Accountability at last
Democracy is described as a government rule of the majority, and a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.
In SA and the rest of the continent we spent the last century fighting to make sure that our countries were governed by democratically elected leaders who are, theoretically, accountable to the people who voted them into power.
Our constitution is among the most progressive in the world.
We crafted a constitution that had in mind the unique circumstances and race-based inequalities we inherited from the apartheid system.
In local government the apartheid spatial planning was a huge problem that we had to address when configuring the wards and the sort of system we were to use.
We settled on a mixed system of ward-based representatives and a proportional representation that took into account the overall tally of votes a party garnered.
Why am I giving you a history lesson? In theory, elections are a tool used to hold the elected to account. Under democracy, theoretically, people are represented by the people of their choice and they have the right to remove them if they do not serve their needs.
The way our system is, parties have all the power and the elected therefore hold allegiance to the party more than to the electorate. This makes it exceedingly difficult to hold them to account.
Up to now the only recourse the electorate had was to wait for another election and then, hopefully, vote that defaulting party out. But the high court case in Makhanda this week has changed the whole landscape and has created a precedent that offers long-suffering communities another recourse to get rid of incompetence and disregard.
The Unemployed Peoples Movement brought a case to the high court to declare that the Makana Municipality had breached Section 152 of the constitution. Basically it has failed to do its job as mandated by the constitution.
Judge IT Stretch ruled on Tuesday that the provincial government should dissolve the municipal
“” council and appoint an administrator to run the municipality until new elections were held.
What are the implications for municipalities in similar dire situations? It means residents have recourse to arrogant, incompetent and dysfunctional municipal councils. If they do not do their jobs, you do not have to wait and you can apply for them to be sent packing.
No more will citizens and ratepayers be forced to endure shoddy service by people who do not care about them. No more must people be forced to live in hellholes because they have only one opportunity in five years to do something about it.
This also means that citizens do not have to embark on violent protests that are self-defeating in order for them to be heard.
It means that arrogant and uncaring public representatives can be got rid of even before their term ends. So all of you doing nonsense, you have been warned.