“What is happening here,” said Mbuyiseli Songelwa to a British reporter in 1985, “[is that] we are struggling for one municipal vote. One vote, one municipality, which goes with one man, one vote nationally.”
Songelwa, the Komani leader of the Detainees Parent Support Committee made these remarks to a ThamesTV crew. A year later he was dead. At the Truth & Reconciliation Commission over a decade later, his wife Nokuzola would recount the story of two white policemen informing a 13-year-old and a six-year-old “that Mbuyiselo is dead, and they went off in their van”.
For Songelwa, who had worked at the old TV2 at the SABC before going back to Komani, and many in his generation, the task of building “one municipality” may have at that point been confined to “one vote, one man, one council”, but in the current conjuncture that task remains incomplete and even more complicated.
Incomplete insofar as when it comes to the equalisation of the roles, responsibilities and benefits of the provisioning of public goods and administration of our lives, many municipalities fall far short of the elusive dream of “one municipality”.
Part of the problem in achieving this, as SA Cities Network CEO Sithole Mbanga suggested at the recent Urban Festival 2021, is an outcome of the compromises of the early democratic era, and the emergence of new provincial boundaries not just as geographic markers, but as fiscal and sociopolitical bureaucracies, sharing concurrent powers and functions with the national government on things critical to our day-to-day wellbeing.
This has meant that the things needed to unify the erstwhile racialised municipal governance structures also require intentional focus on the areas that create commonly shared and functional public goods, on a basis different to the Black Local Authorities Act.
In this sense the uneasy balance between a unitary and federal state remains an unresolved tension. While an important milestone in our democratic project, Monday’s ballot is also a moment for us to reflect on the design of our intergovernmental relations and co-operative governance framework.
The 1998 White Paper on Local Government recognised that this level of government had to “prioritise the delivery of at least a basic level of services to those who currently enjoy little or no access to services”. This implied that a progressive approach in our division of revenue framework is one of the reasons for the frustrations of the Cape Independence Party, and their dreams of secession. The party complains that the Western Cape raises R185bn in taxes, yet receives less than a quarter of that back in the division of revenue.
This overlooks the explicit constitutional commitment to “heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and human rights”. One element of this commitment is to recognise that our past also determined the concentration of economic activity and by extension where a taxable industrial base was, and intentionally underdeveloped large parts of the country from which cheap black labour was drawn. Therefore, any macro-fiscal division must be redistributive in character to address this uneven path of development, if we are to build the “new society” envisaged in the constitution.
These design features of municipalities, which the Cape Independence Party rejects, are further complicated by subjective weaknesses in many underperforming municipalities, like misspending or failing to spend capital grants, limited funding of operational and capital requirements from locally collected revenue, and an inability to respond rapidly to growing service needs due to shifting population sizes in the case of many of our cities.
The unitary administration Songelwa dreamt of is not just about being able to wear the mayoral livery and sit in council chambers, it’s also about breaking down the barriers in life chances and environments between the former homelands, townships, and the republic. If that fails the ghosts of old and the contemporary administrative weaknesses of the local, provincial and national state will lay the basis for new fantasies of federalism and secession.
• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.
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