The great enabler of a Nation’s Rescue: The RDP should be the soul of SA’s laws of local governance

This is the second in a three-part series on the capture, rescue and future of South Africa. See part 1 here:

The laws most influenced by RDP policy are Chapter 4 of the Municipal Systems Act (MSA) on ‘Community Participation’. It explains the system of participatory governance and Section 24 of the Constitution on “Environment” because it provides the “big vision” role for participation.

In Chapter 4, Section 16 (1) of the MSA is introduced with the following.

“A municipality must develop a culture of municipal governance that compliments formal representative government with a system of participatory governance….”.

Although “A culture of municipal governance” would be better phrased as “a culture of municipal collaboration”, this statement about local systemic structures is important for two particular reasons.

First, the statement makes clear the vital distinction between the concepts of local political ‘government’ and local participatory “governance”. This distinction being that government refers to the decision-making role of formal or elected political representation, and governance refers to the statutory or lawfully-compliant action-taking in accordance with those formal decisions.

In order to avoid the risk of any conflict of interests between the political aspirations of the former, and the statutory requirements of the latter, this is why, in the second amendment to the MSA, Municipal Managers of the statutory administration are forbidden from sitting on the executive of a political party at the same time.

Secondly, the statement makes clear that there are two distinct ‘systems’ necessary to perform two distinct roles. One is the system for formal representative government according to political needs, and the other is the system for participatory governance according to democratic needs.

In effect then, what this statement does is make the addition (onto the old, control system of centralised government) of the ‘bottom-up’ system of participatory democracy, which was implicit in the RDP policy - an explicit obligation in local government law.

In the history of civilization surely this law is unparalleled? I believe so because for citizens the world over formal participation is, and always has been, an essentially notional construct reduced to one tick on a political ballot paper (there is also of course the participation-of-last-resort in protesting). But in South Africa now, real citizen’s participation is a statutory democratic right.

Section 16 of the MSA does, therefore, legislates for effective community participation in the utilities and services matters of the local municipal administration. This is one role. But there is a second, vital role for community participation identified in Section 24 of the Constitution that has not yet been factored – into the national discourse – still mostly about historical disparities.

24. Everyone has the right -

a) to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being, and

b) to have the environment protected, for the benefit of present and future generations,

through reasonable legislative and other measures that -

i) prevent pollution and environmental degradation;

ii) promote conservation;

iii) secure ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources while promoting justifiable economic and social development.

And it is sub-clause (b)(iii) that informs the vital purpose of the second participative role, which is to secure “ecologically sustainable development” for “the benefit of present and future generations”.

Mandela and his lawmakers wrote the RDP and Constitution hot-on-the-heels of the UN’s 1992 Agenda 21 strategy for “sustainable development”. This law in our Bill of Rights makes South Africa the potential leader in global transformation, which not one nation knows how to achieve yet.

What only South Africa does already know, however, is how to do the dialectics necessary to create the three-system synthesis implied in that development being “ecologically?” sustainable – or “ecological” in the sense of the interconnectedness of the system of society and the system of its economics within the system of their host environment – a systemic interdependence that, along with global democratisation, are the main features of Agenda 21.

Just as with the one amended-word in the phrase “non-dialectical materialism”, there is also a need to amend one word in the phrase “sustainable development” for it to rather read as “sustainable self-development”.

This is necessary because all living systems are inherently self-organising and self-determining, and to maintain their continuity of living simply must also be self-sustaining – it’s an inescapable logic for all species having “life” otherwise they could not exist, and neither would Nature or the human “community”.

It follows then that both the original, collaborative human community and the ecosystems of Nature are complex, self-sustaining systems, and, as Scott explained in Part 1, it was the annexure of their life-enabling land by a centralised bureaucracy which began to accelerate their disruption and destruction – to the global scale of catastrophe this generation has inherited.

Given that the Section 24 (and Agenda 21) objective is to restore these original properties which were lost due to the State’s oblivious disregard of them, this implies that the local role of doing so will need to be the self-organised and self-determined outcome of their own self-development. South Africa’s RDP inspired a precedent for exactly this scenario.

In its final year of existence, the RDP Forum of Greater Plettenberg Bay (now the Bitou municipality) created a self-organising and self-determining municipal network system for its own community’s sustainable self-development. The proof of the latter is in the wording of my mandate here.

But they achieved all this just as the RDP was abandoned by government and before the MSA was promulgated in 2000.

Nonetheless, their self-created network system for their own community’s sustainable self-development is still a perfect fit for the second, vital community role in the “system of participatory governance” identified in the MSA.

It must be stressed, however, that in no way does the community’s role of doing “ecologically sustainable self-development” represent the addition of a “fourth tier” to government. This role is actually to greatly restore the efficiency of the hugely degraded systems of the collaborative community and Nature. The role is therefore about achieving the renewal of their already existing, quite-independent, systems.

Given the statement of intent for the MSA referred to at the end of Part 1, surely then, as the MSA’s “front line development agency”, local government must be responsible for helping with the realisation of this lawful right in Section 24 of the Constitution?

Which in fact it is according to Section (4)(2)(j) of the MSA that makes “progressively realising” this constitutional right a specific duty of municipal councils – which, to the best of my knowledge, not one council complies with. Or the other two tiers of government-oversight for that matter.

A situation which begs a pertinent question: to whom exactly does one make a complaint when the whole institution of national, provincial and local government fails to comply with the realisation of a constitutional right that is a legislated, and clearly-stated duty of councils in local government?

This is the question the whole of South Africa urgently needs an answer to, which I believe can only be provided through the dialectical synthesis of “nation rescue” by a Government of National Unity. DM

Dewar is a community-mandated researcher for the Greater Plettenberg Bay RDP Forum. He has been designing a “whole-system” cluster project for the implementation of an ecologically sustainable, rural self-development pilot project in South Africa.