Examine motive behind mergers

It is unclear why the ANC wants fewer provinces

THE African National Congress’s (ANC’s) plan to reduce the number of provinces has been knocking around in different guises for almost as long as SA has been a democracy.

However, it was only officially recognised by the party at its 2012 national conference in Mangaung, when it resolved to establish an intraparty commission to examine the issue.

This followed the rejection of a policy proposal put forward at the ANC policy conference earlier that year that recommended that the number of provinces be reduced from nine to five and that their boundaries be significantly reshaped in the interests of improved governance and the more efficient delivery of services.

This proved a contentious matter among the delegates, many of whose status in the party and livelihoods as state employees depended on the continued existence of all nine provinces.

Like so many other contentious issues that were raised in Mangaung, the question of how many provinces SA should have was shelved.

The conference resolved to form a committee of “experts and academics” to advise the party on how to proceed, with the then chair of the ANC’s subcommittee on the legislature and governance, Nomaindia Mfeketo, saying depending on its recommendations, a final position would be adopted at the next national general council meeting.

The meeting in question is, of course, the ANC conference that starts in Midrand later this week, and true to Ms Mfeketo’s word, the issue of the provinces is back on the agenda.

But it is apparent from the confused nature of the various provinces’ input on the question in recent months that if the committee of “experts and academics” has indeed sat and applied its collective mind, its thinking has either not been shared very widely or their ideas have not gone down too well.

While the ANC Western Cape provincial general council decided at its meeting last weekend that the provinces should be rationalised, this is by no means the consensus view in the party, especially in those provinces that are most likely to cease to exist.

And those who do support the concept of fewer provinces cannot agree on why.

The Western Cape justification is that the conditions that existed when the decision was made to create three layers of government “no longer exist”, and with South Africans having become more integrated, “to continue to divide them according to provinces is not helping nation building”.

This naturally exposes the ANC to the allegation that the real aim is to retake political control of the Western Cape by gerrymandering the province’s borders to include more ANCsupporting regions, specifically parts of the Eastern Cape.

But Ms Mfeketo still insists reconfiguring the provinces has “nothing to do with reclaiming

There’s the allegation that the real aim is to retake political control of the Western Cape by gerrymandering the province’s borders

the Western Cape”, but is about “recapacitating the state” and ensuring resources are shared across the country’s provinces equally.

The fact that a similar argument was used to support the ANC’s ongoing bid to merge the poor and populous Emfuleni Municipality with Midvaal, the only council controlled by the Democratic Alliance in Gauteng, will not make the proposal any more popular among opposition parties.

Given that vested political interests are, if anything, more entrenched in the ANC now than they were in 2012, and reducing the number of provinces would require a constitutional amendment and the support of two-thirds of the National Assembly — not to mention ratification by the legislatures of affected provinces — the ANC would have to make an especially compelling argument to get such a proposal through.

So far none has emerged.