Serving people is key, not service ‘delivery’
Is Tito Mboweni the first cabinet minister to say that the people need a direct say in decisions that affect them? Or merely the latest to want citizens to do the government’s job for it?
Mboweni’s first mediumterm budget speech may not have broken any new ground. But a comment he made at the media conference before the speech did exactly that: he challenged an object of workshop in the public debate by arguing that we don’t need “service delivery.”
“Service delivery,” he said, “is like sitting at home and waiting for the baker to deliver the bread … instead of participating in the development of the bread, which is development. I prefer the development approach, not the delivery approach.”
This is a vital point. Most people are so used to praising “service delivery” that they give no thought to the message the words send.
If the job of the government is to “deliver” services, the citizen’s role is reduced to waiting around for whatever is “delivered.” People have no say in deciding what they get — they decide only whether they like it.
This is a deeply undemocratic idea. In democracies, the government is meant to serve the people, not “deliver” to them.
Citizens decide what democratic government will do and then hold it to account for whether it does what they want. In “delivery”, government “experts” decide for citizens what they want and need.
Not surprisingly, this is often not what people want; what “experts” think is good for citizens may make their lives much worse.
In one case in Gauteng a while back, the “delivery” czars decided that what people needed was to have their homes moved because this would make it easier to “deliver” to them.
So, when we are told that people have taken to the streets because they want “service delivery”, it may well be that the opposite is true — that they want to avoid what people behind desks are “delivering” without bothering to find out what they really want.
Mboweni is right that this does not produce development, which allows people to make the best of their abilities: no-one will reach their potential if they must make do with what the government thinks they need.
It also makes governing much more difficult because people who have no say in what the government does, supposedly on their behalf, are likely to see it as a threat.
If Mboweni is saying that people need a direct say in the services the government provides, he is arguing for a radical change in what the government does, one that should produce far more development and make democracy work better.
But that is not necessarily what he is saying.
When people in the government say citizens must play a bigger role, they don’t always mean they should have more say. They usually mean they should let the government off the hook by doing part of its job. Some in the government have argued that citizens should not wait for it to provide better policing or schooling; they should get involved in providing this themselves.
This does not deepen democracy, it passes the buck by shifting the blame for poor services from politicians and officials to the people they are meant to serve.
Insisting people do the government’s job is as much a problem as allowing the government to do the people’s job. Mboweni is right to insist that we will not have development or democracy as long as we insist that citizens need “service delivery.”
But only if citizens insist on a new approach, in which the government serves the people rather than “delivering” to them, are they are likely to get a government that works for them rather than itself.