Building a state beside a state

President Cyril Ramaphosa governs through a growing web of committees, commissions and councils. Some do real, useful work. Others duplicate a job a minister has. At the same time, South Africans are building their own civic groups to do what they no longer trust the government to do.

Both sides are answering the same problem the same way: building something new next to the old structure, instead of fixing it.

Here is how the major structures are doing, whether bringing them together has worked anywhere and a realistic way to try it here.

The national water crisis committee, by contrast, is chaired by the president rather than Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina — even though she has been acting decisively, warning municipalities bluntly that "the time for talk is over". She needed backing, not a committee on top of her.

The national dialogue steering committee, a 99-member body on poverty and inequality, has struggled from the start, with excluded nominees suing the Presidency — work the department of planning, monitoring and evaluation exists to do.

The Presidential Economic Advisory Council sits outside Treasury's normal budget process, where it would face more scrutiny.

The national conventional arms control committee does it right — narrow, technical, permanently owned. And the inter-ministerial committee on migration, formed after this year's protests, hands coordination to the justice minister for a job home affairs owns.

The Khampepe commission on blocked apartheid-era prosecutions belongs with the department of justice, which runs the National Prosecuting Authority it is investigating.

The Zondo commission, the South African Revenue Service commission and the Public Investment Corporation inquiry all sit naturally under the Treasury — proof that a commission's value depends on what the department does with it afterwards, not the report itself.

March and March recently launched the SA First Forum, a non-profit using courts rather than protests on immigration and policing — launched within weeks of the president's migration committee.

AfriForum and Vuka Azania point at slow delivery from the departments of land reform and trade, industry and competition, from opposite directions. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi's 11 Theses, built on siyazenzela — we do it ourselves — calls on communities to supersede rather than petition local government, a challenge to CoGTA.

South Africans for Constitutional Reform works differently: backed by 135 000 people, it makes submissions to parliament, home affairs and cooperative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) processes.

South Africa has its own 30-year experiment in this idea. Nedlac, created by law in 1994, seats a "community constituency" alongside government, business and labour to negotiate economic and labour policy.

It has produced real agreements and its community representatives are proud that few countries give civic structures a seat at that table.

But its critics have a strong case too.

Business has generally carried more weight than community voice, consensus-seeking has often slowed decisions when speed was needed and a new Nedlac Amendment Bill has been accused of letting government hand-pick a single "acceptable" community federation instead of genuinely independent, grassroots movements — the exact risk of any co-governance model, where the state ends up choosing which citizens it wants to listen to.

The Philippines offers a second data point. Its 1991 Local Government Code legally requires that at least a quarter of every local development council's seats go to NGOs, with guaranteed seats on health, school and peace-and-order boards too.

Three decades on, researchers find those councils too centralised and technocratic in practice and participation often thinner than the law promises.

The lesson from both cases is the same: giving civic groups a legal seat at the table does not automatically produce power-sharing. It works only when the government keeps the seats open and listens, rather than treating them as a box to tick.

The government could give civic groups a formal seat inside the department their issue belongs to, the way South Africans for Constitutional Reform works with home affairs and Cogta — SA First Forum with home affairs, Vuka Azania with land reform.

To avoid Nedlac's mistakes, any such seats must stay open to genuinely independent movements, not only officially "approved" ones and must come with real power to shape decisions, not just a chair in the room.

A government of national unity does not need to stop at party politics. If South Africa can unite competing parties in one cabinet for stability, it can extend that same spirit to government and citizens, done honestly and imperfectly rather than not at all.

The country does not need fewer people trying to fix its problems. It needs the government and citizens pulling in the same direction, through a front door that is open.

Sbusiso Gwala is an international relations, political science, sociology and development studies scholar, researcher, writer and educator. His work explores migration, governance, education, African politics, social justice and transformation.