Place name changes likely to run foul of shaky political coalitions, especially at local level

Daily Maverick

a day ago

In late March 2025, thanks in no small part to an invitation by colleagues from the Gauteng Geographical Names Committee, I gave input on the Gauteng leg of the countrywide South African Geographical Names Amendment Bill public consultation workshops.
The Bill is a proposed amendment of the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture's (DSAC) South African Geographical Names Act 118 of 1998 – the principal place names statute in the country – as part of the national department's efforts to seamlessly standardise geographical names across South Africa.
The well-attended Gauteng public engagement workshop formed part of nine consultative provincial visits by the department, following which the department will incorporate stakeholders' submissions and table the Bill to Parliament for further consideration.
At the workshop, attendees were assigned to three breakout rooms – commissions – where we discussed the Bill's proposed clauses and later gave the department feedback at the plenary.
The SA Geographical Names Amendment Bill proposes substantial and striking changes to the 1998 Geographical Names Act. This includes formalisation of South Africa's nine provincial geographical names committees advising and making place name recommendations to provincial members of the executive committee; adequate placename research and consultation; and formation of an independent three-to-five-expert placenames Appeals Tribunal that will review 'rejected' placename proposals.
Intriguingly, the Appeals Tribunal, anticipated to be appointed by the national minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, will purportedly have more power than the national minister.
Clauses around provincial geographical names committees authorise their setup, formalisation, morphology (10 to 15 experts), functioning, and tenure (five years of national council as opposed to the current three years spelt out by the principal act).
'Rigorous public participation'
Provisos pertaining to research and adequate consultation mandate rigorous public participation and make requisite authorities' ample communication with local communities, from start to finish.
Given that placename changes in South Africa have courted considerable controversy, with a lack of consultation having been cited as one potent driver of fiercely opposed toponym changes, clauses around adequate community participation and appeals are arguably a welcome proposal.
Yet, the Bill is seemingly silent on matters of place-naming and name-changing at the local level. Indeed, the Bill does not make provision for local geographical names committees or bodies advising and giving geographical names recommendations to relevant members of the mayoral committee at the municipal sphere, referring to them only as 'subcommittees'.
I raised this as an issue at the plenary and at the commission I was assigned to. Following this, some local geographical names committee members from Gauteng's local municipalities lamented the absence of clauses around local geographical names committees in the two-tier governance model characteristic of district and local municipalities, raising questions around how committees in such setups would be constituted.
While some Gauteng Geographical Names Committee members argued that such omissions would be made up for by the fact that some local geographical names committee members also sat on the provincial geographical names committee in Gauteng and possibly others countrywide, thereby acting as transmission belts, the 'neglect' of local geographical names committees on the Amendment Bill remained palpable.
Not only is this surprising, but it is also concerning, given naming-related controversies and ongoing on-the-ground governance issues at municipal level.
In South Africa, (re)naming-related controversies, including petitioning, litigation and picketing, are arguably most pronounced at the local sphere of government.
Consider, for instance, the then-ANC-controlled City of Tshwane's contested 2012 renaming of 25 streets in Pretoria Central and surrounds, which dragged on for years owing to, inter alia, court action by opposing AfriForum.
Or the controversial wholesale renaming of Durban's 108 streets, which, following the Democratic Alliance's successful appeal at the Supreme Court of Appeal on grounds that the eThekwini Metropolitan Council had not followed proper procedures in its first phase of renaming, saw nine new street names being reverted.
Unstable coalitions
More concerningly, the Amendment Bill does not address the proverbial elephant in the room – pronounced unstable coalition arrangements across all governmental spheres, especially at the municipal level.
Because South Africa's biggest political parties are increasingly unable to secure outright majority wins at local polls since 2016, hung councils have become a staple of the country's electoral politics, having grown from 27 in 2016 to 66 in 2021.
This is most evident in many South African metropolitan municipalities where, thanks to multiple motions of no-confidence, shaky coalitions have proliferated. For instance, a 2024 study by The Outlier shows that since the 2016 local polls, no mayor in Johannesburg has been able to finish his/her term.
