South Africa’s great constitutional experiment is part modern republic, part post-liberation compromise. We’ve inherited a state both noble in its intentions and bloated in its execution. The Executive sprawls like a badly planned city, with ministries stacked like shipping containers on a listing vessel of political convenience. Our police force is centralised to the point of paralysis, unable to distinguish the crime patterns of Claremont from those of Clanwilliam. Meanwhile, state-owned enterprises straddle the economy like sloppy drunken giants, too big to fail, too broken to function. For these and a plethora of other reasons, Free SA advocates for a bold approach that not merely tweaks the system but reboots the logic that underpins many of the stumbling blocks faced by modern-day South Africa.
Our proposals are simple: We want to cut Cabinet bloat, bust state monopolies, and decentralise police powers. While we have had these proposals for as long as we have existed as a foundation, Parliament’s recent call for comments on the 2025 Annual Review of the Constitution provides the perfect opportunity to put pen to paper.
Against this backdrop, we believe that Free SA’s proposed Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment Bill, dubbed the Power to the People Amendment, arrives like a much-needed cold front on a muggy day. It is an audacious intervention, both philosophically and constitutionally. It deserves praise, critique, and, most of all, serious public debate. I will discuss each major proposal in turn, and unpack the implications, not just legally, but politically and culturally.
I. The Great Trimming: Limiting the Cabinet
South Africa’s executive government often resembles Noah’s Ark during a rainy season of Political Expediency: two of every ministry, all aboard, not necessarily for capability so much as for party loyalty and patronage. A Minister of Public Works here, a Deputy Minister of Basic Education there, a ceremonial figure for each acronym and factional alliance. The Executive has bloated into a flotilla of redundancy, with enough political appointments to fill a mid-sized rugby stadium.
Free SA’s proposed amendment proposes limiting the number of ministers to 15 and deputy ministers to 15. Fifteen is already provides a 20% buffer on top of the 12 portfolios that we deem truly necessary. No more Cabinet aggrandisement via patronage appointments. If you want to be rewarded for your loyalty to the party, you can participate in the functional economy like the rest of us, or you can take your camping chair to go and enjoy people queuing to vote. Your loyalty does not allow you a blank paycheque for the rest of your life, followed by a blank pension cheque until the end of your days. In practical terms, this number forces the President to make meaningful decisions about what government should actually do and what it can do without. In a time of multi-party coalition, it also removes the temptation of simply increasing the number of bums in seats instead of true political compromise.
Although the savings on salaries, residences, bodyguards, blue lights, and bloated departmental entourages would be significant, this proposal is more than just cost-cutting. It is a structural reset. The real power lies in forced prioritisation at the cabinet level. With only fifteen portfolios, the state must finally ask itself: What is essential? Can one ministry handle health and social development? Could economic development and trade be unified? Must higher education be bundled with its basic counterpart? In essence, governance by subtraction is sorely needed.
While fewer ministers is a good start, it is just a start.
II. Reverse Gatekeeping: Banning State-Owned Monopolies
Enter our next big idea. The constitutional prohibition of monopolies by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) unless explicitly authorised for national security reasons by a 75% supermajority in Parliament.
This proposal does not necessarily eliminate SOEs, but because it reverses the default logic of state intervention, it would necessarily improve their service delivery. Rather than having to justify liberalisation, Parliament would have to justify monopolisation. In effect, this proposal establishes a constitutional presumption in favour of economic competition.
We call this “reverse gatekeeping”: an inversion of the ideological assumptions embedded in post-apartheid economic governance. For decades, state control, especially in “strategic” sectors, has been assumed to be good until proven otherwise. Eskom, Transnet, SAA… the list goes on and reads like a cautionary tale about putting all your eggs in a government basket, and then lighting it on fire with diesel.
Critics will argue that some sectors—electricity, rail, water—are natural monopolies, or too sensitive for full liberalisation. That’s a fair concern. But the amendment does not ban SOEs outright. It simply demands that they earn their exceptional status via democratic consensus. Call it a safeguard against Supersocialism, if you will. If it is indeed the case that these sectors require a monopoly, let that be democratically confirmed.
In this way, the proposed amendment shifts the burden of proof. If you want the state to monopolise broadband, for example, you’d need overwhelming parliamentary and public support. That’s a good test. A state monopoly should not be easier to create than a corner café.
Breaking these monopolies is not about ideology in our view. In a country with 32% unemployment and with service delivery failing clearly, economic gatekeeping is economic injustice, and the poor are harmed the most.
III. Policing for the People: Devolving Police Powers to Provinces
The third and arguably most transformative pillar of our proposed constitutional amendment is the devolution of policing powers. It proposes that provinces establish their own police services, appoint their own commissioners, and determine provincial law enforcement priorities.
In other words, it seeks to take policing out of Pretoria’s orbit and place it into the hands of those closest to the communities affected by crime. This is not federalism in the American sense, but rather a subsidiarity model which is rooted in the established constitutional principle that decisions should be made at the lowest competent level. And after three decades of centralised policing marked by inefficiency, corruption, and unresponsiveness, this proposal is both undoubtedly necessary and decades overdue.
Crime in Khayelitsha is not the same as crime in Kimberley or Komatipoort. And yet, police strategy in all three places is dictated by a bloated national SAPS bureaucracy, often preoccupied with ministerial optics rather than meaningful safety outcomes.
By devolving policing, the amendment aims to tailor law enforcement to local realities, enhance accountability (via provincial legislatures), and create competitive pressure for performance. If one province can run a cleaner, quicker, more trusted police service, the others may be forced to catch up. That is democratic dynamism.
Make no mistake: this will not be easy. Many provinces lack the administrative and financial capacity to run full-fledged police services. The risk is a patchwork of competence—Gauteng may innovate, while Limpopo falters. To mitigate this, the Bill retains a national coordinating role for matters like organised crime, intelligence, and cross-border enforcement. This attempts to avoid fragmentation through functional decentralisation.
Moreover, devolution could serve as a pressure valve for national politics. When governance is shared, political tensions diffuse. Local failures can no longer be blamed solely on the national government, nor can successes be monopolised for political gain. In a fracturing political environment, such a balance could be stabilising.
Conclusion
Our Power to the People Amendment does not promise utopia. It offers something far more grounded, namely a return to first principles, a recalibration of state power, and a modest invitation to reimagine governance from the bottom up.
Free SA has chosen these three reforms—a leaner Cabinet, the end of state monopolies, and the devolution of policing—precisely because they strike at the symbolic and structural heart of South Africa’s post-apartheid malaise. Each addresses not just a technical dysfunction, but a deeper political pathology.
A bloated executive is not merely inefficient; it signals a political culture of excess and patronage, where the party is always viewed as more important than the people. SOE monopolies are not just uncompetitive; they symbolise a state that fears its own people and does not trust the ingenuity of the private citizen to build, innovate, and thrive. And centralised policing is not merely unresponsive, but it reflects a distrust of local autonomy and the assumption that central intelligence is more effective than local experience. In this sense, these reforms are chosen because they force the state to answer a more fundamental question: Are we here for ourselves, or for the communities that elected us to serve them?
Unlike the arrival of a State of the Nation Address, this amendment will not fix Eskom overnight. It will also not end crime in Eldorado Park. But it may help lay the foundation for a state that knows its limits, minds its budget, and trusts its people. This, in a country long governed by promises of transformation, may prove the most transformative step of all.