How to think clearly about decentralisation

James Scott famously wrote a book called Seeing like a State, in which he illustrates a series of issues with how high-order institutional thinking is forced to simplify the world in order to govern massive organisations like states or megacorporations, with the result that it mutilates social relations and causes often enormous unexpected damage because of the difficulty in apprehending nonrational ways in which society and nature organises itself at the local level. But there is another aspect to his thesis which is implied at many stages but understated throughout, because he is mostly focused on those who govern.

In reality, most of us have learned to think like states, or at least like statesmen: whenever there is a policy question, we always say “we need to do x” to fix it. Everyone in opposition circles keeps talking about how “we” need to “decentralise” “South Africa”. By the number of concepts I have hung in quotation marks, you should see there is a lot of confusion to clear up.

“We”

There are a few good examples of this you can see in everyday political conversation. One is the fallacy of the general will, which you see in electoral conversations. The other is the fallacy of general agency, which you see in discussions of policy.

DA voters (particularly white people) often get anxious about fellow white people voting VF+ or ACDP in the general election. They say that would mean “splitting the vote”. And in local elections there is a limited sense in which this is the case – for ward seats, but these are of course compensated for in the representative calculation.

But overall, they are failing to see that the “we” they are thinking about – all South Africans – doesn’t actually exist. The main factors in elections are class and race, and the votes line up pretty cleanly on these lines, to the point that in many cases you can predict the outcome based on the differences in racial turnout to within a percentage point or two.

That means that there is a minority bloc and a majority bloc (yes, that is the spelling when it means a political or military faction), and so long as you are voting for a party that serves the interests of your voting bloc, you are not betraying them. With the DA moving ever-closer to the ANC, both in allegiance and policy design, it makes little sense to use Helen Zille’s old “rats and mice” argument.

Among the majoritarians, the Charterist movement (ANC, PAC, EFF, MK, etc) absolutely dominates the Assembly, with 2/3rds of the seats. They are fundamentally opposed to any abrogation of power that cannot be revoked in a second, so no legal reforms will be handed down, only temporary policy concessions handed out on a trust basis at best, which can be retracted if disloyalty is shown.

Which brings us to the second and more salient fallacy here, of general agency. Who is the “we” when we talk of devolution or decentralisation? Do the main political decisionmakers (elected officials, senior civil servants, donor-class private actors, litigious NGOs, foreign powers) take your opinion into account? When you think of the Charterists, do you think “we”? Howabout when you think of the most powerful oligarchs? I am guessing the answer is no.

So why do so many of the ordinary public think and act as if they are part of a shared hivemind with the political leadership? Quite simply, because of democracy. We are taught to believe not only that there is some common interest to all members of a society, but that there are common values, and a common will. This is demonstrably not the case even in the most homogeneous societies. Of course, there is an extent to which it is true, but these are gossamer-thin filaments of social connection.

The rational move is to find a section of society which shares your interests, and to pursue strategic changes where possible from this common sectional vantage point. In this sense, one should be appealing to one’s actual community, however defined; people with a shared vision, ethnos, location, or material interest. Then advocating for an action becomes an appeal not to the state (an armed organisation of hundreds of thousands) who has no reason to listen to you, but to a small subsection of society potentially capable of collective action to extract concessions form that state.

And to that end, political actors everywhere in the world have to realise that you don’t get to make the final decisions unless you have decisive military capacity and the will to use it. And in the modern age, that means almost nobody but the United States, China, and their respective geopolitical dependents. Any smaller state or non-state actor which causes trouble without their permission will be forced to back down. That leaves a whole host of smaller strategies that civic organisations, protest movements, private individuals, corporations etc, can use, but they all stop short of a direct military challenge. This explains Ernst Roets’ efforts to attract the favour of the king in Washington, and more power to him.

But let’s say you are not trying to play planetary chess just yet, but are already smart enough to see who “we” are and what “we” can do. What then do you actually do?

“Decentralise”

The obvious meaning of this word is that we are taking power away from the central government. but they are not going to give it to us. And there are several ways in which you can “decentralise”.

You can hand more powers to the provinces, or to the municipalities, but this will require a constitutional change to mean anything beyond the cycles of ANC leadership and national elections. Our constitution defines the powers of the three spheres of government (national, provincial, local) so narrowly, that we may well be the only constitution on earth that defines which level of government is allowed to run a dog-catching service.

Perhaps you more modestly want a new municipality, or a change in municipal boundaries. Then you have to jump through seven administrative permissions before the ANC-picked demarcation board gives the final ruling, and less than 1% of all applicants have succeeded. Or maybe you want a new traditional authority, so that you have greater sovereignty over land use and planning in your community. Are you a traditional community in the eyes of the state?

And given how much the Charterists like what they sometimes call “democratic centralism”, what makes you think they would ever grant these changes even if they had notional merit? Perhaps you think the change would come through the courts. But as I have said, they have very little room to manoeuvre, given how strictly our constitutional divisions are defined.

This leaves us with private solutions. Well, the problem here is that any corporation you use is going to run into special problems, namely that they must obey the law. And it is not only the state that enforces it. Major corporations are all BEE, and that means they are at least part-owned by high-ranking ANC cadres. Your gated community, which Frans Cronje reckons will be like the proverbial cockroach which survives a nuclear blast, is actually fairly vulnerable – the companies which run these will eventually have to commit to BEE policies like any other. Sure, the wealthiest will be left for last, but how much good news does that really constitute?

And the mega-corporations are not going to help you either – when one looks into the notorious policy which imposed racial criteria for water licenses, it turns out that it is being pushed by the Resource Mobilisation Fund, the private-sector tax-deductible consultancy (run by Martin Kingston and the biggest business players) which is tasked with staffing the national civil service and writing its departmental policies. AgriBiz and AgriSA are happy to see EWC bankrupt independent farmers so long as the banks which sit on their boards are compensated for the mortgage exposure they have, leaving only BEE entities which can be organised like a single cartel, and looted from centrally if the country really starts unravelling.

So what are you going to do about all this?

“South Africa”

If you really want to decentralise power in South Africa, there is only one meaningful solution, and that is secession. Now, secession doesn’t actually have to succeed, any more than the genocidal intentions of the ANC in the 1980s needed to succeed for them to end white power in the state.

But in order to get any devolution of power, one needs to force the state into a compromise against their will, by engineering a crisis that will require the cooperation of all parts of the political elite.

That may mean a provincial referendum, it may mean the Zulu King declaring his intent, or it may mean an Afrikaner town placing all their small businesses and residential property into a common trust, withholding taxes and fencing it off until they are given a new municipal arrangement.

This is the thing to notice if you have been watching South Africa at all – those who break the law as a popular collective and stand their ground eventually find the law reshapes around the break.

Take Collins Chabane Municipality. It is the result of years of violent protest by the Tsonga community who felt excluded from the Venda-majority municipalities they were a part of, and they caused such massive ruction they attracted the attention of the top ANC leadership, and the Municipal Demarcation Board actually gave them their own municipality, along ethnic lines, no less – something that not only has never happened before or since, but also runs completely against the grain of ruling ideology and law.

If you want the government to have less power, you have to take it from them.