Daniel Plaatjies: spoke truth to power
For many years anti-apartheid activist, prominent intellectual and senior public servant Daniel Plaatjies, who has died at the age of 57, was a voice in the wilderness, warning about the collapse of municipalities and making bold, evidence-based recommendations about how they could be turned around.
No public servant ever spoke truth to power more persistently than he did, or was more persistently ignored.
As chair of the Financial and Fiscal Commission (FFC), his consistent message was that the government must give municipalities adequate funding to ensure their financial and fiscal viability. Without it there could be no service delivery, and without service delivery, he warned, there would be increasingly violent civil unrest and the country would rapidly come apart at the seams.
The government ignored him. As befitted someone who grew up fighting apartheid police on the streets of the Cape Flats with future finance minister Trevor Manuel, he didn’t take this lying down.
He questioned how seriously it took constitutional institutions such as the FFC.
“You can’t have these constitutional structures that the government invests in and then you’re not listening when they give you independent advice on what needs to be done,” he said in an interview with Business Times in 2018.
He tackled parliament for reneging on its oversight role to ensure the executive acted on the FFC’s recommendations. “We’re a constitutional institution with a constitutional mandate. Why are they not pushing to ensure that the executive responds adequately to recommendations of the FFC or a range of other constitutional institutions?”
Some thought he was naive to think that handing more taxpayers’ money to municipalities with endemic corruption and capacity constraints would improve service delivery. Ending corruption and improving capacity were the priorities, they argued. “So is everything else,” he responded.
“If you withhold new funding until they’ve dealt with issues of corruption and capacity, all you do is destabilise them even further in terms of their ability to deliver services.”
The issues were systemic and they’d been flagged for years, he said.
One of the most fundamental was qualifications, “not just certificates but skills, experience and integrity”.
Hewarned that horror scenarios of towns with no tap water, sewage running down streets and industry “running away” were becoming reality because of cadre deployment.
He called on bodies like the Public Service Commission to “state definitively that we can no longer have people in positions they’re not qualified for. Councillors must stop employing people who have political connections and who are not qualified for the positions they are filling”.
He said their own qualifications needed to be looked at.
“In some municipalities the majority of councillors have less than grade 10. And people vote for them. The result is you have the tail wagging the dog. Municipal officials get councillors to approve things they don’t understand.”
Councillors who were out of their depth could not, and did not, hold the officials to account. He called for “hard-core performance reviews” of municipal managers and their staff.
Other key issues he flagged repeatedly were the surplus of staff in “noncore” positions while there was a drastic shortage of skilled technical people, and billions spent on consultants who added no value because their only qualifications were their political connections.
He called for “really hard pushback against councillors and officials in the area of procurement”.
He flagged parliament’s oversight committees for reneging on their constitutional mandate to exercise oversight.
“We have not seen the members of these committees taking their responsibilities seriously,” he said. “It’s all about politicking. They need to jack up their responsibilities.
“I know they’re representing their parties, I know they need to score political points. But my God, start scoring points for the citizens and the country.”
In addition to the FFC, Plaatjies was a senior manager of the public finance unit at the National Treasury and special adviser to the Human Sciences Research Council.
He was born in Bonteheuwel, Cape Town, on May 21 1963. He matriculated at Modderdam Secondary School. He had an honours degree in social science from the University of Cape Town, a master of philosophy (MPhil) degree from the University of the Western Cape and a doctorate in governance, public policy and public finance from the University of the Witwatersrand.
He was head of the School of Governance at Wits, an executive director at the Human Sciences Research Council and a visiting professor at the University of the Free State School of Business.
He edited three books which reflected his reigning passions: building state capacity, governance and public accountability, and, in 2016, the state of the nation, titled: Who is in Charge?