Local Municipalities, Central Fiscal Reform, and Regional Blocs: Revenue Relationships and Local Government in Limpopo, 1980–2020

ABSTRACT:This article considers the changing role of the Mogalakwena Local Municipality in the political economy of the Waterberg region of Limpopo. It considers the effects that centre-led processes of municipal fiscal reform over the course of the 1980s and 1990s have had on local and regional politics, and suggest that this offers one dimension through which to understand why Limpopo has long proved a troublesome region for successive national South African governments, across the apartheid and post-apartheid decades. In the first section, I consider the outcomes of attempts by the national government to reform apartheid in the 1980s. Even as the National Party moved to introduce forms of regional government which had greater emphasis on the redistribution of revenues across racial boundaries, ‘lily-white’ Conservative Party-controlled local councils sought to entrench fiscal segregation and resist inclusion in the Regional Services Councils (RSCs). In the second section, I show how this resistance ultimately failed in the face of national transitional processes. By the end of the 1990s, the Conservative Party was a spent force. However, what resulted from the period of the local government transition fell far from the aspirations of ‘wall-to-wall democratic local government’. In the final section, I argue that post-apartheid municipal reform which has overseen an expansion of the developmental role of local government, which entrenched principles of corporate managerialism and outsourcing, has given rise to new forms of local and regional resistance against central government and party control. Against the backdrop of local economic decline, local politicians have used revenues distributed by the national treasury to build an independent political base within regional and provincial structures of the African National Congress.