Political opportunism
This is evidence of political instability imposed by coalition arrangements in a country that is yet to promulgate laws for governing them. Suffice to say, the dearth of laws governing coalition arrangements in South Africa's largest urban centres and elsewhere has created opacity and made room for political opportunism.
Some of this political opportunism is evident in (re)naming. Here, the case of eThekwini, where renaming controversies have mainly played out between the proposing ANC and the opposing IFP, is instructive.
Take, for example, the controversial 2011 renaming of Mangosuthu Highway to Griffiths Mxenge Highway in honour of the ANC veteran, civil rights lawyer and anti-apartheid activist who was assassinated by an apartheid death squad on the road in question in 1981.
In an open letter to the then KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) premier, the IFP had lamented that the name change was highly provocative, divisive and detrimental to reconciliation efforts in a province with a sordid history of party-political violence.
The IFP had also posited that the name change would undermine community will, since residents in Umlazi, a township through which the highway passes, had in effect specifically requested the previous honour.
Notwithstanding the IFP's objections and arguments, the ANC in eThekwini and KZN had okayed the renaming on the grounds that Buthelezi was a living person. The IFP found this reasoning irrational since several geographical features were named after statesman Nelson Mandela, then a living person, like Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
In an interesting turn of events, in November 2021, a decade after the renaming and shortly after South Africa's disastrous sixth municipal elections, the ANC, determined to form coalitions with the IFP in KZN's 21 hung municipalities, was left with little choice but to bow to several IFP terms and conditions.
One was that the ANC rename Griffiths Mxenge Highway back to Mangosuthu Highway. The ANC allegedly agreed to abide by this 'coalition precondition' and several others, which then led to the surprising coalition.
While Griffiths Mxenge Highway has not been renamed back in honour of the IFP's now-departed leader, this saga demonstrates that geographical name-changing initiatives are liable to be held hostage by party politics and can be used for party-political bargaining.
Where to now?
Where does all this leave the geographical names committees at provincial and local levels? How do we ascertain that the political authorities to whom the South African Geographical Names Council and naming sub-committees report take the committees' voices/recommendations seriously?
Really, how do we ensure that the committees are meaningfully engaged and 'shielded' from party-political manoeuvring?
Equally, while the Amendment Bill makes provision for the establishment of an autonomous and powerful placenames Appeals Tribunal, how sure are we that the body will be truly impartial and independent, especially given its (future) functioning in a highly charged party-political setting?
According to a Gauteng City-Region Observatory occasional paper on municipal demarcation in Sedibeng and Gauteng (particularly) and SA (generally), supposedly independent bodies in areas such as municipal (re)demarcation, another controversial issue in the country, have been affected by party politics.
For instance, before the establishment of a single Municipal Demarcation Board, there existed provincial boards that made boundary demarcation-related decisions. The provincial demarcation boards, like the one for Gauteng, had made partial boundary re-demarcation decisions informed by political partisanship and aimed at gerrymandering.
In fact, several gerrymandering instances in the 1990s were largely responsible for the removal of municipal and ward demarcation responsibilities from provincial control and the establishment of an independent national body that would make final delineation decisions.
Disturbingly, the same Gauteng City-Region Observatory occasional paper finds that notwithstanding the national Municipal Demarcation Board's quasi-independence and enjoyment of constitutional protection, opposition parties and ordinary citizens alike have sometimes accused it of, inter alia, political slant in favour of the ANC, and making demarcation decisions without proper consultation.
In the context of existing naming committees and the proposed Appeals Tribunal, since most name changes in South Africa have been proposed by political parties and authorities across all governmental spheres, how certain are we that the Appeals Tribunal and place-naming committees will be truly neutral, impartial and independent?
With the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture having finalised the province-to-province consultative workshops around its proposed Amendment Bill, the jury is still out on whether the Bill will pass in Parliament.
More importantly, there is no telling whether questions around local geographical names committees, messy coalition arrangements and incessant party-political changes at the municipal level will be considered and incorporated in the resultant amended Act.