Mukti Rijal

Local elections in some countries do receive relatively greater political attention, publicity and provoke more critical comments, discussions and assessments than in the others. There should be some major reasons for this widening interest. The first reason in this regard could be attributed to the importance and material significance attached to local governments in the respective countries' constitution and laws, and the roles they perform in the overall governance and development in the jurisdictions concerned. Such mandates and competencies do cast the local government into the crucial role to define and establish impact on setting direction and course of the overall national politics.

Popularity index
The second and obvious reason has been the provision of the party based competitive nature of the local elections, especially in the countries where the sub-national poll results can reflect and serve as the approximate popularity index of the national government and its leadership. Where the local elections are not based on multiparty democratic competition fought out by the political parties with their own phalanx of the candidates, the grassroots polls do not receive much attention outside their jurisdiction.

In this case, the local election results cannot be interpreted generally to offer a kind of popularity measurement index of the party and leaders seated on the saddle of the national government. Another important reason as to why the local government polls are looked with greater curiosity is the growing value attached to the decentralised management of state affairs through constitutional and legal arrangement in the evolving governance paradigm.

Accordingly, due to the reasons stated above, South African local elections have hogged global limelight and speculations during these days in the manner and scale the crucial national level polls do. It is, indeed, a fact that South African model of local government offers an exemplary case of democratic devolution for many emerging and even mature democracies in African and Asian countries. The successes and failures of the local government in South Africa are widely discussed and analysed as part of the serious governance studies and scholarships.

It is in order to note the fact that when the federal democratic constitution was being drafted by the historic Constituent Assembly in Nepal a few years ago, South African experiences and constitutional architectures did provide the much needed lessons to draw and incorporate into the basic law of the land. Many governance experts do compare Nepal’s local government arrangements with that of South Africa and see several parallels between them.

In fact, local governments in South Africa offer an important and distinct sphere of the government as stipulated in the constitution formulated during the post-apartheid era in 1996 under the stewardship of Nelson Mandela. The local governments in South Africa exercise the authority to govern local affairs of their community. According to the constitution, they are required to give priority to the basic needs of the citizens, promote social and economic development, mobilise resources and take part in the national and provincial development programs.
South Africa, needless to say, is one of Africa's most decentralised democratic countries with local governments exercising substantive autonomy and governing authority. South Africa has successfully conducted the six local government elections so far following the abolition of the apartheid regime.

The sixth local elections were conducted during the last November 2021. Notably, electoral contest held in last November had been the first since the deadly violence that rocked the country back in July when supporters of the former president, Jacob Zuma, rebelled against his conviction for contempt of court when he failed to attend a corruption inquiry. The governing African National Congress (ANC) that was led and nurtured by Nelson Mandela, among others, is at present split into major rival factions – one supporting the incumbent president Ramophosa and other the ex-president Zuma. The governing ANC was indeed losing support it commanded among the voters in the 2016 local election though ANC had nearly 54 per cent of the national vote. It has declined further as the party filed to prove its credibility since most South Africans continued to experience poor delivery of basic amenities and services.

Moreover, intra-party leadership rivalries affected the ability of the ANC to agree on candidates to represent the party. The anti-Ramaphosa faction had hoped that a poor showing will hurt the sitting president and allow others in the party to justify competing against him in the party’s national conference scheduled for the next December. According to the poll results, the ruling ANC as conjectured has dipped to 46 per cent of the vote for the first time in South Africa's democratic history. "We are eating this elephant (mammoth sized ANC party) bit by bit," had been the words reportedly uttered by an opposition leader after it was clear that the ANC was losing support across the country.

Tough contest
In Nepal too, the upcoming local elections are expected to witness a tough contest among the political parties as it has been viewed as an exercise to gauge the mood of the people and decide at the national elections who will return to Singha Durbar to rule for the next five years. Political parties have heavy stakes in the local polls as the role of the local government has significantly buttressed after the federal constitution of Nepal catapulted them into the role of what is termed as mini-Singha Durbars spread across the 753 territorial jurisdictions in the country. The local elections have to be conducted during the upcoming months regardless the ambiguities and confusions seen in the text of the law. The political parties are under an obligation to clear the mist and ensure that the legal confusions are cleared to facilitate the process of holding local elections in the true spirit of participatory democracy.

(The author is presently associated with Policy Research Institute (PRI) as a senior research fellow.  rijalmukti@gmail.com)