Communities must take charge of own destiny
It’s not us, not them, not those people, and certainly not they. It’s you and I. Systems of social control thrive when the state keeps the people happy through welfarism, the concept of taking care of citizens from the cradle to the grave.
Apartheid was a system based on state patronage and for as long as the populace acquiesced, the system took care of everything.
The apartheid state was based on racialised welfarism and created a system of dependency on the state, especially among the oppressed.
Such systems shore up the politics of patronage which is based on a system of reward to those communities who vote the local leaders to public office by allocating public funds to those communities once they are in office.
Fast forward to 1994 and the Reconstruction & Development
Programme as the postapartheid government’s form of welfarism.
Like apartheid, the RDP created the fertile conditions for dependency instead of people taking control of their development.
For example, it was his comments about patronage that led Jeremy Cronin famously to apologise to Thabo Mbeki when he referred to the Zanufication of the ANC (and, by extension, the government).
Cronin warned against the dangers of relying on patronage instead of transformative investments in communities for political support.
Apartheid welfarism created the conditions which still prevail.
Having failed for various reasons to keep up with its service delivery plans, and having continued the culture of dependency, most South Africans agree that the local state is failing to fulfil its basic civic duties.
The impact this has on the ground includes:
● Litter- and sewage-strewn cities creating environmental health and rodent problems; the ecological damage is the everyday experience everywhere;
● Roads with potholes, graves and dongas akin to those on Sani Pass;
● Rundown school buildings, school management and disabling school curricula;
● Badly run public hospitals;
● Crime-enabling urban design in every apartheid, and most postapartheid public housing projects;
● The preponderance, growth and exploitation of addicts, drug dealers and rough sleepers in neighbourhoods;
Wherever we look across SA, the situation is ‘n gemors, a cocktail created by a mix of public expectations of the public sector and the public sector not meeting those expectations.
That is because the local state is out of touch with its residents, resulting in systems of democracy such as the IDP and municipal budget processes clashing with expectations of welfare.
Our constitutional democracy requires democratic participation in local government.
Yet, it is common knowledge that Integrated Development Plans have not been the deep levers of democracy as they were intended to be.
This needs to change and it should start with an acceptance that matters are not expected to improve any time soon, and communities need to take control of our neighbourhoods and community development. For example:
● University Estate is close to Woodstock Hospital which is occupied by homeless people. There are many built environment and health professionals, including former councillors in the area, who could get together to offer their services to the municipality and the residents in support of social housing;
● The residents of Bishopscourt, instead of opposing the legitimate rights of displaced people to return to ancestral land, work with them instead to design socially and aesthetically nurturing housing while offering to top up the government subsidy;
● The residents in the tiny suburb of Sherwood could get together to appoint urban designers and traffic engineers to design plans which prevent crime, high-speed rat running and then offer to pay for it;
● The residents of Val de Vie could agree to pay for the privilege of their ecological, social and public infrastructure footprints, including the real costs of domestic labour;
● Residents in Malabar could decide that they would use unemployed youngsters to keep the parks clean;
● The businesspeople in Mthatha could decide to build a new road where dongas now stand; and
● The residents of Orange Farm could raise money to pay bakkie owners for garbage collection and transfer to approved dumps.
Our dependence on a benevolent state is at odds with the reality of that state’s inability to be so. A new social compact is required, one where people get together, agree with what needs to happen in their neighbourhoods, be prepared to commit resources and participate in IDP and municipal budget meetings.
It is at such meetings that the resources of the community and those of the municipality are brought together. Resources include money as well as a sweat equity. In such a system, which the law encourages, the municipality becomes an enabler of service delivery instead of a delinquent deliverer of services.
Communities can choose to sit back and blame the state as if we are the forgotten victims of a failed system, or we can step up and take responsibility for our development and thereby force municipalities to respond to our initiatives.
Patronage divides us because it promotes opportunists who shout their various ideologies from soapboxes, but democratic engagement in pursuit of community development can help to unite us.
Has the time not come for South Africans to get over ourselves and accept that even in well-functioning welfare systems, communities are expected to participate in and contribute to their development?
In the spirit of the season and to drive home the point, let’s end with John Lennon when he sings:
“Ev’rybody’s talking ‘bout, Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism, Thisism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m. All we are saying is give peace a chance. All we are saying is give peace a chance.”
Let’s give peace a chance from 2020 when residents start taking control of their own development in a way. our system of democracy expects.
● Adam Ashraf is MBDA CEO