Foot soldiers in war against poverty
PHINDILE Ndlovu, a Community Caregiver (CCG), is doing her home visits in Lidgetton, 16km from Howick, in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), when she discovers three neglected children below the age of 10 years: dirty, hungry and half naked.
Ndlovu immediately sends a WhatsApp message to her colleague Fakazile Nzimande, a community development worker (CDW), at the Lidgetton War Room located in the community hall, who in turn phones the Umngeni local municipality’s ward 4 councillor, Sithembiso Nkuna.
Later that day, councillor Nkuna and Nzimande visit the house.
Councillor Nkuna buys groceries from the local shop, so the children can be fed as there is no food in the house. They trace the children’s maternal aunt, who informs them that the children’s mother lives at her workplace in Nottingham Road, 20km away.
The ward councillor drafts a report and refers the children to a provincial Department of Social Development (DSD) social worker, who places the children at the Khazimula Children’s Home.
Then their uncle “adopts” them, later to be returned to their mother, who soon after is tragically killed in a train accident.
Since then the children have been in the care of their aunt.
The CCG and CDW follow up on the case and monitor the situation.
They assist the aunt with applications for her ID at the Department of Home Affairs, so she can apply for child support grants from the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa).
Ndlovu and her colleagues shared the above case during my visit last year to write a case study on KZN’s highly regarded Operation Sukuma Sakhe. The case is a good example of public service leadership, teamwork, collaboration, diligence, passion, activism, care and compassion – all essential attributes in achieving the noble vision of Sukuma Sakhe (“to stand up and build”): a vibrant, equitable and sustainable socio-economic communities in KZN.
KZN bears the country’s largest burden of poverty and disease, with the highest rate of HIV-infection prevalence among antenatal clinic attendees, while tuberculosis claims the second-largest number of lives. In addition, social ills like crime, drug and substance abuse, and women and child abuse, are rife. Seventy-five percent of the province’s young children live in poor households.
In April 2011, KZN Premier Dr Zweli Mkhize launched Operation Sukuma Sakhe (OSS), thereby building on previous anti-poverty initiatives and the Presidency’s War on Poverty Programme launched by former president Thabo Mbeki. Through the OSS, KZN was the only province to continue with the War on Poverty initiative after President Zuma’s administration terminated the national programme.
The OSS aims to challenge the common frustration of government’s pervasive and entrenched “silo mentality” resulting in weak co-ordination and collaboration across the public service in service delivery. To improve co-ordination, OSS political and technical governance structures operate at provincial, district, local and ward levels.
Community-centred public service delivery is pivotal to OSS’s ethos and ward-based ‘war rooms’ are the crucial nexus that connects vulnerable households and communities to government services and social partners. Operating from these war rooms, under the leadership of the ward councillor, it is the “foot soldiers” – the CCGs, CDWs and other fieldworkers – who are their lifeblood.
The ward 4 war room operates as a closely-knit team, meeting weekly, under the the exemplary leadership of councillor Nkuna.
Over the past five years, the hard-working councillor has built strong relationships with social partners, such as Ethembeni, TB/ HIV Care Association, Rotary, Red Cross, CareWorks and local farmers. He recognises that government alone cannot provide services.
These social partners, along with school principals, community organisations and government departments, meet monthly at the war room to receive reports from the fieldworkers. Government departments report on their progress with referrals from the war room; however, very few departments attend – they are the weakest link in the OSS value chain.
The ward 4 war room also has a Phila Mntwana mother-and-child health facility at which CCGs measures children’s basic growth and health indicators, while urgent cases are referred to the health clinic. A mobile clinic visits the war room twice a month. The ward 4 Aids Council ensures that people take their medication, while the CCGs follow-up on defaulters. A women’s club of senior citizens meet thrice weekly for activities, such as bead work and lunch.
Councillor Nkuna successfully pursued the authorities for four years to gain mediport status for his war room. “This is a practical example of bringing services closer to people,” he says. “Now they collect their medication here, rather than travelling to the clinic a distance away. The mediport will also address the issue of defaulting.”
The team happily shares their many achievements: 50% closed referrals, reduced number of new infections in TB and HIV, 99% of those eligible receive social grants, services to people living on farms, 21 water tanks distributed and so on.
A CCG boasts: “We don’t theorise, we have evidence based on household profiles and we take action.”
Late last year, the ward 4 war room was placed third out of 823 wards in KZN, winning the bronze KZN Premier’s Service Excellence Award. Also, councillor Nkuna was re-elected as councillor with a twothirds majority in the local government elections.
While the OSS model has been lauded as a best practice model by UN agencies and adopted by the Deputy President’s Office in their “Best Practice Guidelines for the Implementation of an Integrated Service Delivery Model,” and replicated in other provinces, and notwithstanding ward 4’s many achievements, the OSS has many institutional challenges to overcome.
For example, currently there are 12 645 CCGs, however, KZN needs another 29 648, and while 466 CDWs are contracted, another 362 wards are without. The CCGs receive a monthly stipend of R1 800 with no benefits or job security. They feel marginalised as government managers and professionals look down upon them.
The fundamental challenge to the survival of the OSS remains the dominance of the monolithic bureaucracy, initially confronted by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in 1994.
The OSS still confronts an archaic, enduring industrial age public service paradigm: rigid and steep hierarchical organisational architecture that reinforces the entrenched, overly bureaucratic, top-down, rank conscious, command-and-control mindset of public managers and political office bearers.
In some ways, the OSS is a bold reawakening of the spirit of the RDP’s bottom-up, community-centric developmental ethos, which some say was doused by the hegemony of neo-liberalism in the late 1990s.
The RDP argued for a “comprehensive approach to the development of a democratic and accountable public service” that would “facilitate internal accountability and democracy within the operations of the (public) service” and “ensure that its relationships with the public are also transparent, consultative, participative and democratic” (White Paper on the Transformation of the Public Service, 1995).
In the past 20 years, the public service has strayed from these ideals, paying lip service to community participation in their development, further marginalising the poor.
At the OSS strategic review session two weeks ago, Dr Fikile Ndlovu, head of OSS in the Office of the Premier, highlighted these contradictions and tensions, asking: “Is the state configured to achieve the mandate of a developmental state and service delivery to the most vulnerable households and communities? Or does it serve to perpetuate the stark poverty and inequality in our province?”
A few kilometres from the ward 4 war room, on the Midlands Meander route, I visit the artistic memorial and museum at the Mandela Capture Site. Mandela’s words on a mural catch my attention: “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no freedom.”
I return Mandela’s radiant smile, knowing he would be proud of the champions of the OSS, like Dr Ndlovu and councillor Nkuna, and their teams, for liberating vulnerable households to stand up and build in the spirit of Sukuma Sakhe.
Dr Haricharan acknowledges the EU-funded Programme to Support Pro-poor Policy Development, Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation that commissioned the case study on Operation Sukuma Sakhe. He writes in his personal capacity.