The ball’s in your court’
In the current climate, any local councillor who does not listen properly to their constituency and do their job is in for the high jump. That’s the word from a senior government official on a visit to Grahamstown last week.
There’s nothing wrong with the model for local government, Deputy Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Luwellyn Landers told Grocott’s Mail. What’s needed to make it work properly is for a municipality’s residents to speak up and hold representatives accountable.
“In Africa we tend to defer to our leaders,” Landers later said on a similar theme, but in response to a different question.
“In other countries they expect their leaders to listen to them.”
Landers himself was outspoken during the question and answer session that followed his address to a packed Barratt lecture theatre at Rhodes University on Wednesday, and chairperson Siphokazi Magadla, lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, thanked him for what she described as “a refreshing frankness that is quite unusual in these kinds of public events”.
Landers’s theme was how the department implements SA’s foreign policy objectives to realise domestic priorities through international co-operation.
“Development and democracy are ideas that South Africa promotes through foreign policy,” he said by way of introduction.
Landers spoke about the need for the reconstruction of Southern Africa in order to achieve sustainable development, on the basis that colonialism and apartheid had harmed not only South Africa but the entire region.
“We pursue an African Agenda which places significant importance on the entrenchment of democracy, peace and security, and acceleration of economic growth not just for South Africa but for the betterment of all Africans,” Landers said in his address.
“In essence, this commitment encapsulates our Pan Africanist foreign policy configuration.”
This policy was carried out, Landers said, through the building of institutions to embed democratic principles on the African continent.
Landers also described SA’s foreign engagement as being strongly linked to realising the objectives of the National Development Plan (NDP), core to which is service delivery at the local level.
How can South Africa hope to export democracy when we can’t even get it right on our own doorstep – with democratic institutions at every level perverted to serve the needs of powerful alliances? Grocott’s Mail challenged Landers in an exclusive interview after the address.
“You’ve raised an important point, one which the ANC is grappling with right now,” Landers told Grocott’s Mail.
“Our leadership have said as much. They’ve conceded that the model they used for these local government elections just didn’t work. People ended up being killed. Candidates were rejected outright and it showed in the polls.
“But I don’t think that the model that we have insofar as the municipalities being efficient and functioning properly – I don’t think we should change that. It works fine.”
The question we should ask, Landers said, is how ordinary residents engage with their councillors, through ward committees.
In Makana Municipality, ward committee elections were postponed from their scheduled dates this month because of the need to comply with the 30-day notice requirement.
“Yes, there are challenges and difficulties – I acknowledge that,” Landers said. “But it’s for those residents and citizens to raise their voices and say, ‘ Look we have issues to discuss here and so we want you to appear before us’.
“I can guarantee you that if the councillor refuses, that’s going to go back not just to Bhisho or Port Elizabeth: it’s going to go back to Luthuli House and he or she will be in serious trouble. Especially in the current climate.”
South Africa’s foreign policy is informed by the country’s domestic needs, Landers said in his preceding address as he outlined the country’s range of strategic partnerships with other nations, blocs and alliances.
The notion of development as a human right was raised during discussion. And later, in his response to Landers, politics lecturer Wesley Seale posited that the principle means of development is the removal of various types of “unfreedoms that allow people little choice to exercise their reasoned agency”.
Poverty, unemployment and inequality were those unfreedoms, Seale argued. “The removal of these is what makes development.”
Landers then answered questions from the floor about Zimbabwe, the AU passport and freedom of movement, SA’s role with regard to Libya, Brexit, and the schisms within our own government, among others.
Zimbabwe - the value of South Africa’s diplomatic and neutral approach versus speaking up as the country goes into meltdown:
“We all know what needs to be done there,” Landers said not-so-cryptically.
“Like our other neighbours, if they thrive and prosper, so do we. We see them not just as our neighbours but as our brothers and sisters.
“We’ll have to just keep striving and hope that eventually the penny will drop.”
Distribution of the African Union passport and free movement of people:
“For now the AU passport is restricted to heads of state of members of the AU, and ministers of foreign affairs of member states,” Landers said.