Local government restructuring in South Africa: The case of the Western Cape

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Abstract
In the current context of reform in South Africa, recent proposals by constitutional planners to restructure the system of local government are significant because they could have a substantial impact on the form and content of political struggle at the local level. Conversely, the evolution of the system of local government can itself be seen to have been altered and shaped by the particular dynamics of social and political change in different local contexts. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the proposed restructuring of local government in terms of the contextual specificity of social and political processes in the Western Cape. The paper is divided into four major parts. The first focuses on the broadly‐based rejection by the coloured population of Cape Town of the system of separate local government structures established under the Group Areas legislation of the era of “grand apartheid”. Certain factors embedded in the specificity of local social and political structures which were central to this rejection are identified. The second part outlines the role which the proposed system of local government is to play in the state's overall reform strategy, with particular reference to the attempt to incorporate the political demands of the coloured and Indian populations at both the national and the local levels. The third part describes the basic structure of the new system in some detail in order to examine how it might relate to the issues of “legitimacy” and “control” which the failure of the previous system has thrown into sharp relief. The last part of the paper presents some tentative conclusions concerning the possible effects which the implementation of the new system and the trajectory of social and political change in the local context may have on each other. The discussion incorporates the few fragmentary details that have emerged to date about how the new system is actually to be implemented in the Western Cape, including the interim measures that have been adopted.

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