COSATU Media Monitor, 31 March 2010

THE wage dispute which led to a strike by bus drivers yesterday in Port Elizabeth has been resolved and bus operations are expected to return to normal today.

Only a few buses were on the roads in the city yesterday, leaving hundreds of commuters stranded.

Many had to squeeze into mini-bus taxis and private vehicles to get to work on time while students, especially from townships like Motherwell, KwaDwesi and KwaNoxolo, waited for hours for the few buses to arrive.

Algoa Bus chief executive Sicelo Duze confirmed bus services by the company were disrupted and only 80% of the buses were running yesterday.

“This was due to the fact that one of the three unions in the industry, Transport and Allied Workers Union of South Africa (Tawusa), had not heard from their head office that the strike was off and the bargaining council wage agreement was binding on them,” Duze said.

Union members who had been on strike had accepted the increase offered to their national leaders and had called off the strike, he said.

Two other unions, SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) and Transport and Other Workers Union (Towu) have already signed the agreement for a 10% wage increase offered by employers.

“Our initial demand was 16% and we went down to 11% and we view 10% as being more reasonable,” Satawu spokesman Honest Sinama said.

1.2 Victory for workers

Francis Hweshe, Sowetan, 31 March 2010

Department warns firm over safety

THE Department of Labour has intervened at a Cape Town beachfront hotel construction site following claims by a group of workers of unfair treatment.

Realcor Cape, which is currently building the luxury Raddison Hotel at Bloubergstrand , has been given two months to comply with safety standards.

Sowetan reported about two weeks ago that a group of workers on the site, mainly from Zimbabwe, alleged that they were being assaulted, called baboons and forced to use the “dompas” system when they wanted to go to the toilet.

They also complained of unfair dismissals and being paid less than stipulated in their contracts.

The company has dismissed the allegations.

The department, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and lobby group People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression and Poverty (Passop) had two meetings with the company.

Following an inspection of the site last week, the department has issued the construction company with an inspection report to improve a number of things.

It has been ordered to affix fire extinguishers and first aid signage boards to relevant locations, have the names of responsible persons displayed and appoint health and safety representatives .

The company was also told that “every employer has to provide his employees with safety footwear, overalls, hard hats, among other things”.

In its report, the department said the company must ensure that scaffolding complied with safety standards as stipulated in a regulation of the SA Bureau of Standards.

NUM regional coordinator Patrick Hlengisa said they expected to hold another meeting with the company this week.

He said they expected the company to respond to the various allegations against it.

Hlengisa said about 150 workers, including foreign nationals, had joined the NUM following the Sowetan report.

Passop chairperson Braam Hanekom said they were happy with the intervention of the department and the union.

Sowetan was praised by the workers during a visit to the site last week.

They said that working conditions had improved following the publication of their grievances .

Realcor Cape’s Lionel Lylyveld said yesterday that they would address the issues raised by the department.

1.3 No NTA taxi strike in W.Cape

Malungelo Booi & Regan Thaw, 30 March 2010

The National Taxi Alliance is not planning to embark on any industrial action in the Western Cape.

Operators affiliated to the alliance met in Mitchells Plain on Tuesday afternoon.

They issued an ultimatum to Transport MEC Robin Carlisle last week, demanding an end to what they called the harassment of taxi operators.

Carlisle then promised to continue engaging with them to end the impasse.

“What’s actually going to be happening is that the minibus taxi industry will be engaging with the minister of transport as he’s promised when he responded to our memorandum,” said the alliance’s Mvuyise Mente.

TRAIN STRIKE HAS NO EFFECT IN CAPE

Meanwhile, it is apparent that a strike amongst Metrorail workers has had very little impact on train services in the Western Cape.

Transport union Satawu called on the company’s employees to embark on an indefinite strike starting on Tuesday.

They are protesting bonuses that were not paid to hundreds of workers in 2009.

Satawu had hoped to bring train services in the Cape to a screeching halt but this was not the case.

At Cape Town station, the largest in the province, all trains appeared to be on time and most staff on duty.

As a ticket verifier waved commuters through a turnstile, most train users seemed satisfied with the level of services.

Metrorail said negotiations with Satawu will continue.

