The South African Presidential Participation Programme (Imbizo): Engaging Communities for a Better Life

Hartslief O¹*

1. University of Johannesburg, Queenswood, Pretoria, South Africa

The Imbizo programme allows South Africans to engage provincial political leaders including the President by providing feedback on policy delivery in a typical bottom-up approach. The President visits remote areas in South Africa and engage communities. Imbizo is a Nguni word, meaning “gathering”. Imbizo can be broadly defined as a gathering of South Africans in a village or close to a township or town. This has been a traditional political system of Africa for many centuries especially in South Africa. Its only during the Presidential term of Mr Mbeki, the President of South Africa, that the concept found a place in a formal governance setting.
The general interpretation of the concept is seen as limiting and goes beyond to include information that can be gathered for future policy decision-making processes to improve management of implementation and/ or systematically interpreted for the public policy process, leading to policy change, cancellation or even introduction of new items on the policy agenda.

The information gathered and the monitoring and evaluation potential of the Imbizo should be made explicit. The method is connected to the growing importance of policy networks in which knowledge and solutions are generated for better policy implementation and incremental policy adjustment. Overall, policy needs to be maintained and this can only be done through evaluation, which in turn relies on access to information and the importance of “problem solving as a process of unending inquiry” this has value especially in relation to the Presidential Imbizos’ contributions, which emanates from communities.

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