The first casualty of the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) if they were to take over the reins of government after the May 29 national and provincial elections, would be to dismantle and destroy the nine provincial governments “for they serve no useful purpose other than being a financial drag to the fiscus”.
“What is the wisdom of having nine provincial governments at a staggering cost of hundreds of billions of rands a year when in fact you can comfortably make do with the national government with local municipalities or local governments serving as implementing arms of the national government, helped by administrators spread over the country to ensure government policies and objectives are put into practice,” president of Azapo Nelvis Qekema said this week.
Qekema said it is this thinking that will dominate the organisation’s manifesto launch schedule for a venue still to be determined in Soweto on March 24.
The black consciousness-oriented organisation leader argues that to spend “something in the region of about R700-billion” to keep provinces afloat amid great poverty and general unemployment pervasive in the country, with that of the youth skyrocketing, is to fail to come to grips with the sad realities of the poverty black people must endure in the country.
“All you need to do is cut the staggering R700-billion fat to a modest budget by resorting to a two-tier governing system of national and local governments. If you do that, you will be able to release billions of rands, divert them to other pressing social and economic needs demanded by communities, and also address unemployment and poverty challenges and create jobs,” he said.
“South Africa is overgoverned with duplication of functions shared by both the national and provincial governments. This model is unsustainable. We need an Azapo government to dismantle this mess.
“When we meet in two weeks’ time to unveil our manifesto, we hope to invite communities to have a serious discussion about the unsustainable model pursued by the governing party, and sensitise them to those realities,” Qekema said.
He added that Azapo understands South Africa to be a unitary state, but questioned the motives of the governing party and those who negotiated the unjust Codesa deal to turn the country into a quasi-federal state instead of a unitary state.
“Is the nine-provincial government model inspired by the desire to hark back to the old apartheid days in which our country was balkanised, broken into little pieces to further the apartheid system interests of divide-and-rule along ethnic lines, weakening in the process the solidarity spirit of black people as designed by the Black Consciousness philosophy inspired by the likes of Steve Biko and other Black Consciousness struggle stalwarts,” he said.
He said it was a great pity that those in government who aligned with the liberation ethos have embarked on a project to re-balkanise the country and divide it along ethnic groups, as had been the case when the apartheid regime divided it along ethnic groups, with white people taking 70% of the land and giving black people 30% of arid land.
This balkanised the country’s land along Bantustan lines, which gave birth to homelands.
He said the economic wealth of the country is controlled by an oligarchy, a minority of white people who control the wealth of the land, including banking and all major economic sectors.
“The financial sector is a monopoly run by 10% of white population, a factor that serves as a bulwark of white monopoly capital, keeping the old apartheid economic structures intact, with black business content being part of the ‘shares economy’, shares derived from white monopoly capital that do nothing to enhance our grip on the economy that increasingly remains in the hands of white people,” he said.