1.4 Government told it risks becoming labour broker

ALISTAIR ANDERSON Business Day, 31 March 2010

BY REGULATING labour brokers, the government might become a labour broker itself, the Freedom Front Plus’s parliamentary spokesman on labour, Anton Alberts, said yesterday.

He was responding to a report on labour brokering prepared by the parliamentary committee on labour last week. Report details were released at a National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) conference on Monday.

An African National Congress (ANC) MP and representative of the parliamentary labour committee, Eric Nyekemba, told delegates the committee proposed to replace labour brokers with “public employment services”.

This meant the Department of Labour would act as an employment agency, he said. Workers would apply for jobs on the department’s database. The department would then place the workers with an employer at no fee.

Alberts said he was worried the government might dominate the labour broker market if its public employment services were not properly regulated.

“The government is right not to want to ban labour brokering, but by creating this new role for themselves they may take over an industry which is important to our economy,” he said.

Numsa president Cedric Gina said members should protest against labour brokering “until the government proves that our interests are guaranteed”. The new system was “no different to what has oppressed people for years”.

2. South Africa

2.1 ANC defends struggle songs

Mantashe says party will appeal decision; Zuma wants debate

By SIPHO MASONDO, TIMESLIVE, 31 March 2010

A defiant ANC has vowed to push for the continued singing of controversial liberation struggle songs for "generations to come" so that memories of the past can be preserved.

ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe slammed the decision of the Johannesburg High Court to ban the singing of struggle songs with the words "dubula ibhunu" (shoot the Boer).

Judge Leon Halgryn on Friday ruled that the singing of such songs was unconstitutional.

But Mantashe said the party would appeal against the ruling because it had not been given an opportunity by the court to state its case.

The case was brought before the court by Willem Haraamse, a member of the Society for the Defence of the Constitution, against fellow member Mohammed Vowda, who purportedly wanted to sing the song at a march against crime next Friday.

Mantashe said the court's decision was baseless because the applicant and the defendant had made an arrangement before going to court.

"One is an applicant and the other is the defendant. They have predetermined the outcome of the case. They just go there to formalise the outcome and the judge falls into that trap and formalises a predetermined decision of a group that belongs together," Mantashe said.

The ANC leader said that the party would take the Freedom Front Plus to the Equality Court for hate speech because of the right-wing party's newly launched "Prosecute Julius Malema" campaign".

Mantashe said the FF Plus campaigns promoted hatred of the ANC Youth League president. Defending the continued singing of revolutionary-era songs, Mantashe said they would teach future generations about the country's divided past.

"For this nation to be confident about the future, it must be confident about where it comes from. These songs must be sung for many generations to come so many of these generations know exactly where we come from.

"This democracy is a product of a long struggle for liberation. That must never be hidden from younger generations. Any nation that doesn't know where it comes from will never know where it is going," said Mantashe.

He said he personally derived pleasure from such songs because they brought home the message that freedom was not free.

Though Mantashe did not say when the ANC will lodge its appeal, he said the party had consulted its lawyers.

"We don't think this is a normal case. We think it is a constitutional matter. Our view is that we should get a correct constitutional interpretation of the role of freedom songs in the struggle for freedom," he said.

Mantashe said there was no evidence to suggest that the singing of such songs contributed to attacks on farmers, as claimed by the FF Plus.

"Our view is that misinterpretation of the song, in the first instance, was intended to incite fighting in communities. A Boer is not a farmer. To give it a simple interpretation - that it means 'kill the farmer' - is a wrong interpretation intended to incite. We have declared our concern about farm killings, but to incite these communities using these songs is misplaced. It is that misinterpretation that is inciting farming communities, not the song," Mantashe said.

The songs have also been defended by President Jacob Zuma, who yesterday told Afrikaners in Bethlehem, west of Pretoria, that they were part of the country's heritage.

"We must make social cohesion a priority. We must have a discussion on common heritage," he said. - Additional reporting by Nkosana Lekotjolo

2.2 ANC defends same old tune

IOL, 31 March 2010

ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe yesterday encouraged people to continue to sing liberation songs and said a recent court ruling against the dubul' ibhunu song was "unenforceable".

He was addressing a press conference in Joburg, on the same day that President Jacob Zuma visited an informal settlement for poor Afrikaners in Pretoria West, and said the controversy about freedom songs was a sign that people had not "dealt with" the country's history.

