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Yesterday Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Sicelo Shiceka vowed to fire municipal officials who do not have the relevant skills. He said "A lot of these officials are going to go...there is no doubt in my mind" and "those officials who are incorrigible...there is no reason for them to stay. This will be applicable to all municipalities across the country". While the Minister's commitment to stamping out poor performance is praiseworthy, his ignorance of the constitutional principle that a separation of powers, between national, provincial and local governments exists, is fairly breathtaking. This is the Minister responsible for overseeing local and provincial government after all.

The Constitution clearly states that: ‘The executive and legislative authority of a municipality is vested in the Municipal Council' and that ‘A municipality has the right to govern, on its own initiative, the local government affairs of its community'. The Constitution further says that ‘The national or provincial government may not compromise or impede a municipality's ability or right to exercise its powers or perform its functions'.

This means that the Minister can no more fire a local official than appointment one. Those decisions are at the discretion of the relevant municipal authority; and that is a good thing. It is a good thing because federalism ensures a devolution of power, one of the consequences of which is that those public servants or representatives responsible for failing to deliver on their mandate be held to account and, the more localized the authority, the easier it is to identify who is responsible. And, if local politicians refuse or fail to act, they should be voted out of power!

Minister Shiceka's intentions seem indicative of a broader pattern. Increasingly we see attempts from the executive to exert more power over provinces and municipalities. The proposed single public service bill would achieve exactly what the Minister wants; so too would the proposal to scrap the provinces. Both of these, however, would be to the detriment of our democracy. Because, on the one hand, to adapt a truism: power corrupts and the more centralized the power, the more likely it is to corrupt; and, on the other hand, because the executive is no more likely to fire a person than a local municipality. One can name any one of a litany of examples in support of this: Eskom; Oilgate; Travelgate; you name it, the ANC doesn't believe in holding people responsible.

If the Minister was serious about accountability, the message he should be preaching is as follows: If those people you elected to power are failing to deliver, you must vote them out of office in the upcoming local government elections. He should also speak out against cadre deployment and the damage it is doing to good governance at local government level.

No doubt the Minister's utterances, however, are borne of a deeper misunderstanding; one intrinsic to the ANC's conception of its role in our democracy. It is unable to distinguish any separation between itself, as a political party, and its role as a government. The two are seen as the same. And so the Minister sees himself as some sort of omnipresent force, that can intervene where he likes and on what he likes. Not so I am afraid. He and every councillor who is failing to deliver are accountable to the voters and if he is really interested in promoting best democratic practice, he should be encouraging people to act at the polls against poor service delivery and not on the streets.