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While the DA is defending the new compact between the Cape Town Metropolitan Police, the Western Cape Provincial Government and the national SAPS as a positive step toward devolution, the provincial secretary of the Communist Party has hailed it as a step towards a unified central police force.

This is very odd.

*On paper, what the new compact is, is a cooperative arrangement that includes the three spheres of government on the same committees for steering policing*

Much of the contention over the past decade has had to do with deeply-seated corruption within SAPS, who have long demonstrated a profound unwillingness to cooperate with Metro police in Cape Town, and have even been involved in the murder of high-ranking police officials attempting to target corruption and gang affiliation.

The recent arrest of Mzwandile Tiyo, the former provincial head of crime intelligence, has removed an actor who has long been suspected by much of the public and by insiders of being party to the assassination of Lt Col. Charl Kinnear, and has presided over the period of the long-term compact between Jacob Zuma and the Cape gangs since 2011.

This period also covers the reign of the infamously corrupt and incompetent Bekhi Cele, the qualified preschool teacher who presided over the worst decline in the police service in its history. Ian Cameron, who managed to publicly humiliate Cele on several occasions, has had his final victory, as he assumed the chair of the portfolio committee on police at the same time as Cele’s quiet dismissal from office.

This realignment does open the way to the possibility of genuine cooperation between the three spheres of government, and the presence of the Provincial- and City-level governing party in the national executive will do much to grease the gears.

But this returns us to the fundamental question - is this centralisation or devolution?

I think it is pretty clear in context that this is a thorough and permanent abandonment of any form of Federalism by the DA.

The harmonisation of the three spheres through cooperative steering committees is what is known in the department of development planning as the District Development Model (DDM), something the DA decried as an intolerable concentration of power by the ruling party.

The DDM, which is already being piloted in three districts around the country, seeks to use a similar multi-level committee system to harmonise all levels of government with national policymaking. The DA have criticised it on the basis that it would remove local accountability and subject

But now that they are inside the tent rather than outside of it, they are no longer in any meaningful sense opposed to this form of governance. As our comrade at the Communist Party noted in his article above, the harmonisation of the three spheres is in line with the ANC’s national development plan for 2030, which aims to integrate national intellegence, civic society and policing under one tent.

There is a double-edged sword here.

While it allows a voice for local policing and provincial government, potentially increasing the input from the more competent voices in the Cape, the pooling of decisionmaking into these cross-jurisdictional committees spreads and reduces accountability, by making all elements party to the same decisionmaking process.

This means that when something goes wrong, all parties are now responsible, and the capacity to point the finger at the national government or vice-versa is much reduced - raising issues in public where consensus cannot be reached in committee will inevitably damage trust, and with it, the capacity to reach consensus in future.

In practice, this folds all parties into the same incentive - to defend national policy and decisionmaking.

Thus any improvement in quality is temporary, since the capacity to force change through institutional competition is reduced, and each new crisis or decline introduces a new ceiling to the quality of service delivery that cannot be hammered out without introducing new frictions.

And in a competition between the spheres, the national government, the weakest link, will always win out, because it is also the heaviest.

The DA will struggle to dig their way out of this structure if it goes sideways, but for now, it should be treated as an opportunity which the DA should be very anxious not to waste.

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