In historical context, federalism derive from the Latin term ‘foedus’ which was used interchangeably to “describe cooperative or the contractual agreements between states for the purpose of defence’’ (Rodden 2004, p.489). Driven from this medieval assumption, federalism is pragmatically viewed as the notion of mutuality between the parties to serve any purpose. However in modern political theory, federalism is described not in term of “a particular distribution of authority between the governments, but rather a process-structured by a set of institutions through which authority is distributed and redistributed” (Rodden 2004, p.489). In federal political configuration like Australia, this scenario implies intergovernmental relation in which no particular government, whether in the centre or in the states, gets what it wants by an authoritative decree. In essence, federalism is anchored on the consent and cooperation between central and subnational units. This practical setting is admired but it has some drawbacks, especially on the governance unless there is an explicit channel for check and balances. It became obvious that roles and responsibility as well as the cost for running the constitutional tasks in various levels of governments in like the states increasingly becoming irrelevant and also cause economic mismatch with these governments’ capacities to generate revenue. Central government in most cases endings up putting the bills for states to runs their constitutional tasks, hence causing what theorists called the Vertical Fiscal Imbalance. This VFI is caused by the disparity in the revenue generation powers as sub-governments that consumed more than what they produce (Persson, et al.2004, p.25). In federal state where sub-governments rely on central authority for financial transfers, gaps and spending responsibilities grow while the capacity for generating revenues contracted. Putting that to South Sudan political perspective where there is no individual states that can afford to it run its own government through its finance, federalism will definitely ends in failure in the current system. It is the fact that those states will not fund themselves that will hand Juba greater role and says on how states are going to be government and that is what we have now. My disagreement with the call for federalism is vested in the above emphasis. It is simply clear that our current states are too dependent on central government to run themselves. They are not capable of paying their own law enforcements agencies like the Police or teachers, let alone paying the entire government bureaucracy. My second point is the similarities between federalism we are asking for and the current decentralised system we have. The structure we have is great only its ability to perform is disconcerting. What affects its ability to perform is the parliament that is inefficiency to interpret the law in the book and constitution that undermined residual power of states, like for instance to elected their own governors that can never be fire by Juba and that is what need to be change.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 10:47:03 +0000
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