Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)

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Browsing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs) by SDG "SDG-16: Peace, justice and strong institutions"

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    Capacity development of service delivery structures and programmes in Bojanala Platinum District Municipality
    (2021) Mphahlele, Matuku
    Bojanala Platinum District Municipality (BPDM), in the North West Province is a centre of the extractive economy in South Africa. The BPDM experiences challenges in relation to delivering quality public services. In this context, this thesis examines capacity development of service delivery structures and programmes of the local municipalities, in the BPDM, that is, Kgetlengrivier, Rustenburg, Madibeng, Moses Kotane and Moretele. In addition, the study explores the ways in which they can be overcome for enhanced service delivery. The BPDM is embedded in an extractive economy and experiences challenges of the largely heterogeneous and mobile population that results in high influx of labour migrants, socio-economic inequality, and unemployment that impact heavily on the municipal capacity to deliver services (Van Wyk, 2012; Alexander, Sinwell, Lekgowa, Mmope & Xezwi, 2012). Accordingly, the Mineral Petroleum Resource Development Act 28 of 2002 (MPRDA) unpacks legislative prescripts on what structures mining companies have to establish, how to monitor and report on collaborative Social and Labour Plans (SLPs) in conjunction with municipal Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) for enhancement of service delivery. Thus, the study also examines the nature of structures and programmes, facilitators and inhibitors of skills development initiatives and how mining companies as local partners facilitate or impede improvement in delivering municipal services to the community. Within the context of local government capacity development, this study develops a theoretical framing incorporating scholarship on human capital, performance improvement and collaborative participatory governance perspectives. This framing is premised on the scholarly evidence that capacity development is an enabler of service delivery, influenced by skills development, municipal performance improvement and collaborative participation. ii )To generate perspectives in relation to capacity development of service delivery structures and programmes, a qualitative case study approach, using interviews is adopted. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with senior managers in the municipalities and the respective, locally based mining company. In addition to semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis and the descriptive statistics were employed. The study’s research questions examine the structures and programmes for enhancing capacity development in relation to service delivery. In addition, the study hones in on how local partners facilitate or hinder improvement in providing municipal services and how local municipalities better utilise their capacity development resources, including partnership with mining companies in relation to service delivery. This case study reveals that there are difficulties with respect to capacity development associated with skills retention, organisational relations and socio-political capacity building. The study concludes that political abandonment, poor communication and stakeholder engagements aggravate weakened inter-municipal co-operation and inadequate utilisation of resources. These challenges undermine cost-effective, efficient and effective implementation of capacity development of service delivery structures and programmes, underpinned by skills development and organisational learning. This study, suggests that socio-political resilience and administrative synergy are key enablers in the enhancement of service delivery. The thesis contributes to the body knowledge about the distinctive nature of the interface between learning and skills development, underscoring key enablers of improved capacity development of service delivery structures and programmes.
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    Improvement of Nigeria’s Security Sector Governance to effectively control terrorism
    (2022) Ossai, Vincent
    This research explored the means of enhancing Nigeria’s security sector governance to effectively counter the threats of terrorism and its facilitation by terrorism financing. For this purpose, the subsisting status of the necessary requirements that can strengthen the sector was assessed. These requirements are those advocated in the traditional Security Sector Reform paradigm and in the African Union Policy Framework on Security Sector Reform. There are several of these but the ones concentrated on are: civil democratic oversight, human rights and good governance as well as its derivates including the country’s anti-corruption profile especially with relevance to the required transparency and accountability of the sector. Access to gainful employment as a means of poverty alleviation and to help reduce involvement in terrorism was equally assessed. The data for this purpose were sourced from relevant documents and the submissions of purposefully sampled experts. The result of the assessment showed that the subsisting quality of the above requirements, are deficient in terms of their efficacy to boost Nigeria’s security sector governance to effectively counter terrorism. This therefore, necessitated the following improvements; namely: development and application of better strategies to mitigate this crime and its illicit financial supports; strengthening the capacity of the sector through improved human resources, budgetary and equipment supports; better intelligence management; improvement of policy and legal supports; improvement in the collaboration of constituent institutions in the sector as well as complementary international cooperation supports. Others are: strengthening of the various oversight institutions and the proficiency of their functionaries as well as improvement of human rights standard of the sector through enforcement of civilized and ethical conducts of security operatives and complemented with sanctions for breaches. Further improvements revolved around provision of good governance including enhancement of Nigeria’s anti-corruption profile including the required transparency and accountability standard, entrenchment of professional responsibility etiquette and effective administration of sanction schemes. Further improvements include: provision of gainful employment opportunities through requisite skills and entrepreneurship development programmes as well as provision of supports to the private sector and investment in public infrastructure. Consequent upon the foregoing, it is expected that when the above improvement measures are undertaken and proficiently applied, that they can help to strengthen the capacity of Nigeria’s security sector governance to more effectively control terrorism in the country.
