NCOP veto halts Western Cape’s attempt to dissolve dysfunctional Knysna council: Ivo Vegter

Key topics:

• NCOP veto blocks Western Cape’s bid to dissolve Knysna council

• Political power struggle hinders municipal service delivery reforms

• National ANC influence overrides local and provincial governance decisions

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By Ivo Vegter*

The wheels of government grind slowly on, until they run up against the immovable wall of the National Council of Provinces.

Eighteen months ago, I wrote about the perilous state of the municipality in my home town of Knysna.

At the time, the premier of the Western Cape, Alan Winde, stood up in Parliament to point at Knysna as an example of a captured town, and asked the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, to help him place the town under administration.

Why Winde needed the president’s help was a mystery to me, and I said so at the time.

In terms of the Constitution, the president plays no role in the process for assessing the performance of a municipality, and if necessary, placing it under provincial administration.

Winde knows more than I do, of course, and I’m now guessing that he appealed to Ramaphosa not in his capacity as president of the country, but in his capacity as president of the ANC. Because as it turns out, the ANC effectively has veto power over major provincial decisions, even in provinces that are nominally governed by the Democratic Alliance.

Dissolving council

It took until September this year for the Western Cape government to explore every available avenue to restore Knysna’s municipality to a functioning state.

The intervening 17 months had been spent trying to implement a plan and establish some sort of stability. Knysna has had 15 municipal managers since 2022; many of them imported from far-flung locations where they had spotty records.

The province provided an elaborate support plan in terms of section 154 of the Constitution, designed to enable the municipality to perform its functions effectively, on its own.

Eventually, the province gave up. On 12 September, the Western Cape provincial ministry of local government issued formal written notice of its intent, within 14 days, to intervene in terms of section 139(1)(c) of the Constitution by dissolving the municipal council and appointing an administrator until such time as new elections could be held.

Its notice cited a detailed history of attempts to address the municipality’s problems, and included a long list of deficiencies that, the province argued, amounted to a failure to meet minimum standards for the provision of basic services. It noted that residents had been obliged to provide some of the services the municipality was failing to provide. It said that exceptional circumstances called for a section 139 intervention.

It also sent written notice of the proposed dissolution of council to the minister of cooperation governance and traditional affairs, and the National Council of Provinces (NCOP), both of which hold a veto, as per section 139(3)(b) of the Constitution.

NCOP select committee

The NCOP, with surprising alacrity, dispatched a select committee to Knysna for an oversight visit. It produced a lengthy report, which was tabled during a virtual online meeting of a handful of NCOP members representing each of the provinces, on 26 September – the day before the dissolution would take effect.

The NCOP consists of a delegation from each province, constituted roughly according to the support each party received in the provincial elections. Each delegation consists of ten members, but votes as a single provincial bloc.

The select committee report rejected the proposal to take the municipality into administration. It gave the council 14 days “to provide a clear plan to address its water and sanitation challenges” (as if it hadn’t spent the last 18 months or more doing exactly that).

The report was adopted, rejecting the proposal to dissolve the Knysna council, with seven provinces voting in favour and only the Western Cape and Kwazulu-Natal voting against.

Local views

Locally, the Democratic Alliance supported the intervention, but all other parties represented on the municipal council, including the DA’s minority coalition partner, the Knysna Independent Movement (KIM), opposed it.

The DA has, in public communication, denounced KIM as now being part of the “coalition of corruption”, consisting of the ANC, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), the EFF, and a small local party, Plaaslike Besorgde Inwoners (Local Concerned Residents).

The chairman of the NCOP’s oversight select committee, Thomas Kaunda of the ANC in Kwazulu-Natal, said that the committee consulted a wide range of stakeholders in Knysna, including organised labour, business, ratepayers’ associations, the South African Local Government Association, and chief whips of the parties represented in council.

All, he said, were opposed to the administration proposal.

Some of the opposition to administration came from unexpected quarters.

An emergent residents’ association that has been very effectively helping the municipality with remedial work on water, sanitation, and other infrastructure, didn’t believe dissolving council would be of much help.

Like KIM, which broke with the DA on this issue, it felt that administration would be disruptive, would undermine relationships that had been built with municipal officials at all levels, and would derail the limited progress that had been made under a new mayor who took office in February.

Most importantly, they felt that new elections were in any case scheduled for next year, and were in any case unlikely to substantially change the balance of power on the council. Even if they did, there was no guarantee that a new council would be any better at resolving the town’s infrastructure problems.

Perceptions

I don’t want to relitigate the case for and against administration here. There are good arguments on both sides of the debate.

Whatever the merits of the opposing views, the fact that the NCOP was in a position to veto the decision by the province raises alarm bells.

The DA has presented it as a case of an ANC-dominated national government coming to the rescue of a failed ANC-led local council. Whether that is true or not, that is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw. It is certainly possible, which is where the danger lies.

The ANC controls only 20% of the seats of the 10-member NCOP delegations from the two provinces that voted in favour of dissolving the Knysna council, and cannot marshal a majority vote in either of these provincial delegations.

By contrast, the ANC either has an outright majority, or can count on supporting votes from EFF or PA delegates to achieve a majority, in all seven of the provincial delegations that voted against dissolving the ANC-PA-EFF-led council.

It seems wrong that national-level representatives from provinces so remote from local affairs should, on the basis of a single short visit to a town, be in a position to veto decisions with far-reaching consequences for local administration and service delivery.

It seems strange that such superficial oversight is sufficient to countermand the decision of a province that has been closely engaged with a failing municipality over a period of years.

Is this why Winde thought he needed Ramaphosa’s support to intervene in Knysna? Because Ramaphosa is the only one who could prevail upon the ANC delegates to the NCOP to vote in favour of dissolving the Knysna council?

Veto power

Early in 2023, I warned that wresting the National Assembly away from ANC control would only be a small part of the battle. What nobody talks about is the veto power that the ANC-dominated NCOP holds over legislation and decisions that affect the provinces.

According to the Constitution, that includes being able to veto provincial decisions to intervene in failing local governments.

Whatever the merits of the NCOP’s decision involving Knysna, the fact that distant party comrades of allegedly delinquent local government members are able to ride to the rescue when a province decides to intervene to stop the rot is worrying.

Perhaps the NCOP made the right decision, this time. Maybe Knysna’s council can make good on its promises to right the ship, given enough help from both the province and local residents and business. I certainly hope so.

I’m also sympathetic to the view that the prospects of a new election aren’t sufficiently appealing to merit the disruption that a dissolution of council would cause.

But what about South Africa’s many other failing municipalities, some of which are in even worse shape than Knysna? The arguments against dissolving the Knysna municipal council will not hold everywhere.

Can those municipalities, too, count on being rescued at the last minute by fellow party members on the NCOP? That would make stopping the rot in our municipalities much harder than it should be.

* Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist.

*This article was originally published by Daily Friend and has bee republished with permission.