Provinces To Be Reduced?
Well if you thought renaming a few suburbs and streets was going to cause administrative nightmares does Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi have a doozy for you. Apparently the reduction of the number of provinces is firmly on the table.
That’s right. After spending millions of Rand building provincial government, constructing grandiose provincial legislatures and paying massive provincial civil service salaries (read the Sunday Times career section and you’d think the North West province was the largest employer in the country with the way they’re hiring) national government has decided “meh, maybe we don’t need them after all”. I mean the National Council of Provinces (the other house of parliament, or did you forget) is pretty much irrlevant these days anyway so let’s just get rid of the whole charade.
Someamongus over at South Africa Blog thinks that this is just a threat from the executive to get the provinces back into lock step and that’s a valid point. Of course the ANC national parliament has passed a few laws and then later had to go back and redraft them when it was clear the laws weren’t just going to work (remember the draft Immigration Act?), so this might just be the same thing on a much larger much more expensive scale.
Personally I think it might be the sign of a nervous ANC. The ANC knows that it’s biggest weakness heading into municipal elections in 2006 and national elections in 2009 is it’s lack of service delivery and it seems some in the ANC higher up beleive provincial government is probably getting in the way. From the article it seems Mufamadi believes service delivery can be done much more efficiently with only national government (providing the money) and local municipalities (doing the implementation). While this idea has some merit, it can be done without disbanding provinces and I get helluva nervous when something like ANC electoral strategy could be causing major constitutional rewrites.
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