By Tracey-Lee du Plessis

Today, in our liberal democracy our leaders are elected to their positions and all South Africans have the fundamental right to vote for their representatives. Suffice to say, the constitution recognises the institution of traditional leadership, but the traditional leadership structure imposes leaders on communities. This has resulted in a situation that implies rural people belong to the past with their traditional leaders. Urban and rural areas are therefore divided.  In the process, the colonial and apartheid structures are being perpetuated.

For example, a migrant worker is a citizen when he works in the urban areas, but when he is in the rural areas he is viewed as a subject. This clearly suggests that the rural people do not enjoy their full democratic rights as is the case with their urban counterparts. During a recent seminar hosted by Afesis-corplan in East London, Professor Lungisile Ntsebeza, from HSRC, expressed the importance of acknowledging that there is a definite need to work out a harmonious relationship between local government and traditional authorities.

All leaders, according to Professor Ntsebeza, should be subjected to vote by ballot to ascertain their popularity and therefore justify their claim to leadership. Unfortunately, traditional leaders don’t want to be involved in elections and they want to be the only leaders in rural areas. Chiefs want to lead development, but they don’t want to be accountable to the people. Professor Ntsebeza finds it rather unfortunate that they do not want to acknowledge that culture is changing. These attitudes have enforced a new kind of apartheid, because there has been no clean break from the old institution and democracy is not being practiced.

Currently, the land issues faced in many rural areas are mostly led by traditional councils. The land is legally owned by the state and administered by traditional authorities. But because there is no democracy instilled in the traditional council structure, a lot of tension exists, which is why it is vital to work out a harmonious relationship between local government and traditional authorities. And democracy must be high on the agenda.

Prince Ntuthuko Khuzwayo, from CONTRALESA, highlighted the responsibility of traditional authorities to their subjects. Leaders are selected through tradition and cultural formulas, especially the family line. When determining traditional leaders, the family tree is consulted.

As a result of apartheid, forcible removals as well as the colonial system of indirect rule, many traditional leaders lost their legitimacy especially after they collaborated with the colonial government to the detriment of their communities. However, the South African Constitution as it stands provides superficial recognition of traditional leaders and their powers and functions are not explicitly defined.

Although the traditional leaders are supposed to work closely with councillors, the relationship is hardly harmonious. There is mutual distrust and the former argue that councillors often leave the rural areas to pursue activities in urban areas and are therefore no longer available to help people in the rural areas. They argue that politicians make promises and fail to keep them and this puts traditional leaders in a difficult position because the latter are more or less permanently rooted in their rural areas.  Likewise, municipalities are not facilitating the participation of traditional authorities in municipal processes.
According to Prince Khuzwayo, rural people who move to urban areas to get an education and a job need to be re-educated to be able to live and function in rural areas. But how does one encourage rural people brought up in urban areas to return to rural areas, asks Prince Khuzwayo? What can be put in place to encourage urbanised rural people to conduct economic activities in their homeland? To Prince Khuzwayo, people who truly care about rural development should go and register as voters in those areas so that they can influence allocation of equitable share accordingly.

Nontando Ngamlana, from Afesis-corplan, shared on her experiences as a social facilitator of development programmes implemented in rural areas. She noted that what the organisation has found is that rural people are happy to cooperate in development programmes or in rural development for as long as there is no threat that their land would be taken away from them. In rural communities land is a heritage issue; rural people would like to ensure that it remains in their families for generations to come. Similarly, she highlighted challenges with corrupt traditional leaders who derail development programmes for their own personal gain and alluded to the fact that in a democratic South Africa there is a desperate need for a system to hold traditional leaders accountable for their actions, especially on the key tenets of our democracy such as good governance, accountability, transparency, participation, etc. It was clear from this presentation that the role of the House of Traditional Leaders needed to be communicated broadly, especially if it can play the oversight and monitoring role and hold traditional leaders to account.

To conclude, local government is trying to be democratic and traditional leaders are traditional; this is not synonymous with democracy. These two structures need to meet on a neutral developmental platform in order to address the issues facing rural areas. Also, in the process of modernising society, we need to foster more democratic procedures and institutions.