Services should be based on rights, not the marketplace
ON MARCH 15, the City of Cape Town hosted an exhibition at the Cape Town Civic Centre for International Consumer Rights Day and invited civics, communities and other stakeholders to the event, which was said to provide a platform for raising awareness and educating staff and residents about the role of the various consumer rights stakeholders.
Taking its cue from Consumers International, the City themed the event “Making Digital Marketplaces Fairer”. On show were the services of the City, including the City Ombuds, the Risk, Ethics and Governance Unit, the Revenue Department, Water and Sanitation Services and the Electricity Department.
While there is nothing wrong with empowering consumers to be more assertive of their rights, we wonder what message this sends to the residents of Cape Town, in a constitutional democracy, which affords all living in South Africa the opportunity to be rights holders, entitled to services from the City – not as a favour, nor as a commercial exchange, but simply because we are all human. In terms of a wider social contract, the City is expected to fulfil its contractual relationship with the residents to provide services for all of us. This is not a consumer-producer relationship but one in which the citizens designate an agency (the City Council) to fulfil a function on our behalf. Translated into rights language, this means that rights holders have entitlement to see that their basic needs are met by government and should not have to rely on the act of paying for a service to get a decent response. However, as we well know, lodging a complaint as an individual “consumer” on the City’s complaints system is a testing business and you rarely get a response, let alone a remedy to the complaint.
Moreover, highlighting consumer rights as existing in a digital marketplace is somewhat bizarre, given that 26% of city residents live in poverty, more than half a million Capetonians do not have access to the internet and more than 50% of Capetonians cannot access the internet via cellphone. Only 21.4% of residents in the Western Cape have internet access at home. Emphasising consumer rights in such a context runs the risk of increasing inequality in an already highly unequal city when only the connected can take advantage of being empowered in the “digital market place.”
The fact that the City is enamoured with the idea that it has clients is part of the neo-liberal project that has re-cast citizens as consumers who purchase services from government. A consumer no longer has any entitlements as human rights, rather their only entitlements are linked to the market, where they are consumers – meaning we must all be savvy in how we spend our money, getting the best value for our rands – and the job of the City is to make us better consumers by us being better informed.
However, this does not work in practice. Markets are highly unequal, no matter how much we pretend to equalise the huge information imbalance that exists. And for basic needs, you can’t shop around.
For example, for health care, electricity and water, the market is not there to work for you.
Quite frankly, we are tired of being treated as consumers. We would like to be treated as citizens – citizens who have rights which attract corresponding duties from state officials. We are tired of unaccountable officials and delinquent political representatives who think nothing about ignoring community needs and who do not understand the constitutional imperatives of a rights-based society. It’s time the City thought of residents as rights-holders, not consumers or clients, and stepped up to the plate by fulfilling the obligations imposed on City officials and public representatives by our Constitution. Leslie London Observatory Civic Association