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Why municipal boundaries matter

It’s surprising how little we hear from the Municipal Demarcation Board. Its main role is the determination of municipal boundaries, and every five years, on the eve of elections, it is inundated with requests for the redrawing of municipal boundaries.

These boundaries matter not only in their determination of local and district municipalities, but in an economic sense — how they spatially frame the political-administrative interface that determines whether services are delivered and what resources are available for the capital spending that allows for the regeneration of life and productive activity.

When the residents of the disbanded Mutale local municipality in Limpopo contested the municipality’s incorporation into the Thulamela and Musina municipalities, they followed in the footsteps of the people of Matatiele during the last election, and of Bekkersdal in 2004, who contested their incorporation into North West.

In a 2004 report, a local resident and member of the campaign against the incorporation of Bekkersdal suggested that the arguments against the incorporation were not only “socio-reproductive”, insofar as they related to basic social service needs, but were also economic, as they related to the contest over whether boundary determinations are driven by ethno-linguistic or industrial concerns, as many of the boundaries in the postapartheid era still mirror the ethno-linguistic patterns of old.

Look no further than the name KwaZulu-Natal, even though the province is also home to Basotho and Xhosaspeaking groups.

The example of Matatiele in 2016, and the ultimate emergence of the African Independent Congress, was indicative of a long-standing tension around how to harmonise the Balkanised bantustans of old into a new local government framework that can be self-sustaining. In this case, sustainability requires less of a reliance on grants from national government and the ability to finance larger proportions of capital spend from locally generated resources.

Yet the majority of municipalities within and alongside the former homelands are unable to sustain themselves, largely due to the lack of an industrial base that can be levied, and jobs that can finance property rates and service charges.

This approach, as Govan Mbeki suggested in a 1993 article debating the proposal for a “tenth province”, that “any proposed tenth region (in a context of devolution of administrative and taxation power) should be attached to an industrial base or bases which can generate income” is often at odds with the ghosts of ethnolinguistic boundary-making.

So while Matatiele (and other parts of the Alfred Nzo district) may be closer to the “Natal region”, with eThekwini as its industrial base as Mbeki suggested, the bureaucratic pen placed it in areas that would need to be served by the industrial bases of KwaGompo and Gqeberha. Why? Because it was suggested then, and seemingly now, that the people of the area belonged in the Eastern Cape because they are mostly Xhosa speakers and share common cultural ties. Such an approach embeds a planning path that prioritises ethno-nationalist discourses of “common nationhood” at a local level, while oblivious to spatial and industrial diversities that make municipal boundaries functional spaces to live, work and play.

As we near the elections, we may want to consider in the civic discussions that will follow how the distribution of industrial and other economic opportunities influences boundary-making and the ambitions of our national spatial development framework and recent programmes such as the district development model.

In some cases, mergers and the dissolution of boundaries, or the recasting of boundaries, determine not only the “placemaking” of those seen as kith and kin, but also the flow of resources within the division of revenue that make our local economies enablers of productive activity. Without that it may seem like gerrymandering that resuscitates the bantustan ghosts of old, marshalling them in contemporary contests over declining economic resources.

● Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.

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2021-09-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

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