Like everyone who was once a child, I am no stranger to the business of closing my eyes or hiding under my blankets in the hope that, when I next look, a problem will have gone away.
It has seldom worked as a problem-solving strategy in my case. And I see no reason why we should expect it to solve our country’s political problems.Yet it does appear to have been the strategy employed by the government on the issue of traditional leaders.
For five of its six years in power, the African National Congress has done little to resolve the issue. This year, it sprung into hurried action. It produced A Draft Discussion Document Towards a White Paper on Traditional Leadership and Institutions in April, new local government legislation that has caused great unhappiness among traditional leaders but failed to confront head-on the issue of what powers they should have, and an insulting amendment last week to the latter law that affirms traditional leaders’ authority to oversee matters of such importance as the collection of firewood and the like. That, at least, was the situation until Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting.
Over the same period, the government failed to do the audit it had promised aimed at sorting those traditional leaders who have genuine lineages from those given chieftaincies by colonial administrations and the apartheid government. Calling any piece of written work A Draft Discussion Document Towards … is about as conditional as you can get. It’s a bit like saying: nobody should be under any illusion that this document has any significance at all. Or: listen, mate, don’t hold us to anything we’ve gone and said here.
Let us hope this is not characteristic of the way the ANC now intends dealing with other important issues.
It is also a bit like being a member of the ANC who says at a meeting of the national executive committee in October 2000 that s/he believes the president might perhaps, conceivably, all things considered, just wish to supplant his excellent self in the HIV/Aids debate with a committee made up of lesser members of the party and Cabinet more suited to dealing with this lowly concern.
The approach amounts to dealing with problems by not dealing with problems.
As regards the elections on December 5, we will have to hope that the lack of clarity over the respective powers to be enjoyed by traditional leaders and the new local government authorities does not result in open conflict on the day. Beyond the elections, the chances of trouble in outlying areas of the Eastern Cape, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, and Northern and North West provinces are no less worrying.
Traditional leaders argue that municipal powers and functions will erode their control over land and their role in dispensing justice in their areas.
There are many who would respond: so what? Get rid of the lot of them.They’re a relic of the past, wholly discredited by the role they played in servicing the apartheid state. They have retarded development of their areas. By insisting on communal land tenure, they are constraining the prospects of future development.
Moreover, some would add, the patriarchy and privilege on which the institution of traditional leadership is most often based, with the notion that one South African can ever be another’s subject, are inconsistent with our democracy and Constitution. So scrap it!
At its last full conference in 1997, the ANC was ambivalent on the issue.Though it doubted traditional leaders’ legitimacy, it saw an important role for them.
There are others who would wish to save at least part of the institution – perhaps those traditional leaders with a lineage uncorrupted by colonial administrations and the apartheid state.
And there have been suggestions of this latter view in some of President Thabo Mbeki’s statements about securing a renaissance in Africa.
Some commentators on the issue, such as Fred Hendricks of Rhodes University’s sociology department, however, warn against the uniform acceptance of the legitimacy of all traditional leaders.
They are widely discredited, notably on the ground in rural areas, he says.Hendricks also warns against using chieftaincy and a relationship to it as a basis for identifying some people as Africans (as opposed, say, to Europeans) in the “African renaissance” project.
You and I cannot solve in 900 words what the ANC has evidently been too scared to confront in six years. What we all can do, however, is demand a proper and full debate on traditional leaders.
It is now too late to resolve the issue before December 5. But the Cabinet did us all a belated favour on Wednesday when it set up a special Cabinet committee whose job it is to use the next fortnight to provide sufficient reassurance to traditional leaders to avoid a political train smash in the short term, while the chiefs’ longer-term future is sorted out.
The committee is to achieve this by drawing up a series of more palatable amendments to the Local Government Structures Act that will be rushed through Parliament in the next two weeks.
Thankfully, the Cabinet committee has both ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party members, and the Cabinet decision to set it up was unanimous.
Beyond whatever short-term measures are now decided, South Africans need to be drawn into the fuller debate on traditional leaders. Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi said after Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting that the government hoped to have finalised its new policy by March next year and to introduce legislation on traditional leaders’ longer-term future to Parliament by July.
The issue cannot be left to fester until the next occasion when it can no longer be ignored. To do so could be dangerous for peace in the countryside.
If, perhaps, you cannot see why you should be bothered, consider this fact alone: the annual salary bill for traditional leaders costs taxpayers like you and me more than R577-million a year.