@geordinhl Very impressive Mr Mayor - touching on some deep epistemological truth there. Freeing local municipalities to conjecture new solutions to their problems in order to make progress.
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Zavier Haddad
4 posts
Last week the DA government in Cape Town won an important victory for the autonomy of local governments across South Africa.
We have stood up against the endless attempts by the national government to centralise powers and remove autonomy from local municipalities, and we’ve prevailed. This is important for South Africa, because we believe that instead of centralising power, we should actually be decentralising it as much as possible.
Some background to this win:
The Constitution says that local governments (municipalities and cities) are not mere local branch offices of the national state. They have their own powers, their own elections, their own mandates, and are free to pursue different policies or programmes. And this local policy experimentation is very healthy for South Africa. With this local experimentation, we can find what works and replicate elsewhere, and discard what doesn’t work.
But a few years ago, the national government came up with a plan called the District Development Model. This innocuous sounding new “model” was actually an underhanded attempt to centralise power again, giving the national government the power to veto municipal plans and projects.
Cape Town lodged a formal dispute on this DDM model, called an “intergovernmental dispute”. We made clear that we felt this was unconstitutional, and that if they did not overhaul it completely, then we would seek to strike it down in the courts.
To his credit, Minister Velenkosi Hlabisa, who is the Minister for Co-operative Governance in the GNU, really listened. An overhaul has happened. The new model published respects and protects the constitutional powers of local government, and removes all of the veto powers of the national government.
Minister Hlabisa is a former Mayor himself, and cares about the success of local government. He is also from the IFP. I have no doubt that if it were still an ANC Minister in this portfolio, like the former Minister Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma who came up with the plan in the first place, we would never have had this success. We would have won in the end, because the scheme was clearly unconstitutional, but it would have taken a long and difficult fight through the courts.
This is a story of how working with like-minded reformers in the GNU, we can change bad ANC policy into much better policy for South Africa’s future. And it is an example of how the DA will always stand up for decentralising power closer to the people whose lives are affected by these services, and will always resist the ANC’s centralising tendencies.
businessday.co.za/news/2026-03-1…
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@conconeurope @Saturn__OS @ConjectureInst @DavidDeutschOxf phenomenal graphic - major props to the creator
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We’re putting on a Conjecture Conference in Europe for the first time! May 16–17 in Oxford.
Thanks to sponsor @Saturn__OS and partner @ConjectureInst, join crit rats from many worlds for talks, philosophising, and a live Q&A with @DavidDeutschOxf .
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@skampoledixa An internet connection + a suitable device is a gateway to almost endless free knowledge about how to solve problems people might have. Seems quite valuable if you ask me.
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