SA needs federalism

No voting reform will deliver the hard medicine that can make SA a successful nation. Political power is centralised in an incapacitated national government, failing to acknowledge the incredible diversity across SA. National taxation and the redistribution from wealthier to poorer regions allows failing regions and municipalities to continue to exist when they may never be productive.

What SA badly needs is a high degree of federalism so that provinces can compete in the marketplace of ideas. Only national defence and immigration should remain exclusively the domain of central government.

Everything else should go to the provinces, including the right to raise taxes, with only a small amount of tax then given to the national government to fund its remaining competences. This would also weaken the grip of national party structures over their provincial branches.

A strong central government will continue to ruin this country with poor policy choices because one-size-fits-all policies only work in small, homogeneous nations, which is not SA. Whether it be National Health Insurance (NHI) or the persistence of quasi-monopoly state-owned enterprises such as Eskom and Transnet, we need real-life experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t.

Let KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape have control of their ports and experiment with privatisation or remaining state controlled. Let provinces that believe in NHI implement it, and if it’s a disaster others won’t. Mineral wealth can also be managed by each province — if they implement bad policy and legislation, they’ll get no taxes and be forced to reform. Education delivery to poor households — the biggest failure in postapartheid SA — can be done very differently in each province and successful processes copied.

Thirty years after Codesa, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and try something radically different, instead of tinkering around the edges.

Suhail Suleman

Cape Town