It is not enough to condemn culprits when babies die — John Kane-Berman

CONDEMN us when children die of contaminated water.” That, according to Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, is one of the media’s jobs. He was speaking recently at the annual Nat Nakasa award for courageous journalism hosted by the South African National Editors’ Forum.

Ten days before Ramaphosa’s speech, the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) had put out a press release headlined “affirmative action kills babies and must be scrapped”. We were referring to the deaths of three infants in Bloemhof in North West after they had drunk contaminated water.

Our statement linking the deaths to affirmative action in local government elicited praise and outrage.

A paper issued by Parliament’s research unit earlier this year said diarrhoea was one of the major causes of high mortality among infants. An audit by the South African Institution of Civil Engineering in 2011 gave sanitation in major urban areas a C-minus rating. Sanitation infrastructure in all other areas was rated E-minus — meaning “unfit for purpose” because infrastructure “has failed or is on the verge of failure, exposing the public to health and safety hazards”.

Not long after that, the National Development Plan (NDP) spoke of a “crumbling health system and a rising disease burden”. A“deficit in skills and professionalism” affected all elements of the public service, said the NDP, the shortage being particularly acute at municipal level.

The question is why. Public health facilities, like local government, do not run themselves. They are run by people. So the question is how those people are appointed. Official national policy is that they are appointed according to employment equity requirements. African National Congress practice is that they are appointed to promote cadre deployment. This does not mean everyone is appointed on grounds of race or political allegiance, but many are.

The need to fill racial quotas has also led to the displacement of white professionals, especially engineers, throughout local government. Nor is the education system producing sufficient numbers of qualified black engineers to replace them. The institutional memory that went out with them cannot be replaced. One consequence is that new infrastructure has been built while old infrastructure has decayed because it has been neglected. The conventional view of the problem in local government is that there is “lack of capacity”. One of the reasons is that many of the appointments, like much of the infrastructure, are “unfit for purpose”.

But there is a third component: lack of accountability. Ministers and bureaucrats who foul up often do so with impunity. Their fate is not dismissal, but “redeployment”. This toxic trio — affirmative action, cadre deployment and impunity — explains many of the problems plaguing the government at all levels. More people are waking up to the risks arising from widespread impunity. A few are recognising the damage done by appointments on grounds of political loyalty. But they need to pluck their heads from the sand on affirmative action.

Ramaphosa himself needs to do this. Not long before the election, he said that “race will remain an issue until all echelons of our society are demographically representative”. It is no good simply condemning culprits when babies die. The reasons must also be exposed and corrected.

Kane-Berman is a consultant at the IRR.