Cape Town – The Development Bank of South Africa's involvement in a tender to find service providers for the OR Tambo and Waterberg district municipalities raises more questions about leaked plans to devolve powers away from local governments, the Democratic Alliance said on Tuesday.
The DBSA invited tenders for professional service providers for the two district municipalities, located in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo provinces respectively, at the end of June.
The tenders call for service providers to support the government in developing and finalising a district development model plan for two pilot sites in the two municipalities.
DA MP Cilliers Brink said the tender showed the DBSA was acting as "an implementing agency" for the Department of Cooperative Governance in its mooted plan to place the district model at the heart of local government.
This was set out in a document marked top secret, which was leaked from the department to the official opposition earlier this month.
The 45-page blueprint, which the department has not authenticated, speaks of the need to redesign municipal economies and centralise district decision-making through a central command council, modelled on the contentious National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC).
The NCCC has driven the government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, although critics have questioned the legal basis on which it rests.
The leaked document, styled as an economic recovery plan for local government, professes to offer a basis for the reorganisation of government at all levels in the aftermath of the health crisis.
"To give effect to the economic recovery of the country, a mirroring of this institutional form would be required... We need to centralise decision-making body, which functions precisely as the Central Command Council does so that all of government in involved," it states.
The district model will function on developing comprehensive long-term plans, called One Plans, according to the document.
The tender driven by the DBSA states that the selected service providers will help to develop One Plans for the two districts in question.
Brink noted that the DBSA describes the district development model as marking a shift from the “highly negotiated” system of planning between different spheres of government.
He said the conventional thinking about the district model was that it was merely a mechanism to improve coordination between national, provincial and local governments, but reading the tender along with the department's proposals suggested that it was in fact intent on a process of centralisation that would erode the powers of provinces.
"The DA will be asking Finance Minister Tito Mboweni - to whom the DBSA has a reporting line - to release documents given to it by the department of cooperative governance on the district development model. We will also write to the DBSA," he said.
"We hope that these documents will show what has so far been hidden from the public, including whether these is evidence to justify proceeding with the District Development Model."