A further sign that South Africans had "not dealt with history" was Friday's ruling by the Johannesburg High Court that singing "dubul' ibhunu" (shoot the boer) in the song Ayesaba Amagwala (the cowards are scared) was unconstitutional and amounted to hate speech. Zuma said that although the country had done well since democracy in 1994, there was a need to make social cohesion a top priority.

He called for a national debate to reach an understanding and tolerance of culture and history. If this failed there would be an outcry every time a street or town name was changed, the president said.

"We must make social cohesion as important as providing access to water, electricity or roads."

After a meeting of the ANC's top six officials in Joburg, Mantashe repeated that the governing party would soon launch an appeal against the court ruling.

This was necessary to ensure a "more correct" constitutional interpretation of the many Struggle songs which formed "a big and important part of our history".

Mantashe said it was impossible for the ANC to implement the judgment.

"Our members are in all organisations - Cosatu, the SACP, stokvels and even karate clubs... How can the ANC enforce that? That is an open veld for anybody. That judgment is unenforceable and unimplementable."

Mantashe said the fact that the applicant and the respondent in Friday's court application were from the same organisation - the Society for the Protection of Our Constitution - gave the impression that "an artificial contestation was created to arrive at a pre-determined outcome".

"The officials of the ANC expressed concern about the determination by some interest groups' use of courts over political issues and to seek to eradicate our proud history and heritage through unenforceable judgements such as declaring the Struggle songs as unconstitutional," he said.

Mantashe insisted that the reference to ibhunu was not directed at farmers, but referred to apartheid.

To give it the "simple interpretation" that it meant kill the farmer was incorrect.

He rejected claims the song had incited farm murders.

In her reaction, DA leader Helen Zille again questioned the message the ANC was sending to South Africans and the world by appealing against the judgment.

2.3 Danger of unholy deal with ANC

Stephen Mulholland, Dispatchonline

If HITACHI of Japan, described without response by this correspondent as “morally bankrupt”, believes it can with impunity interfere in the internal politics of South Africa it should immediately have its lawyers study the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) administered by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington.

There they will learn how the FCPA was born: “As a result of SEC investigations in the mid-1970s, over 400 US companies admitted making questionable or illegal payments in excess of 300 million to foreign government officials, politicians, and political parties.”

Hitachi would be well advised to take note of the reference to “political parties” and to this passage from the Justice Department: “Several firms that paid bribes to foreign officials have been the subject of criminal and civil enforcement actions, resulting in large fines and suspension and debarment from federal procurement contracting, and their employees and officers have gone to jail.”

Now Hitachi has its shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It also does substantial business in the US, no doubt some of it with the federal government plus state and city administrations. It must also answer to the Securities Exchange Commission which takes a dim view of bribery and has a great deal of muscle.

Hitachi’s corrupt allocation of 25 percent of the shares of its local subsidiary, Hitachi Power Africa, to the ANC’s investment arm has been brought to the attention of the World Bank by the Democratic Alliance .

The Bank, which will decide on April 8 on a 3.75 billion loan to finance the Hitachi contract, has been made aware that the ANC stands to make billions out of contracts between Hitachi and Eskom, itself a 100% state-owned entity. This process will have historic effects on the conduct of politics in South Africa.

It must be said that the World Bank, in this matter at least, behaves in a pusillanimous manner, replying merely that the Hitachi matter was not raised in the loan negotiations. Hello? Eskom is owned by the state which is run by the ANC which has 25percent of Hitachi Power Africa. Who at those meetings was going to bring it up?

But the World Bank now knows about this unholy deal. It will render the ANC one of the world’s wealthiest political parties. It will make it impregnable in South African domestic politics as hundreds of millions will flow into it from Hitachi’s rapidly growing business with government and the private sector year after year.

If Hitachi believes this business model is useful why, pray, do we not see it granting 25 percent of its subsidiaries to ruling parties in other countries in which it operates? Why not, for example, in the US, give Barack Obama’s Democratic Party a free slice of Hitachi USA, or whatever it’s called.

That would, however, mean jail or hara- kiri or some such fate for guilty Hitachi executives. Or maybe, like Daimler, they will just pay a massive fine which just might wipe out their South African profits.

It is not overstating the case to say that we stand at a historic crossroad in our political affairs. Unless the ANC is forced to divest itself of its 25 percent share in Hitachi Power Africa, for which it has not paid, it will emerge a financial powerhouse which will permanently be in a position to brush aside all opposition.

