Decentralization Under Apartheid and Democracy: South Africa as a Unitary Federation

Throughout the reconstruction of the 1990s, accompanied by the official transition to federalism, South Africa nevertheless retained some basic features of the proto-federal structure that it had acquired in the previous decades—during the long era of white minority rule. In democratic South Africa, federalism still remains a topic of heated political debate, since different political forces see ways to achieve their own political goals in promoting or, conversely, suppressing the “federal principle”. Even before coming to power, the African National Congress was suspicious of federalism, seeing it as a racist ploy that fragmented the political will of the black majority. In subsequent years, one of the conditions for the monopoly rule of the ANC was excessively centralized federalism, depriving the provinces of political subjectivity. At the same time, the gradual erosion of the political hegemony of the ANC may trigger a process of rapid renovation of federal statehood in South Africa, the consequences of which are still difficult to foresee.