This past Monday, 2 November, I took on a new role as the founding Head of the AfriForum Institute for Federalism, while retaining functions in the Free Market Foundation.
Yesterday, millions went to the polls hoping to choose a better life for themselves and their families at the municipal level.
Unfortunately, today the same state collapse that people convince themselves they have taken a stand against will continue to beleaguer them, regardless of whether a new government has been elected on paper. The chaos many now take for granted – and some even attempt to rationalise with such silly notions as “even Western cities face water crises!” – will carry on consuming every aspect of life.
Unless, of course, South Africans begin to look beyond electoral politics, at scale.
Federalisation
At the root of the word “federalism” sits the Latin foedus, meaning “agreement” or “covenant”.
Federation is, therefore, in many ways the liberal form of government, because it is one of few that presupposes voluntariness, and the only form of government that presupposes constitutionalism. The centre is inherently limited by law from involving itself in the affairs of the subcentral units of the federation.
While South Africa is a constitutional (that is, formal) federation, the relationship between the centre and both the general and regional populations is not premised on agreement or covenant. All positive law outside of the text of the Constitution proceeds from the false assumption that centralisation and detached politics is the more apt form of governance under our highest law.
So detached is governance that in May 2024, South African voters turned out and voted the African National Congress clean out of power – only for Cyril Ramaphosa and Panyaza Lesufi to carry on occupying leading authority positions.
The people of Johannesburg have never voted to subsidise collapse in the Eastern Cape. The people of the Eastern Cape have never voted to help fund schools in Limpopo while everything in their own province crumbles.
This is a dispensation in need of reconsideration. Renegotiating governance in South Africa on the basis of mutual agreement, responsibility, and reciprocity, is the only viable path out of our quagmire.
Such a renegotiation need not come in the form of formal constitutional change. The South African federation spelled out in the provisions of the Constitution can remain as stated, but how this translates into practical politics needs to be fundamentally altered.
This process has been ongoing for some time in pockets of the country – a phenomenon Dr Frans Cronje this week again referred to as a “shift in power away from the central state and towards independent enclaves of economic and social authority”.
The Amish exist in an essentially federal relationship with the formal authority structures of Pennsylvania and the United States. The Mormon Church as well, to some degree, though there is much overlap with the state government of Utah.
Italy is otherwise a unitary state, and yet its province of South Tyrol sits in a clearly federal relationship with Rome. Rome cannot simply revoke South Tyrol’s statute at its discretion – which is what makes London’s relationship to Scotland unitary – because independent Austria is bound by international law to act as the protecting power of South Tyrol’s autonomy.
Constitutional federalism is characterised by the legal entrenchment of authority at a level higher than the discretion of the centre. But practical community federalism is characterised by the emergence of real authority to which the centre’s discretion is functionally irrelevant.
Ordinary South Africans, too, therefore have it within their power to immediately bring order to chaos. This is something that thousands, across racial, cultural, and wealth lines are doing successfully.
I believe we should call this process of renegotiation federalisation, rather than the usual (and somewhat negative-coded) fragmentation, enclavisation, balkanisation, or the hysterical “return of Apartheid”.
Three options
The process of federalisation is underway. We need not “get going”, because it is already happening. The only question is which communities are going to participate, and which are going to be left behind.
There are, in this sense, three options for the future that I liberally borrow and modify from Sakeliga:
1. Waiting. This is the option that most South Africans have opted for. Many – though a minority – rightly go out and vote, and then sit by, passively, waiting for that vote to translate into something tangible. When it fails, they wait years for another opportunity to vote. The majority have opted out of questions of governance entirely and now only seek to survive. Both these groups are perpetually waiting.
2. Organised crime. The state is collapsing where it has not collapsed already. Drive three hours out of any metro outside the Western Cape and you will realise this is most of the country. The void left by the state cannot remain unfilled, and one of the two major forms of filler is organised crime. Whether it is gangs in the Cape Flats (long abandoned by the City, Province, and centre), zama-zamas, or construction mafias, criminal organisations are starting to play an increasingly important role in South African politics. After all, what is left of the Police Service, as we know, is to some degree already captured. The more people engage in Option 1, the more likely it is that organised crime will become the de facto form of order that they live amidst.
3. Organised commerce/community. The other option, of course, is organised commerce and organised community. Outsurance manning intersections and Discovery despatching its own fire brigade are faint echoes of commerce filling the void. The Solidarity Movement and AfriForum are clearly manifestations of the community stepping up, with private security and education among other things. The more people who choose not merely to wait, the more likely it is that organised commerce and community will step into the breach over organised crime. This requires initiative being taken, however. Criminals are motivated by an inherent incentive for self-enrichment, whereas organised community and commerce require a transcendent sense of responsibility towards yourself and towards others.
Mere voting
Those who choose only Option 1 will have either Option 2 or 3 chosen for them. Mere voting for change, even if one sports the proud “I Voted!” pin, unfortunately has the same result.
There is no Option 4 that has South Africa electing a reformist government that reasonably quickly starts tangibly righting the ship. The electoral math does not support it, least of all in general elections where the National Democratic Revolution bloc (ANC, EFF, and MK) started in 1994 with some 62% of the vote – it has never dipped lower – and sits today with 64% of the vote.
Option 3 is clearly the best option (I would hope!) for your community, but nobody is going to ride in from elsewhere to deliver it to you.
I voted in Pretoria yesterday, and was spoiled for choice between Cilliers Brink of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and Willie Spies of the Freedom Front Plus. I could do this in the full knowledge that the outcome of the vote would have a negligible effect on quality of life.
The DA swept the Overstrand Municipality and its district Overberg Municipality in the 2021 election, and the Western Cape province in 2024. Still, it allowed (and allows) large-scale land invasions (accompanied by crime and uncertainty in the local economy) in upper-class Hermanus to continue unabated, as exposed in Joe Emilio’s Stolen Ground: The Hermanus Story. In fact, the DA administration there, at the behest of the miniscule Land Party, appears to have countenanced the invasion and now seeks to formalise it.
This is how the massive electoral mandate a reformist party was granted has been repaid. Placing all your eggs in the voting basket is a fool’s errand at best.
And yet, not voting and not choosing organised civic action is the worst mix of options. Voting and becoming an active participant in the process of federalisation is by far the best. Ultimately, the power is not merely in the mark on your thumb, but in your hands.
[Image: by zeffss]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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