Political parties and factions free to play fast and loose with local government
The city manager of the eThekwini metro, Sipho Nzuza, was arrested on fraud charges on March 10. His case follows the arrest last year of the city’s then mayor, Zandile Gumede, and a number of other city officials, councillors and local business owners. All are implicated in an allegedly fraudulent Durban solid waste tender from 2018.
Though none has yet been found guilty, news of the investigations confirmed that eThekwini, SA’s third-largest city by population, has now joined an alarming list of metros where substantial abuses of resources and governance failures are undermining urban development agendas.
The metros of Buffalo City, Johannesburg, Mangaung, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay have all been through, or are in the midst of, governance and service delivery upheaval. Even the Cape Town and Ekurhuleni metros, both somewhat less in the news these days, have not come through entirely unscathed in recent years. Many would be forgiven for thinking, somewhat pessimistically, that the great urban age promised by many glossy publications might well be passing SA by.
In our cities today political parties and their incubated factions seem to be free to play fast and loose with municipal governance. These same factions battle one another to deploy people to critical posts with little consideration given to qualifications, management capabilities or an intimate knowledge of municipal processes. The mechanics of these factional conquests, documented so well by Crispin Olver in his incisive analysis of the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, are repeated daily in local government around SA.
In this context of widespread chaotic urban governance it can be all too easy to be captivated by headlines of Machiavellian political contests. Yet apart from the disruptive leadership changes that arise in these institutional battles, it should be appreciated that these processes often cause the displacement of professional staff, who leave out of frustration or get pushed out.
In our largest cities, with budgets that dwarf those of a number of the provinces, these processes have caused deep fissures in governance systems and in the professional management of diverse municipal functions. Instead of these municipal professionals participating in meaningful engagement with councillors, communities and others, we end up with mayors and their political teams scuttling from one choreographed event to another while day-to-day service delivery suffers.
Despite these upheavals, our cities still rarely miss a beat in claiming they are doing better than ever before. As an example, the eThekwini metro claimed in its recent draft annual report that the 2018/2019 year saw the best ever performance of its administrative leadership team in terms of their key performance indicators.
However, a close reading of the report and analysis of other data, such as that from the auditor-general, suggests these claims flatter to deceive.
To take one example among the many tender troubles, the same report notes that Durban Solid Waste, has provided a weekly household-level garbage collection service to 106% of households. The eyebrow-raising statistic aside, citizens reading this might well be forgiven for thinking they must have been imagining the extensive citywide strikes and service interruptions in areas such as Umlazi in 2018 and 2019.
For SA’s cities to recover from their damaging urban governance rut will require a lot more than merely parading those who have allegedly fallen foul of the law. After all, this is not only a story of a few bad apples at the top. It is a situation where entire sections of increasingly elaborate municipal bureaucratic structures now struggle to carry out their responsibilities in an efficient and effective manner.
Without a serious reboot of systems of management and associated forms of performance governance, the prospects of delivering the urgently needed development that citizens are calling for remains unlikely. For a major city such as eThekwini to have turned from being the best performer in effective use of capital budgets in the 2000s to being the worst at spending its planned capital budget in the last decade suggests that problems extend well beyond those of highly contested political games. Similar challenges face many of the large cities in the country and almost all the secondary cities.
This task of renewing our cities is far too important to be left to the whims of distracted oversight bodies, venal politicians, their branch campaigners and bureaucratic lackeys. Our cities need a place at the table for forms of direct civil society input. They need a substantially more professional, ethical and accountable administrative leadership that is supported across government to nurture the required institutional fabric of an effective local state.
Promises by the national government that the new “district development model” will serve to correct these aberrations have been received with much scepticism by many local government observers. The growing calls for “smart cities” or “cities of the future” in the midst of these troubles suggest our national leaders are poorly advised or, worse, woefully out of touch.
SA needs its actual, existing cities to play a more constructive role in building a brighter future for the country’s citizens. To do this these cities must be rescued from the distortions of factions, patronage, incompetence and accountability failures they have increasingly become synonymous with.
Robbins is an honorary research fellow at the Durban University of Technology’s Urban Futures Centre and a research associate of Prism at the University of Cape Town.