Province Scrapping Plan Revealed 4
- Abolishing provincial legislatures while retaining current administrations with an elected executive;
- Abolishing provincial legislatures while retaining current administrations, with an executive appointed by the national government;
- Abolishing provincial legislatures with no appointed or elected executive, with the current administration retained;
- Abolishing legislatures as well as provincial administrations.
Of the current nine provinces, only four or five would remain. ‘Problem’ provinces such as the Northern Cape, Limpopo, North West Province and Mpumalanga would be amalgamated with the stronger provinces. Although suprisingly (or rather unsuprisingly if you consider this is an ANC led government) the Eastern Cape, a definite problem province, will remain untouched. If this decision is accepted it is expected to be implemented by the 2009 elections.
Now abolishing provinces is a pretty radical proposal. First of all there is no guarantee that this will help with service delivery. Secondly if this is done it will potentially be very embarassing for the ANC, an admittal that they have not delivered in the past 15 years. Thirdly it’s going to cost a lot of money. If the thought of changing the names of a few towns and roads got you hot under the collar then the cost associated with reorganising the entire country will likely give you a major coronary.
And there is the fact that over and above the costs related to the scrapping of some of the provinces is the fact that if carried out basically all the funds allocated in the past twelve years for provincial governments, legislature and administrative infrastructure might as well have been taken out to the middle of the Karoo, dumped in a large pile, doused in petrol and burnt.
The SA Constitution takes its structure from the existence of three tiers of government working in cooperation. So amendments that affect this structure will not be mere tinkering, but a wholesale rewrite of our fundamental law.
Doesn’t this shout ‘pretext’?
That’s another reason why this probably (hopefully) won’t happen. I think this kind of mass rewrite would go contrary to the negotiated CODESA settlement and would make people very nervouse.
The fact of the matter is there are simpler ways of getting round non-delivery. National government could either deal with the major local governments in a more direct manner while still keeping the provincial government. Government could also put a helluva lot of effort into removing beauracracy as well as a concerted effort into removing corruption.
I can’t recall why provinces were agreed upon at CODESA.
They didn’t do much to answer either of the main federalist camps of the time (the IFP and Constand Viljoen’s Volkstat supporters).
Provinces were anathema to the ANC, to a degree greater then than now. The ANC thinks of itself as a centralised, national and nationalist organisation, and of South Africa as an indivisible nation.
Provinces exist as a sort of petrification of the provinces of the pre-democracy South Africa. Strange. And there they are, with all their peculiarities.
In reality they perform an intermediary political function, by dispersing the monolithic concentration of power. The effect has acted most strongly on the ANC and the NP. And similarly to the ANC, the DA fashions its structures in tandem to South African constitutional structures.
The existence of provinces leads to the evolution of national, provincial and local party-political power structures, sometimes – often, I dare say – acting as much in opposition to one another as in harmony. Provinces force people to think and organise themselves provincially. Mbeki admits as much, when he talks of people in the Western Cape having the most remaining to do in becoming a ‘non-racial society’. He is forced into the political compass of the provinces at least as much because they exist as because they have any particular legal, executive or political function.
It occurs to me that however much the ANC revises the function of provinces, short of instantly doing away with them, they are likely to impede any further effort to reform them. In an effort to make the provinces more effective, they will give them a parallel power to resist further erosion of their powers.
I think the problem might be due to the fact that because the ANC has attempted to centralise so much power in national government that the provinces can do little else but be impediments to service delivery.