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    Overpromising and underdelivering: Zimbabwe’s extractive industry indigenisation and uneven development
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2022) Manduna, Kennedy; McCandless, E.
    Uneven development has characterised Zimbabwe’s political economy landscape since the initial days of conquest to the present. Foreign-owned corporations and non-indigenous citizens have commanded the economy from the colonial era to the present, leaving the indigenous majority outside the mainstream economy. Zimbabwe’s indigenisation programme is a strategic policy choice responding directly to this widespread unevenness. The purpose of this explanatory study was to examine the structural and contextual factors accounting for extractive industry indigenisation underdelivering upon implementation. Findings show that extractive industry indigenisation’s implementation processes, mainly through Community Share Ownership Trusts (CSOTs), are producing largely disempowering outcomes for communities involved. These include the failure to address the uneven development problem in the mining sector, which is fuelling the persistence of uneven development. Findings further show that although the extractive industry indigenisation, may, in some instances, result in the restructuring of non- indigenous private mining capital, this is not correspondingly ‘empowering’ the disadvantaged indigenous citizens and their communities. Findings of this show that the following factors explain why extractive industry indigenisation perpetuated and maintained uneven development (i.e. in terms of scale, geography, income and wealth): (a) widespread cases of fronting; (b) except the Gwanda CSOT, all CSOTs did not get shares in the foreign mining companies, only seed capital/pledges/donations that are to this day yet to be paid in full; (c) widespread incapacitation (i.e. in terms of financial, human and managerial skills) and corruption in the CSOTs; (d) the security sector companies that got 50% equity in diamond companies operating Chiadzwa are not spreading the wealth around; and (e) the Finance Act of 2018 (No. 13 of 2018) made it optional for the qualifying companies to continue funding (as well as honouring the pledged amounts in full) the CSOTs. The combination of these factors results in further impoverishment of the disadvantaged indigenous people and their communities
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    The role of decentralisation in managing intra-state conflict in South Africa
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-07) Fourie, Reneva Esther; Van Nieuwkerk, Anthoni
    This research study investigates the imperatives that led to the formation of South Africa’s post-apartheid decentralisation model and the conditions that enabled it to relatively appease the key role-players in South Africa’s pre-1994 conflict, as well as to critique the contribution of the model to state legitimacy. It is set in the context of decentralisation and intra-state conflict on the African continent in an endeavour to contribute to the African Union’s efforts to ‘Silencing the Guns’ by 2030. Regardless of its form, decentralisation is profoundly controversial, yet it is crucial to transitional governments and post-conflict reconstruction debates. However, current literature does not sufficiently enable us to understand the conditions under which a country can devise a decentralisation model that responds to the drivers of conflict. South Africa’s unique historical experience in the development of its post-apartheid model of decentralisation provides an opportunity to critique and discuss these debates through a fascinating case study. Qualitative data collection methods, analysed through a specially constructed three dimensional framework, underpin this interpretive case study. The data collection method for dimension one of the decentralisation framework of analysis is semi-structured interviews with persons who either participated directly in the design of the decentralisation model, or influenced, or observed the process. It responds to the research question, ‘What is the role of decentralisation in managing intra-state conflict in South Africa?’ The sub-questions relate to the context, formation process, and design of the decentralisation model and its perceived effectiveness. Furthermore, document analyses are applied to critique the model’s contribution to state legitimacy. In this regard, primary sources are analysed in dimension two to demonstrate how regulatory prescripts support the decentralisation model to facilitate a reciprocal interrelationship between power and authority; to promote compliance, trust, accountability and innovation; to drive the interplay between these former two aspects; and to enable citizen influence and oversight and social reciprocities. Additionally, document analyses of domestic and international quantitative secondary sources are applied in dimension three to critique governance effectiveness concerning economic management, social development, government orientation and citizen participation. The research study provides new insight into the conditions that preceded and surrounded South Africa’s transition and the different challenges and interests to which the negotiations over decentralisation tried to respond. In South Africa, the depth of the conflict had attained such severity that it had reached a point where there was mutual agreement that some accommodation had to be found. The collectively agreed, unitary post-apartheid decentralisation model, which has significant federal features, sustained the peace for almost three decades. The research study, by applying the three-dimensional framework of analysis, also provides theoretical insights into the relationship between a given decentralisation model and state legitimacy as part of managing intra-state conflict. However, by focusing only on the intrinsic aspects of managing intra-state conflict, the study does not deal with the complexities that arise from adverse external interests and interferences. Furthermore, so many factors shape state legitimacy, which cannot be addressed by a decentralisation model only. Accordingly, the study finds that despite the post-apartheid decentralisation model’s effectiveness in relatively appeasing all the negotiation participants, it was an incomplete arrangement in that it could not contribute to stemming poverty and inequality or empowering local communities. The conclusion flowing from this research is that decentralisation is an eminently political process that, at its best, is dynamic and elastic in responding to changing times and that its application in conditions of conflict is relative.
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    The role of peace missions in sustaining peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
    (2023) Nyuykonge, Wiykiynyuy Charles
    This study examined efforts aimed at ending conflict and restoring order and political stability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, under the auspices of the United Nations peacekeeping mission. As one of the largest and most extensively funded peace operations across the globe, the UN’s mission in the DRC represents paradoxes and contradictions of the Liberal Peacebuilding approach, from the size of deployment to the scale of its funding, given the failure to end cycles of conflict in the country. In departing from the dominant socio-economic and ethnographic lenses from which the elusiveness of peace in the country have been examined in many studies, this study focused on the institutional guiding frameworks that have informed the succession of UN peacekeeping missions and madates over the years. A significant amount of research on UN peacekeeping missions in the DRC have relied on the Liberal Peacebuilding discourse and how it proposes to deliver peaceful and a prosperous nation. This study therefore interrogated the UN missions’ performance in implementing the Liberal peace framework. It examined if indeed the location of the UN mission within the Liberal Peacebuilding models may help explain its successes and failures, and whether this approach informs its inability to ensure sustainable peace in the country. Furthermore, the study examined the prospects that the transition to Sustaining peace holds for peace and stability in the DRC. To this end, it sought to understand, whether and how the new Sustaining Peace approach could overcome the pitfalls of the Liberal Peacebuilding model; and its potency to resolve this partly conceptual and partly practical quagmire. This study adopted a descriptive method of analysis based on a case study survey design, using both primary and secondary data, and qualitative analysis. Findings from interviews with the UN and other stakeholders indicate that in contrast to clear academic bifurcations on the meaning of these two frames of action, there is not such clarity within the UN, about the conceptual equivalence of it's operational frames. Sustaining peace, the study found, is a muscular conceptual matrix whose operationsalisation is not linear. It recommends conceptual harmony between theory and practice among other measures, as panacea for peace in the DRC. This justified the usefulness of this enquiry in ending the elucivenss of peace in the DRC.