Ratepayers face double-edged sword if they litigate

Makana municipality finally has what a lawyer last week referred to as a “world-class” landfill site outside Makhanda. But somewhere between the smelly, burning, environmentally hazardous rubbish dump of yesteryear and the neat landfill site that exists today lies eight years’ worth of litigation against the municipality. It was only once the high court found the mayor and municipal manager in contempt of court and instructed them to come and explain why they should not spend six months in prison that a focused attempt was made to obey the order.

An extreme form of what the government likes to refer to as “consequence management”: do your job or go to jail.

More normal consequence management would simply be to discipline or fire employees who refuse or are unable to do their jobs. This is seldom applied in dysfunctional municipalities which hold no one to account.

But forcing at least this one aspect of service delivery comes at a high cost to the ratepayers of Makana.

First, it is their hard-earned money that funded eight years of litigation during which the municipality lost every step of the way. The municipality rallied its scarce resources over and over to oppose litigation that sought only to make it do its job.

Second, the final realisation that it had better provide at least this one service – or face dire consequences – did not galvanise it into pooling its resources and capacity to achieve the goal. It simply outsourced the function. Over the next three years of the contract, ratepayers will have to fork out R20.5m for the privilege of not having toxic smoke billowing into their homes and plastic flying into their spaces.

Third, instead of cutting its own costs to cover the contractor’s bill to do the job the municipality is required to do, it appears to have retained all its waste management staff.

Fourth, its draft budget suggests it will hit the ratepayer hard with tariff hikes of 8%, a rate well above inflation, across the board. Fifth, as though all of this is not bad enough, it now simultaneously wants to increase staff salaries including, we assume, those of the now-redundant waste management workers, by some 7%.

This bizarre situation is repeated in some form across many local authorities in the Eastern Cape: citizens who force municipalities into doing their jobs end up footing enormous bills in multiple ways.

This is not the way a democracy should deliver. And it certainly is not what our constitution meant when it promised a “better life for all”.

Citizens who force municipalities into doing their jobs end up footing enormous bills in multiple ways