The Limits of Democratic Governance in South Africa

Mattes, Robert

The Limits of Democratic Governance in South Africa

Other

2015

Journal Title

Journal of Modern African Studies

Link to Journal

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-modern-african-studies

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Political Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

If, as promised by the book’s title, you are looking for a good overview of the current state of local government in South Africa, this is not the place to find it. What this book does do is provide a historical narrative of governance – or what the authors call the ‘local state’ in South Africa’s rural areas over the last three centuries. The authors take us from Dutch and British colonial-era, top down ‘prefectoralism’, to the Union government practice of using white district officers to govern rural areas in concert with co-opted or intimidated African chiefs, through to apartheid-era ‘Bantu administration’ with white officials ‘seconded’ to homeland authorities. But the real contribution of the book is the authors’ argument that the current paradigm of South African local government (democratic elections notwithstanding) retains the most important themes of previous epochs. Locked into a partnership of ‘cooperative governance’ with central government, the ultimate purpose of local government is to achieve national priorities as defined by central government, rather than to provide a site of autonomous, democratic self-government at the local level. Local government works today as it has for decades, and even centuries, as a deconcentrated form of national government service delivery and state presence at the local level, rather than a form of decentralised authority.

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