There has been much speculation that South Africa’s nine provinces could be downscaled to administrative hubs because of their apparent inefficiency and ineffectiveness. I believe this is a knee-jerk reaction, not a solution, to the present malaise.
My party and I have always believed that South Africa — like Australia, Canada, Nigeria and the United States — is simply too large and diverse to be administered as a unitary state. Federalism serves to preserve regional identities across our vast multicultural and multilingual territory. We must remember that South Africa’s celebrated diversity is the sum of these many identities.
In principle, I have always maintained that the three-tier system of government suits our purpose best. This system brings political decision-making closer to the individual by setting up a network of political structures that compete with the central government and prevent power from being centralised too heavily.
It is for this reason that our quasi-federal model, at least in theory, secures a fragile balance of power. That is also why the IFP ensured during the transition process that provinces were created in principle. We played a large role in strengthening the federal character of the transitional constitution.
But it is for the very same reasons that the IFP has since often criticised the functions of these provinces in practice. The system we have in South Africa today is a far cry from what the IFP and I originally envisaged. It is a hybrid in which provinces are endowed with all the appearances of a federal system — their own legislatures, executives and administrative capacities — but at the same time are accorded almost no policymaking power by the Constitution. It’s like a car without an engine.
So we end up with the worst of both worlds: the financial expense of duplicated layers of government, combined with the political drawbacks of a unitary state.
If provinces had not existed, the DA-led Western Cape and IFP-led KwaZulu-Natal could not have used their concurrent health powers, one of the few significant powers of provinces, to deliver life-saving antiretroviral drugs to prevent the mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus in 2002. Readers might see a clue here why errant provinces might be a minor irritant to the ruling party!
We believe that many of the perceived problems of governance at the provincial level are the result of work in progress. The fault does not lie with the system, but rather with its implementation. What we originally wanted out of provinces was smaller, more responsive, accountable and efficient political units in which individuals could participate more directly than in a monolithic unitary government. This approach should inform any review of the muncipal demarcations.
The ruling party is too quick to blame the quasi-federal model for its own failures in service delivery. It is not hard to see why. The ANC has always been dedicated to the notion of South Africa as ”one nation”, a nation of masses who have apparently reconciled their historical and ethnic differences and who hold the same political opinions.
The political benefits of federalism — real federalism that cuts the distance between the unitary government and the individual, while conserving the individual’s regional identity — are usually worth the effort and the cost.
The answer to our current crisis of service delivery is more, not less, federalism.
When considering whether we should maintain our provinces, it is clear that devolving power is the international trend. Scrapping provinces here would be to buck this trend. Take Scotland, the home of Adam Smith. Strong regional policies over the past 30 years have transformed the Scottish economy from a basket case to one of the brighter stars in European information technology. Britain’s Labour government has delivered a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly in the past decade.
I believe we reject regionalism at our peril. One of the paradoxes of globalisation and economic integration has been the resurgence of regional identities. This must be managed carefully. Petty nationalisms, especially those based on blood and soil, can narrow a country’s horizons and block a wider cultural inheritance.
Yet, undoubtedly, the social impact of globalisation and urbanisation is driving people to take refuge in what they know — their families, communities and regions. These are now the social institutions that offer security and opportunity. Where our people feel powerless in the face of global and urban change, they feel the local can be influenced even if the national cannot.
There is growing consumer-like demand for the reform of the ANC’s one-size-fits-all, top-down model. In the first decade of the 21st century the new battleground is increasingly around the politics of localism — people want the power to shape their own lives.
Let us respond by building a South Africa of regions and nations blessed with a new dynamism.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, MP, is president of the Inkatha Freedom Party