IN THIS country we talk about local government but never about local democracy. I make a distinction between these two concepts because you can have local government without local democracy.

Local democracy on the other hand is not just about the official institution of the state — that is, the municipality. It is about the culture and history of a place, its collective memory and identity, the quality of its associational networks, or what Robert Putnam (following James Coleman) calls social capital. Local democracy produces leaders accountable to their communities, and gives people a sense of meaning and pride of place. Local government produces functionaries, accountable only to their political masters and localities with no pride of place. The RDP houses do not make things any better.

Local democracy leads to popular government, local government leads to rule by technocrats and oligarchs, and inevitably breeds corruption.

Local democracy is a never-ending, formative process of political and leadership education, local government is a ritual that we go through every other five years or so.

To be sure we did not always shun local democracy. The 1970s and 1980s were the golden age of local government discourse. It was a conception of local politics that relied on the civic resources and capabilities of communities. And as Mill would have predicted, the civic mobilisation brought to the fore talented individuals who later came to play leadership roles at various levels of government structure.

The question of why we jettisoned that tradition of local democracy cannot be explained in a column. One argument was that leaving everything to the localities would hamper the processes of economic redistribution. But we don’t seem to have done any better under the more centralised system. We thought we could achieve the process of redistribution through the provinces but those have proven to be a disastrous waste of resources, and in some cases a replication of the homeland culture they ostensibly replaced.

We need to have alternative institutional arrangements — perhaps regional governments. But we should never fall into a fetish for institutional arrangements. We could easily end up with regional governments without regional democracy. There is therefore no getting around the need to energise our communities.

And this brings me to the other reason we shun local democracy. We equate it with the mob or “the agitated natives” who cannot be trusted with our resources. This is a conservative elite bias that runs across all races. The “agitated natives” scare the living hell out of white South Africans as much as they do the black elite. They helped us win the revolution, but they are of another culture, not ours. And yet in many democracies national leadership is often preceded by a stint at the local level.

This elite bias is not unique to SA. It is a tragic confirmation of Joseph Schumpeter’s argument that only the elites of any given society ought to lead. Once we have elected them, we should stay out of their way, until the next election comes around. The elites — and in our case those who come from exile — know better. I suspect though that there is a revolt in this country against this elite conception of leadership and democracy.

As the urban revolts in places such as Khutsong and my own beloved Ginsberg demonstrate, the former revolutionaries have lost their aura and halo of being untouchables.

Unfortunately, I still have to hear the new revolutionaries articulate any ideas about local democracy as the long-term foundation of our national democracy. Or are they also just politicians waiting to take their turn at the trough of local government, shunning any discussion of local democracy?

Whether our country goes the way of the age of hope or the age of cynicism will depend on whether we go back to the basics of local democracy, not just local government.

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