Local government party politics and ANC councillor representation: the dynamics of council decision-making in South Africa
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Date
08/07/2019Author
Nzo, Thina Zamambo Lotia
Metadata
Abstract
Councillors serving as elected representatives of the African National Congress (ANC) in South
Africa have increasingly gained a poor public reputation and decline in electoral support since
2006. Community perception surveys produced by research organisations have pointed to
corruption, patronage, rent-seeking, gatekeeping and factions as the main contributors of ANC
councillors’ failures to represent the development interests of the electorate. Moreover, the
escalating protest action against the ‘lack of service delivery’ playing out in the public domain,
have led scholars such as Atkinson (2007) and Southall (2007) to conclude that local government
resembles a ‘dysfunctional’ South African state that is in a ‘crisis’.
Apart from this analysis and conclusion, however, we know little about the decision-making
practices and experiences of councillors representing the ANC ruling party. The contribution
made by this thesis is that it offers an alternative approach to the study of local government by
using organisational ethnography to examine the everyday practices and dynamics of
representation from the perspective of ANC councillors. The thesis draws primarily on
observations of Kalahari Municipality council and its executive committee; shadowing of the
mayor; informal discussions and interviews with ANC ward councillors and committee
chairpersons, senior managers, municipal union members, and ANC regional and branch party
officials.
Through the observation of councillors exercising their representational role in council and
executive committee decision-making structures, this research will reveal that there are tensions
between representing the interests of the ANC regional party, national government priorities and
communities. The demands made by the ANC regional party at times constrain the power and
autonomy of ANC councillors’ from representing the developmental interests of communities and
the national government’s agenda of ‘building a capable and developmental state’(NDP,
2012:414-478). The ANC regional party’s dominating presence at local government level, is
embedded within the practices of conflating the ANC party with the state (Booysen, 2015;
Southall, 2013). Although the blurring of the party and state at local government level elucidates
features of neopatrimonialism, however the complex power struggles of cooperation and
resistance against patronage practices and gatekeeping amongst state actors needs to be
understood within the partisan bureaucratic system which local government functions under.
The conflict ridden relationship between ANC councillors and their ANC regional party structures
explored in this thesis, demonstrates the ways in which ANC councillors are able to adopt
strategies such as internal opposition to resist and challenge the manifestation of ‘state capture’ by
the ANC regional party, which is propelled by particularistic interests, corruption and patronage.
The shifting loyalties and defiance against towing party lines in the ANC caucus reproduce
uneven terrains of ANC party cohesion and subordination in council decision-making. The
organisational ethnographic in this thesis brings to light the short comings of the patronage
analytical framework that has been used to homogenise local government, which often obscures
the understanding of the heterogeneous practices of ANC councillors in local government
decision-making.
The thesis argues that beneath the surface of ANC patronage politics, corruption and popular
protests against lack of local government’s capacity to deliver services brought forward by
scholars and commentators who view local government as a homogenous entity; lays deeper and
systematic tensions and contradictions of representative local democracy that needs to be
understood from councillors’ perspective. As suggested by Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan
(2014:14), the state should be seen not as an entity but a bundle of practices and processes in a
field of complex powers. Practices which seek to strengthen and weaken the development of the
state do coexist (ibid) and they vary in their intensity in their local context. Therefore, councillors’
representational autonomy and powers in practice should be understood within the politics of
multiple state actors and the ANC’s struggle for control over local government.