Daily Dispatch

Fixing failures of governance

POOR governance and administration is undoubtedly the main reason why local municipalities are failing to provide residents with the most basic services.

Throughout the Eastern Cape, residents for years have had to cope with electricity and water cuts, lack of refuse removal and almost impassable roads.

A range of excuses have been trotted out by various paid officials, but the failures continue.

The crunch has now come. Just before Christmas, a number of towns faced having their electricity cut off for most of the day.

This was not because of some natural disaster, or sabotage attack or major accident. It wasn’t even because of malfunctioning equipment.

It was because the municipal governments had failed to pay Eskom for the electricity – and this failure to pay wasn’t because the municipalities didn’t have the money. For the most part, the municipalities had been been paid by the consumers – in many cases upfront through prepaid meters.

The failure to pay was quite simply because of poor administration and governance.

To save the residents of towns like Aliwal North, Burgersdorp, Steynsburg, Jansenville, Adelaide and Bedford from having a bleak Christmas, the Eastern Cape government had to step up to the plate and intervene.

That’s not good enough. Unless those responsible in the government and administrations of those municipalities are held to account and made to pay for their incompetence, the problem will continue.

Even in major municipalities such as Buffalo City Metro – which achieved its metro status four years ago and which has more than 100 councillors being paid large amounts of money every month – the same service delivery failures continue.

Large swaths of the metro had to go without water over Christmas.

The official excuse, which to pardon a pun simply does not hold water, was that the cuts were caused by “operational challenges” because the “system is under pressure to accommodate additional consumption due to the heat wave and summer holiday peak”.

In case metro officials are blissfully unaware of the fact, such temperatures and numbers of visitors to BCM at this time of the year are not new or unusual.

The true fact is more likely to be broken infrastructure, which is again directly the result of poor administration and governance.

Despite enjoying metro status, BCM still has no metro police unit, no Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system and no coherent tourism campaign. Again, the reason is simple: poor governance and administration.

Let’s hope 2016 will see a commitment to fixing governance and administration – because when that is fixed, everything else will start to be fixed with it.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR