Paying twice for same service
IS IT AFFORDABLE? FIXING THE FAILURES OF SMALL-TOWN MUNICIPALITIES COMES AT A COST
There may come a point when homeowners boycott rates and taxes.
There’s a disturbing trend playing out in smalltown South Africa, especially in those which still have a semblance of a middle-class population (many don’t). Entire parallel “municipalities”, in everything but name, are being set up by volunteers.
Beyond water and electricity, these entities now exist to fill the gap in providing fairly basic services.
And to sustain this, residents who are already paying property rates and fees for other services – like refuse collection – each month, need to stump up. It’s either that or watch their immediate surroundings descend into utter squalor.
It begins with a residents’ association, or similar body, “offering”
to trim all the verges on the main road through town ahead of the tourist season, or to paint a road marking or two where there no longer are any.
Without this assistance, nothing will get done as the local municipality is practically dysfunctional (at best) or bankrupt and under administration (at worst).
This trend is particularly prevalent in small holiday towns dotted along the country’s coastline. Think Kei Mouth, not Ballito.
The only region immune to this is much of the Western Cape, where local municipalities largely still function as they should.
Some, however, remain dysfunctional. Just ask the residents of Knysna.
To some extent, this is also happening in larger cities and metropolises, where suburban residents’ associations are forced to bridge the service delivery gap.
In the Joburg context, these would have begun as security-focused entities, but many are taking on more and more responsibility, such as pothole repair, maintenance of parks and shared spaces, provision of solar lighting and so on.
Getting buy-ins – financial and otherwise – from a few hundred houses isn’t hard. But beyond that, this becomes like wrangling a herd of cattle.
Fast-forward and, suddenly, these associations are providing the majority of the services municipalities ought to be providing, bar the provision of water and electricity – and collapsing infrastructure means even these are often unreliable.
When refuse removal becomes erratic due to the “nonavailability of trucks” – a famous excuse – residents have to step in.
Anything beyond electricity and water/sanitation is a “nice to have”, something municipalities just don’t deliver.
Beach maintenance, parks and verges, paving, planting of trees, road markings, repairing of potholes, signage, public lighting, and even lifeguard equipment are being provided by residents’ groups.
Most of these entities are organised and efficient. Committee members have various portfolios, much like an actual municipality, and, sometimes, this even extends into arenas such as safety and security, where relationships with the police and private security companies are established and maintained.
But this comes at a cost. Typically, residents pay an annual “levy”. This could be a few hundred or a few thousand rands, depending on the size of the community. The larger businesses in these towns are typically outsized contributors through time, money, space, labour and so on.
These entities are effective – they have an incentive to be: don’t deliver and residents will stop contributing.
The fundamental question is how long homeowners will tolerate paying for the same services twice.
Property rates are not cheap. An owner of a house valued at R2 million will be paying close to R20 000 a year in property rates. Adding a thousand or two to that is material, especially as roads crumble and basic maintenance on public spaces is seldom done.
Homeowners know they can’t afford not to pay these private, volunteer-led entities to maintain
public spaces and keep these small towns “liveable”.
At what point do rate boycotts in these small towns become a reality?
Asure indication that South Africa is sliding towards failed state status is that service delivery has all but collapsed in many towns, especially in rural areas. Corruption, looting and the incompetence which has flowed from the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment has led, inexorably, to the failure of municipal systems such as sewage, garbage collection and basic maintenance of public spaces.
There is a disturbing trend of middle-class residents of those towns having to dig deeper into their pockets, after paying rates for municipal services, to fill the gap the town bureaucracy has created.
Even in larger cities, residents’ associations are moving beyond paying to provide their own security (and, increasingly, electricity via solar power installations) and are taking on more responsibility, such as pothole repair, maintenance of parks and shared spaces.
In other words, those highly taxed middle-class earners are having to further subsidise the governmental institutions and systems imploding around them.
The danger in this, of course, is that the additional financial contributions are in no way either going to lessen the burdens on these people; they are merely going to make it easier for the delinquent town administrations to avoid doing their jobs.
Sooner or later, the middle class is going to start boycotting municipal payments on a large scale – something which is happening now in some smaller municipalities. And yet, there we are – led by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana – at the World Economic Forum in Davos, trying to convince investors that South Africa is a great place to put your money.
If our ports and railways – never mind our power supplier – are dysfunctional, what are the prospects of turning a decent profit? Why invest in a country where the people have to look after themselves because their government is useless?