And here is a final warning for Hitachi from the DOJ: “The anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA make it unlawful for a US person, and certain foreign issuers of securities, to make a corrupt payment to a foreign official for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.”

2.4 SA lacks resources to fight corruption

afrol News, 30 March 2010

The South African office of the Public Protector has more vicious teeth than anyone ever imagined, but what lacks are the resources to expedite the duty without hindrance.

This is what the newly appointed public protector in South Africa, Advocate Tuli Madonsela, told the media yesterday following her consultations that took her and her team across the breath and width of the country.

Ms Madonsela said with the current team of investigators and limited resources such as working space and accessible offices, especially for the rural communities, the task in her new job was still an uphill.

Recent public statements and denouncements by different speakers put South Africa is heading towards topping the African chats on corruption with a number of top ruling party officials as well as government officers being implicated in corrupt awarding of contracts and tenders.

In 2004 only, some R40 billion (euro 4 billion) reportedly changed hands during corrupt transactions and this was "growing all the time", retired judge Willem Heath told the SACP anti-corruption seminar this week.

Ivor Sarakinsky, from the School of Public Development Management at the University of the Witwatersrand, added that the tender system was a "big issue" when it came to corruption, adding that corruption was getting so endemic that it would soon reach the point of no return.

Minister for Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, who is also the SACP general secretary, said that "alternatives" to tenders, without the involvement of "middle men", should be explored, stressing that not every government service must be converted into a tender. The office of the Public Protector has been largely asked to be more accessible to the general public and to ensure that it does not become too legally demanding for the ordinary citizens to report wrong-doing.

Ms Madonsela said the public protector needed more investigators to do its job well and deal with the possible workload, saying that at present, the office has the entire national staff was 153 people.

She also said the office needed to open more regional offices to avoid costly travel by citizens to access her offices.

2.5 ANC: Freedom Park, Voortrekker monuments linked

Business Report, 30 March 2010

The Freedom Park and the Voortrekker monuments in Pretoria should be linked in a single precinct, the African National Congress said on Tuesday.

"We must systematically own all our history and heritage and undo the appropriation of parts of our history and heritage to individual nationalities in the country," said secretary general Gwede Mantashe addressing the media after a meeting of ANC officials on Monday.

"It means you move none of them... but you integrate their work into one precinct.

"So we link them, in a big way, into a single precinct. Even if you call that precinct the Freedom precinct, you can even call it that. Because that history is our history.

Freedom Park is a monument to democracy in Pretoria, the nearby Voortrekker monument commemorates the history of Afrikaners in South Africa.

ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu, flanking Mantashe, said all South Africans should "take ownership" of the country's heritage.

"Even apart from the geographic spaces that these monuments occupy, in our hearts we must be truly South Africans.

"We must take ownership of everything that is South African so that there is no history and heritage that belongs to a particular grouping and history and heritage that belongs again to another grouping," he said.

"All of us as South Africans, everything that is before us, that is part of our history, all of us should take full ownership of that, including our struggle songs."

The briefing followed heated public debate about the use of the words "Dubula ibhunu" contained in struggle songs.

Mantashe was speaking after the words, which mean "shoot the boer" were banned by the High Court in Johannesburg on Friday -- a decision which irked the party and which it is bent on having overturned.

It will appeal the decision, a legal matter which the party believes will end up in the Constitutional Court.

Mantashe conveyed concern by ANC members that interest groups were using the courts over political matters and were seeking to erase the country's history through "unenforceable" judgements deeming struggle songs unconstitutional.

The party has committed to take part in initiatives to preserve the country's history.

"We must own our history and heritage whether good or bad.

"We must be more open about the longest struggle for freedom carried out by the oldest liberation movement in the continent and the various phases thereof.

"We must accept that 30 years of this struggle had armed insurrection as one of the pillars," Mantashe said.

He said the genocide against the Khoi San, the wars of dispossession and the concentration camps during the South African war must be spoken about more openly.

"We must all come together and discuss ways and means of preserving this history and heritage, cautious enough to avoid offending each other.

"Easy legal victories by any grouping in society will further polarise our society."

Mantashe said a nation that forgot where it came from "will never know where it goes", this was the relevance of singing struggle songs today.

