ANC in KZN bent on scrapping provinces

THE ANC in KwaZulu-Natal wants the provinces system to be scrapped because it believes it’s a waste of government resources.

The branch will lobby for this position at the ruling party’s June national policy conference in Gauteng. Cosatu had said it would back the call for the scrapping of the provinces during discussions at the conference.

The ANC provincial executive committee said the functions of the provinces should either be transferred to national government or local governments.

Speaking to The Star yesterday, ANC provincial secretary Super Zuma said: “The ANC believes that we should rather have a strong national government, and strong local government, which is the sphere of government closer to the people.”

He said turning certain MECs to be mayors would strengthen the capacity of the local government because MECs were more experienced political leaders.

“We are going to raise the matter with an aim to get it discussed thoroughly. For now, we want this proposal to be discussed at branch level before we lobby other provinces to back us. We want this to be opened for discussion,” he said.

The party in KwaZulu-Natal would not determine the timeframe for the scrapping of the provinces “until the idea is discussed and adopted” by the conference, Zuma said. “Once it is adopted by the party, we will propose the time-frame.”

About job security of the current employees of the provincial governments, Zuma said they should be absorbed by other spheres of government “because they are employees of the national government”.

Cosatu had, since 2011, been lobbying for the removal of the provinces as it felt that “instead of facilitating development, they have just been guzzling resources needed to build strong local government”.

Cosatu president S’dumo Dlamini said the Struggle for freedom was, among other goals, aimed at creating a unitary state.

He said provinces were created as a compromise to accommodate the Bantustans.

Dlamini said that during the Codesa negotiations, there were political parties who felt strongly that creating provinces was not what the liberation Struggle was about.

“It is quite expensive to run one country with different governments – national and nine provinces, which are autonomous.

“We can see what happened with the Gauteng Department of Health, where the national minister could not do anything because of the province’s autonomy.

“We have nine different public services with more than 30 departments in each province, which is something untenable,” said Dlamini.

He said provinces had an impact on service delivery because the policies were not all aligned with those of the national government.

IFP national chairperson Blessed Gwala said South Africa would have been more organised than it is today if it had adopted the party’s idea of a federal state.

“What they (KwaZulu-Natal ANC and Cosatu) are proposing is that powers should be moved from the people to be centralised in Pretoria,” he said.

According to him, transferring the functions of the provinces to the local government was impractical.

“How can the council take functions of the province? Right now, the municipalities are struggling to function, and if you gave them more responsibilities, they would collapse,” said Gwala.

“Provinces are functioning well, although they have challenges.”

Political analyst Protas Madlala said it would make sense if the ANC was proposing that the number of provinces should be reduced, instead of scrapping them.