Fixing local government is crucial and urgent
When the deputy minister of human settlements, water & sanitation David Mahlobo grudgingly admits that municipal water services are in jeopardy, we need to pay attention.
Uncollected garbage, potholes and power outages we can endure, but when the taps run dry, people start to die.
Collapsed water services (both inadequate supply and poor quality) are the starkest evidence of a potentially catastrophic decline in municipal administration and governance. The drought is a handy scapegoat but the truth is, there have been warning signs for more than a decade – the death of 140 children in the Ukhahlamba District Municipality in 2008 is a case in point. (DD, April 22 2008).
Some district municipalities designated as Water Services Authorities (WSA) have one underqualified technician assigned to the task and no testing capability. Frequently local municipalities (the water services providers) have allowed their pumps, treatment works and reticulation systems to collapse because of inadequate maintenance. Sometimes this is aggravated by muddled contractual arrangements between the WSA, the providers and private contractors.
Once the crisis kicks in, local government typically tries to deny or downplay the problem while seeking a bailout from treasury.
On paper, SA has a worldclass local government system, but by the end of the 1990s it was plagued by some poor policy choices. Then came a series of disastrous ministerial appointments and the murky political forces that swept through all echelons of the state at the end of the Mbeki era and into the Zuma reign.
While we began to grapple with the reality of state capture, local government continued and continues to offer rich pickings for those who failed to secure a piece of the SOE looting spree. By the time it became clear that the local state had not escaped the attention of the raiders, billions had already been squandered on fake asbestos roof audits, target-deficient housing schemes and bogus water and sanitation projects.
For the past decade or so local government has ratcheted up personal and institutional costs, neglected maintenance, subverted clean procurement and allowed political factionalism to undermine governance and dictate decision-making.
The chickens have now come home to roost in the form of bankruptcy and crumbling basic service capability.
The warning signs have been there for decades in the form of auditor-general and national treasury reports that warned of a growing segment of municipalities where good governance and municipal management has virtually collapsed.
Whereas there were always a handful of municipalities with either declaimed or adverse audit opinions and little evidence of credible performance reporting, now there are about three dozen that fail this test at some level. Despite warnings to desist by treasury, about 40% of municipalities budgeted for expenditure not covered by income in the 2018/19 financial year. In the same period irregular expenditure in municipalities amounted to R21.2bn.
There are enough case studies of maladministration, corruption, misappropriation and the fallout of local political elites locked in factional death battles to fill a small library.
South Africa’s post-apartheid local government policy framework is highly regarded globally, however, one fatal flaw was that it followed the executive mayor model. This American inspired model blurs the distinction between political and administrative authority and virtually guarantees the interference of senior politicians in what should be managerial-administrative decisions.
Dr Crispian Olver is a former senior civil servant and an ANC policy-maker. In his new book on the City of Cape Town, A House Divided, Olver conceded; “The legal framework for public administration put executive power in the hands of politicians and didn’t sufficiently protect senior civil servants from political interference.”
At the time, most “progressive” academic and NGO thinktanks endorsed the model as a necessary instrument to transform the apartheid state bureaucracy. What transpired instead was an increasingly autocratic municipal “cabinet” that centralised power and eliminated critical checks and balances between officialdom and politicians.
Even ANC backbenchers were relegated to rubberstamping the resolutions of their better paid mayoral committee comrades.
Instead of scrapping the model, councillors vied to be part of the generously reimbursed mayoral committee and fraudulently adopted the executive mayor type even when the municipality was ineligible.
In post-apartheid South Africa, local government is no longer a subservient tier of government, but an independent and autonomous sphere.
That is a huge joke, since it is the national and regional party structures that dictate local council decisions.
Nonetheless, the myth prevails and is used by organised local government to resist national attempts to leverage better financial governance through the system of national grants to local government.
To be fair, interventions in local government, in terms of section 139 of the constitution (based on the non-performance of executive functions) have rarely yielded a sustainable remedy. According to the Public Affairs Research Institute there have been 140 section 139 interventions since 1998, involving 143 municipalities – 15 were in the Eastern Cape.
However, “very few of these have had a meaningful and sustained impact on municipal operations or financial health”.
So, is there a chink of light in this gloomy scenario? Although the ANC is trying to heal itself and the state, the outcome is by no means certain.
In general, the political culture within institutions of governance is rotten and may take years to repair. The answer may lie in the mid-level officials, the few remaining technicians and the young managers who are gatvol of the corruption and political factionalism that poisons their workplace.
They often constitute the remaining vestige of functionality within a failed institution and are tired of carrying the can for cadre deployment.
If we can strengthen their hand, perhaps local government can be stabilised and start the long road to recovery. Hollands is a consultant on local governance and community safety
Answer may lie in mid-level officials, the few remaining technicians and the young managers