"For this nation to be confident about the future, it must be confident about where it comes from.

"Actually these songs must be sang for many generations to come, so that many of these generations must know exactly where we come from.

"And those songs must be sung to remind us that it is determination, it is perseverance, it is patience that will ultimately give us full freedom in our country.

"Freedom is not about voting every five years, it is being the full citizen in all respects, and that struggle continues." - Sapa

2.6 ‘ANC upset over Julius threats’

Zukile Majova, Sowetan, 31 March 2010

THE ANC says it is worried about the safety of its Youth League leader Julius Malema.

Yesterday ANC general secretary Gwede Mantashe said the outrage over the song Dubul’ ibhunu was a smokescreen for an attempt on Malema’s life.

“We are dealing with a society that wants to wish its history away by picking up on an issue that triggers disagreement and conflict, ” Mantashe said, urging law enforcement agencies to take the threats against Malema seriously.

“Part of our history is that when right-wing groups started aggressive propaganda against individual members of our movement in the past, such members were assassinated.”

Mantashe said the police should investigate the PAC Youth League’s threat against Malema.

But PACYL president Pitso Mphasha said yesterday his members no longer planned to injure Malema, saying they blamed former president Nelson Mandela for the “distortion” over who organised the 1960 anti- pass march .

2.7 Petrol price increase of 55c could be announced today
Business Day Online, 31 March 2010

South Africans are a week away from another petrol price hike, according to economists.

The Central Energy Fund will release the petrol price for April later today.

Econometrix economist Tony Twine has forecast a hike of 55c/l for inland motorists while on the coast the price is likely to go up by 48c/l.

“The cause for the increase is a split of three factors,” Twine told Business Day Online.

“The first factor is Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s announcement in the Budget speech of an 10c/l increase in general levies from April, an 8c/l contribution to the road accident fund and a 7,5c/l special levy to help fund a pipeline built by Transnet,” he says.

“The second factor is the under-recovery during March. We’re estimating this to be 22,5c/l,” Twine says.

Twine says the last factor is Nersa’s decision last Friday to award Transnet an existing pipeline tariff hike of 7c/l.

2.8 Inequality on scale found in SA bites like acid

Neva Makgetla, Business Day, 31 March 2010

IF YOU grew up in a large family (mine had five children), you know the wretched feeling that you came off second best compared to your sister.

It’s not so much that your Christmas present or birthday party wasn’t great — it’s just that, in your mind at least, hers were better. Now scale that feeling up to reflect SA’s far more real and much bigger economic inequalities, and you can grasp their effect on social cohesion.

In 2005-06, the national Income and Expenditure Survey found that the average income for the top 10% of households was 32 times that of the bottom 50%. The richest decile enjoyed well over half of all household income. Inequalities that steep bite like acid. They’re rubbed in every day when you see luxury houses and huge cars, first-rate government services and posh malls in suburbs just kilometres from informal settlements where people live without decent sanitation, water or schooling.

International experience demonstrates that inequitable societies tend to run into traps of conflict and anger that prevent effective development. And apartheid left a particularly poisonous legacy, since economic inequalities align with race, gender and geography. That makes the divisions sharper and social solidarity even more elusive.

Inequality has several dimensions.

To start with, mass joblessness means many people have virtually no earned income. According to the International Labour Organisation, SA ranks among the 10 countries with the lowest share of employed adults in the world.

For the employed, pay is unjustifiably inequitable. In 2008, the Quarterly Labour Force Survey found that one in seven non- agricultural formal employees and two-thirds of domestic, informal and farm workers earned under R1000 a month. Three-quarters of security guards got less than R2500 a month — many risking their lives for people who earned an order of magnitude more.

Assets are even more unequal than pay.

In 2005-06, a household in the richest decile earned 94 times as much from investments as one in the poorest 60%. The richest 10% of households got three-quarters of all the income from capital, compared with less than 1% for the poorest 60%.

The difference is only a tad less stark if we look at income from all accumulated assets, including pensions and enterprise profits. The richest 10% of households got almost two-thirds of income from these assets, while the poorest 60% received 1%.

Social grants, support from relatives and remittances were strongly redistributive, but could not fully offset inequalities in assets and pay. Last year, nearly 4-million people got an old-age or disability pension at R1010 a month, while nearly 9-million got a R240 child-support grant.

