ministerial task team on local government transition, his team has still not been appointed.
Local government fundis across political lines ask why the government, which could have had its pick from a host of experts available, chose Leon, the elder brother of Tony Leon, the leader of the opposition.
Peter Leon says he does not have the answer.
“I don’t have local government skills I am quite happy to concede that,” he says. “They wanted somebody outside the department this is an oversight job, you don’t want people in the department doing it for them.
“Secondly, my understanding is that they wished to bring independent thought to the process.”
Leon says the fact that he headed an opposition party in Gauteng does not compromise his independence.
“I am independent in the sense that I am not a member of the African National Congress. I am out of party politics. I have no position in the DP or the Democratic Alliance for that matter.”
Leon says that he has expertise in developing legislation and policy, and six years of understanding of provincial structures.
His main task would be to oversee the work of three task teams, in particular those dealing with the concurrent powers shared by district and local municipalities, providing transitional support to municipalities and the implementation of integrated development plans in local structures.
“We have to establish what is happening on the ground after all, more than 800 municipalities have been collapsed into 284. We have to ascertain what interventions need to take place and the capacities of municipalities.”
Sources in government say the fact that the details of Leon’s contract have not yet been sorted out is an indication that the government has not clearly given thought to what his task team will do.
Asks a source in local government: “Which brings us back to the question, why did they hire him? Especially considering the fact that they haven’t hired the rest of his team.”
Leon says he has proposed a list of people to be appointed to the team, whose offices will be at the Development Bank.
Mufamadi refused to comment, on the grounds that the Mail & Guardian’s report card on the Cabinet last year labelled him “uncommunicative”.
At the time of his appointment, there were rumours in political circles that Leon was appointed to a government post to exacerbate an alleged feud between the Leon brothers. Another rumour held that Leon’s task will be so difficult that he is bound to fail, and that it is better to make a member of an opposition party the fall guy.
Leon pooh-poohs talk of a family feud between the brothers. “That’s not true. The media made a lot of it it died down,” he explains.
He does, however, add that Tony Leon was “unhappy, he was very unhappy in the way it was announced it actually came out on the eve of the local government elections”.
In any case they don’t talk politics anymore, after Peter Leon chose his legal career over life as a parliamentarian. “We talk about family,” he says, “and his dog.”
Leon hastens to add: “The timing was not deliberate on the part of the government. I know the minister was trying to get the announcement made as soon as possible. Unfortunately, for various reasons, it got delayed by a week.”
He prefers to separate the government from the ANC, pointing out that it was the government that made the decision to appoint him. Mufamadi, whom he has known since the days he was chair of the Gauteng portfolio committee on public safety, approached him with the offer, Leon maintains.
He did not find it unusual. After all, Mufamadi, in his previous portfolio of safety and security, had been known to appoint people from outside politics or even across the political line South African Breweries’s Meyer Kahn was hired as special adviser and the Black Sash’s Sheila Duncan was asked to head a task team on gun law reform.
Why did Leon choose to take up the appointment? “You might think it is nave in the sense of wanting to make a contribution to South Africa. I think the opposition makes a very useful and important contribution to democracy in this country. I equally think one also needs to make a contribution in a different way. It is very difficult to do it when you are in opposition. The job of the opposition is to oppose; it would have been impossible to do it while in politics.
“Quite frankly, I was concerned about local government issues when I was in the province particularly what went wrong in Johannesburg. It went bankrupt in 1997.”