Interesting point of view DEMOCRATIC Alliance (DA) leader Helen Zille has caused a bit of a stir by defending Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga, arguing that the minister of education has way too little power at the national level, while, in education (as, one presumes, in others), the provinces have too much. I increasingly hear sane people of all hues and ideologies make the same positive remarks about Motshekga. They say that she is, in fact, making a decent fist of an impossible job. Explaining to a DA audience in Johannesburg last week, Zille started by reminding them that, "as usual, things are not as simple as they seem" — a lesson South Africans seem determined not to learn, on any subject or at any level. We want heroes and villains, black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. No "buts" or "what-ifs". If ever a society were recruited to populate Hollywood for a decade, it should be us. "Education is a concurrent power," said Zille, "shared by national and provincial government. But when the relevant clauses are unpacked (I still can’t believe she used that word), the real power lies in the provinces. "The national government is confined to establishing ‘norms and standards’, ‘frameworks’ or ‘national policies’, and then only under specific conditions. Provinces have extensive powers to pass and implement their own laws. And provinces actually run the school system." Zille added: "The question is, has Angie Motshekga fulfilled her constitutional responsibilities? On the basis of the record, she has done so to a far greater degree than any of her predecessors." That’s a pretty useful endorsement, but it raises, for the umpteenth time, the fatal flaw in the constitution. We simply don’t need the provinces. I know they were created to keep Inkatha in KwaZulu and the Nats in the Cape happy but both have since been democratised out of sight and we are left with a time-, money- and emotion-consuming tier of government that we simply do not need. I am a centraliser. I do not think that there are enough brilliant education candidates to run nine different education/health/roads/everything else departments in South Africa. We should be run by the very few best we have, and from Tshwane. It sounds absurd, but my home region, Transkei, was run far better by a Nat commissioner-general (reporting directly to Pretoria) in a fascist state than it is now as part of a province in a democracy. Things worked then. Now they don’t. And I know that any talk of scrapping provinces raises DA hackles, because it controls one. But, in fact, getting rid of the provinces would enable the DA to focus on making political progress at what it does best — running cities and towns. A South Africa with a central government and operated by independent municipalities is, for me, a juicy proposition. It is probably too late, sadly, to correct the wrongs that the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) "opponents" at Kempton Park insisted on. But there must be a way to allow Motshekga to do her job more effectively even if (perhaps especially if) it means changing the constitution. As the ANC is unlikely to be able to do that again in my lifetime, the DA would have to help, and it should. The change would involve maintaining the provinces but introducing a means test, province by province, and competency by competency, so that those provinces that can show they are capable of running hospitals, schools and roads and the like, continue to be allowed to do so, while those that cannot demonstrate competency surrender to central government whatever competency they have failed at. Limpopo, for instance, would be at considerable risk, to put it mildly, of losing its right to run its schools. We shouldn’t be afraid to tinker with the constitution. The Americans have done it 27 times and have made their union better. The provinces are a profound threat to our future. We are a small developing country, not the US. Our political model appears to have been Germany or Canada, neither of which is appropriate. One day, when we’ve fixed our education system, we’ll have a horde of people more than qualified to run health and education in poor provinces. Until then, we have to be realistic. We can’t continue to give people in the provinces jobs they can’t do. So let’s make the provinces prove they can do what’s required of them before allowing them to try. Let’s fix this thing.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Jul 2013 05:24:27 +0000
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