These grants are too small to lift families out of poverty. But they are the main source of income for a quarter of all households, and almost two-fifths of those in the former Bantustans.

Finally, continued inequities in education and healthcare reproduce economic inequalities across generations.

The worst education and medical care is still found in the poorest communities, notably the former Bantustans — which still house 45% of all children under 15, though only a third of working-age people.

The results emerge in tertiary education. In theory, it should be a central mechanism for social mobility. In practice, inequalities in general education and income mean it still mostly reproduces inequality. Thus, in 2006, while Africans made up three-quarters of the population, they made up only 51% of university students, and a much smaller share of students in professional programmes.

Government policies to improve incomes, assets and services for the poor have been geared mostly to providing a safety net rather than enhancing overall equality. In particular, policies to increase the asset base of poor communities remain weak, and education and health policies tend to focus on improving average outcomes rather than targeting the systemic inequalities left by apartheid.

A strategy to ensure more equitable access to assets should take into account the many different kinds of capital that now exist: household savings, management and ownership of enterprises, shares in companies, family housing and access to infrastructure, and social capital in the form of publicly and collectively owned assets. The question is how the government can secure more equitable power in the economy while sustaining overall growth and investment.

A particular problem emerges in black economic empowerment (BEE). Broad-based BEE policies acknowledge the need for greater overall equity, including through collective ownership by workers and communities as well as skills development. But in practice, the government’s strongest measures — notably the mining codes and parts of land reform — have focused almost exclusively on promoting individual ownership by black people. That does little to address broader economic disparities, though the rich may become more diverse.

Finally, the social and political effect of inequality has been aggravated by conspicuous consumption by the well-off in both public and private sectors. In contrast, in successful social democracies the rich play down their excesses. We need to encourage a similar culture of solidarity where elites understand the high social and political costs of flaunting their wealth.

2.9 Public servants in conflict of interests
WYNDHAM HARTLEY , Business Day, 31 March 2010

Eight of the nine provinces have been shown to have companies run by public servants doing business with their respective provincial governments, a parliamentary reply by Co-operative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka has revealed.

Shiceka’s revelation that only in KwaZulu-Natal were provincial employees not doing business with the province follows an auditor-general’s report that thousands of public servants, across national and provincial departments, were doing business with government at one level or another.

Yesterday, replying to a question from Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Martie Wenger about the finding that 62% of provincial departments did not comply with regulatory requirements, Shiceka said that in eight provinces there was “transversal” or “entities that are connected to government employees doing business with departments”.

There was regulatory noncompliance in all nine provinces. This mainly consisted of failure to invest in infrastructure as required by Treasury regulations. The two areas most hit by failure to invest in infrastructure were provincial education and health departments.

This occurred in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, the North West, the Free State, Mpumalanga, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape. The Northern Cape had a failure to invest in infrastructure as well but in the field of housing. In the Free State, there was also a problem with the allocation of housing subsidies to municipal officials.

On the extent of the noncompliance, Shiceka said: “The auditor- general has a specific formula which it is using to quantify the level in percentages of noncompliance on the areas as reflected. We are still waiting submissions from the auditor-general on these figures.”

In a separate development, DA MP Willem Doman took Shiceka to task about his statement that underperforming municipal officials would be fired. “While the minister’s commitment to stamping out poor performance is praiseworthy, his ignorance of the constitutional principle that a separation of powers — between national, provincial and local governments — exists, is fairly breathtaking,” Doman said.

“The constitution states: ‘The executive and legislative authority of a municipality is vested in the municipal council’, and that ‘a municipality has the right to govern, on its own initiative, the local government affairs of its community’. The constitution also says that ‘The national or provincial government may not compromise or impede a municipality’s ability or right to exercise its powers or perform its functions’.

“This means the minister can no more fire a local official than appoint one. Those decisions are at the discretion of the relevant municipal authority; and that is a good thing.

“It is a good thing because federalism ensures a devolution of power, one of the consequences of which is that those public servants or representatives responsible for failing to deliver on their mandate be held to account and, the more localised the authority, the easier it is to identify who is responsible. And, if local politicians refuse or fail to act, they should be voted out. ”

image001.jpg

image002.png

Reply all

Reply to author

Forward

0 new messages