Thank you. That is a facile question. It is incoherent, as well. You can speak to me after this meeting. [Laughter.]
As one or two speakers in this House said, the issue, quite simply, is that we are seeking to ensure that we do not intervene in municipalities, Madam Chair, when the municipalities are almost on the brink of disaster. We need early warning signals, and so on, and we need intervention that is more pre- emptive. The intention of the Bill is not to disempower municipalities, not to take away any powers and functions, but precisely to empower municipalities by ensuring that the national and provincial spheres intervene more actively.
If you look at the community protests that have been spreading throughout the country this year, they are not the failure of local government alone. They are ultimately the failure of the co-operative governance system as a whole and, to some extent, it reflects on the NCOP, too. We are pleading with the NCOP to play a more active role in that regard. You do, in fact, play that role, but we are saying you should do so even more actively than you have been doing. I know the chair of the committee that has oversight over us has been visiting the municipalities, and we are very grateful for that. However, between the committee and ourselves, we need to be more like activists - both you as Parliament, and we, as the executive - in seeing early signs, also, of municipalities that are about to dissolve, as it were.
So, we will be introducing this Bill. We are very keen to engage with you. In fact, before the Bill is formally channelled through the parliamentary process, we will have started that discussion, as we have done with your chairperson in a certain structure of your committee that does oversight over us. We hope to bring such legislation before the end of the year which, I am sure you will be very keen to know, enhances your co-operative governance and intergovernmental role.
We also have a process under way at the moment, a Green Paper on co- operative governance, that will hopefully be completed by the end of this year or early next year. And there again, the role of the NCOP is quintessentially important. Without you, this system of co-operative governance and intergovernmental relations will not work.
We know there are criticisms of the role of the NCOP. Councillor Johnson referred to them, and so on. There are people who argue that the NCOP is subordinate to the NA. In fact, there are members of the NA who also see the NCOP as inferior. I think these issues should be challenged.
Ultimately, the NCOP's credibility will reside not in this or that interpretation of the law or the Constitution, but in its activism. And in this term, one has noticed that the NCOP is being more active. Obviously, the more active the NCOP is, the more the NA, the people and civil society out there will take it seriously. But we, as the co-operative governance Ministry, are especially keen that you play the role that the Constitution and legislation provide for you. Of course, we have passed the Intergovernmental Relations Act, but there are weaknesses in it and we need to review it. As part of the co-operative governance Green Paper, that is one of the things we will seek to do.
We want to be very clear, though. Part of the aim of fine-tuning, entrenching, and consolidating the system of co-operative governance and intergovernmental relations is to simplify the system and to ensure that we do not, with the changes we mean to make in consultation with you and other stakeholders, bureaucratise it. We want an activist system of intergovernmental relations, which requires both the executive and the legislature - and not least the NCOP - to acknowledge that, ultimately, it is the people that decide their own destiny. We are merely their representatives, and those of us who are deployed in the executive also need to understand that very clearly.
Therefore we need to engage more with the NCOP than we might have been doing until now, and, as the executive, to take it more seriously than we have been doing. It works both ways, as I said earlier, comrades and friends. If the NCOP plays a more activist role, we, as the executive, are obliged to take it more seriously.
So, as has been raised in this meeting, in this discussion, and having moved on, I also want to stress the crucial role that you have in intergovernmental fiscal relations.
My time is fast running out and I have less than two and a half minutes left, so I will focus very quickly on one further aspect which I think is crucial. It is to say that the reason why we, too, are forced to entrench our co-operative governance system and intergovernmental relations is precisely that we are committed to a developmental state. The two are mutually related. For those of you who might be sensitive to it, they are dialectically interrelated, not in a crude sense, but the one feeds into the other. If we have a stronger co-operative governance system, it creates the conditions for a developmental state, and the more we forge a developmental state, the more the conditions are created for a strengthened co-operative governance system.
Securing co-ordination and co-operation across the spheres is actually a challenge all over the world, not just in South Africa. We are a young, emerging democracy. But if you look at some of the works that I have sometimes browsed through about how governments elsewhere in the world work in the established democracies of the United States - the biggest democracy you can think of - or India, and so on, it is very difficult to secure co- operation with the silo mentality.
So, we must not be too hard on ourselves. On the other hand, we cannot be complacent. We have challenges the USA and other countries in the developed world do not have. We are simply saying that these five years are do-or-die years. If we do not develop our country substantially, if we do not significantly advance service delivery and development, the people out there are going to become increasingly cynical about government and all of us, whichever political party we come from.
We have had this debate now. So what? Where do we go from here? As the co- operative governance Ministry, we are especially keen to see what the outcomes are. The NCOP Chair suggested in his initial input - and I apologise that I was a few minutes late, but if I tell you why after this meeting, you will understand fully - that we are very keen to see what the outcomes are.
Let us not just have this debate, as government and Parliament often do, and have nothing come of it. Two years from now, we may have yet another debate but there is no movement forward. If, indeed, we have another debate, I suggest it might be in 18 months' time or a year from now, although it is only a broad suggestion I can make. And then we can review how far we have come between this debate now and the next debate. But there should be some outcomes.
There are some practical issues that have arisen today, like the sort of things Councillor Johnson raised. There are other issues, like the NCOP Chair raising this committee idea which I think the NCOP should actually apply its mind to.
There is a certain party whose name I will not mention, which is turning 100 very shortly and which is having a major conference of over 2 000 delegates in late September. There is an issue there. These issues can be taken there to get some mandate in a democracy. It is the majority party that guides government. So, hopefully, some of these issues will be taken up there. Finally, I can say that we have now reached a critical juncture and we must deliver. I thank you very much for a very interesting debate. Thank you, indeed.