I am tiring of technocratic talk. Joel Netshitenzhe’s most recent statement, that the government would not change its mind on the provinces it has assigned to cross-border municipalities because to give in to peoples’s demands would be a ”perverse incentive”, is really so much hogwash.
Essentially what it means is that if the state responds positively to demands of violent protesters this will encourage other communities to embark on similar protests with expectations of a similar outcome.
The logical conclusion of Netshitenzhe’s argument is that in the end, if the state does not give in to those demands (reasonable or not), it serves as a deterrent to other communities. It also serves to delegitimise social protest.
And so it was that the state ignored the demands of those protesting the demarcation of Matatiele in the Eastern Cape and Merafong on Gauteng’s West Rand.
Merafong residents want to remain part of Gauteng for better service delivery but are listed for removal into North West. In Matatiele, residents want to be part of KwaZulu-Natal because of the delivery shortfalls in the Eastern Cape. They are also concerned that government services move further away.
Writing in the South African Communist Party’s Umsebenzi Online last week, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande warned of the arrogance of power, which he characterised as a ”technocratic/objectivist” concept.
”This conception of leadership is where the state places itself above the people. Ostensibly on the grounds of acting in the interests of society as a whole, people’s concerns are sometimes dismissed as populist and working class concerns as inherently narrow and sectional,” Nzimande wrote.
No issue, for me, illustrates this concept better than how government sought to demonstrate its power by refusing to listen to the demands of residents of the affected towns.
Here the Municipal Demarcation Board, responsible for drawing municipal boundaries, visited 17 areas that would be affected by the scrapping of cross-border municipalities.
It consulted with the communities and received submissions about the provinces where the new municipalities should be demarcated. It recommended that Merafong remain part of Gauteng.
It reported back to Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi, who ignored his own board’s recommendations and pushed his position through Parliament: Merafong will be incorporated into the North West.
Why did he do this?
At most, Mufamadi has mumbled something about communities having to subject themselves to ”national imperatives” — which nobody has bothered to explain to the citizens of the affected areas. This is technocratic governance.
To quote Nzimande again: ”There is a significant strand of thinking and practice within our movement that conceives of leadership as meaning leading over the people, without adequately taking into account what the people are saying.”
At this point I think we should start worrying. Everyone condemns violence in any protests and no one questions the rationale of scrapping cross-border municipalities.
But for Mufamadi to force Merafong residents into a province they reject because he says so, amounts to an arrogance that has led to the ultimate collapse of many a post-liberation government across the continent.
Mufamadi should be learning from his peers at the SACP, including deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin, who have displayed what democracy and parliamentary accountability should be about.
Over the years, Parliament has been losing its bite, with many of its members choosing to see their oversight role as little more than rubber-stamping executive decisions.
But what a surprise the technocrats of the Gautrain got when they went to Parliament last week.
Parliamentarians, led by Cronin, exposed all the hidden costs and the swelling expenses of constructing what will essentially be transport for the middle class and the wealthy.
Cronin asked why the cost had tripled from R7-billion to R20-billion. He asked why the R7-billion, at least, could not have been spent on im- proving the ageing railroad infrastructure on which the working class relies.
He showed how the Gautrain route itself was designed to stay away from working-class populated areas and to service mainly wealthy areas.
The lesson from the performance of Cronin and his transport portfolio colleagues is that the government’s policies should reflect the will of the voters. The government should not see its role as being to punish uppity residents who think they can take on the state and win. That is perverse.