SOCIAL UNREST Listen to the people
FINANCIAL MAIL
2006 a tide of popular protests has ebbed and flowed across the country, particularly at local government level. The recent shocking images of the police shooting at protesting miners at Marikana, beamed out for all the world to see, were the culmination of years of ugly images.
Recent studies show that in 2010 there were more than 6 000 protests and one academic has calculated that this makes SA “the most protest-rich country in the world”.
It would appear that SA is heading for an unenviable record again in 2013.
The misleading starting point of almost every intervention in these protests is that they are related to “service delivery”. This assumption is shared across government, academia, business and NGOs. Yet, the only consistent revelation is that everyone has battled to understand or explain them.
There have been many problems with local government, including a lack of capacity, too much influence over service provision by party and business interests and, in some instances, outright corruption.
But what is common to all is a technocratic top-down approach to policy formulation and implementation that assumes that experts should make unilateral decisions on behalf of communities.
This kind of approach has been tried and rejected after decades of painful experience in places such as Port Allegre in Brazil and Kerala in India. The wave of community protests across SA indicates a clear rejection of top-down local governance here too. This is a key lesson
DECEMBER 20 1 2 for politicians as we move forward into 2013.
We need to remember that it is at the local government level that issues of development, poverty, injustice, deprivation, democracy and deficient governance come to bear most tangibly on the relationship between citizens and their government.
Clearly, the people organising and participating in these protests are seldom if ever allowed to fully explain their cause and plight.
Democracy does not function at the behest of a few ruling “experts”. That is oligarchy. Democracy is rule by the people. If we pay attention to the thinking of the people organising and participating in these protests, one thing becomes clear — these protests are in response to a crisis of local democracy rather than a crisis of service delivery.
It is true that in most instances failed service or misguided delivery is where things begin to go wrong. But even the problems with service delivery are often due to a lack of democratic public participation in decision-making.
For instance, if people are not consulted about being moved from urban shacks to RDP houses, protest is likely even though delivery is happening.
And as many of these people have said, time and again, they don’t take to the streets because of failed or misguided service delivery. They take to the streets because it is the only way they know to talk to government and get it to listen.
For as long as officials continue to assume that a mandate at the polls gives them a mandate to act in a unilateral and top-down manner for five years, these protests will continue.
Ordinary South Africans had a taste of popular democracy in the great democratic upsurge of protests in the 1980s. Now they expect post-liberation democracy to take the same popular form — to be ruled by the people rather than professional bureaucrats. Especially now, with the Jacob Zuma administration in power, poor people expect him to be the “service delivery president” as they see him as embodying the aspirations of the poor.
This level of intense social conflict is potentially damaging to society and could, for instance, be extremely embarrassing for the country during the Africa Cup of Nations early next year. With the world’s eyes on SA, it could turn into a replay of the 1980s with burning tyres, teargas, rubber bullets and pitched battles on the street between poor protesters and police.
Already both police and protesters are taking an increasingly hard-line stance, with negative social consequences. These point to a clear crisis of local democracy. And this suggests that it is the nature of local democracy that needs to change.
Government needs to take public participation seriously and recognise that ordinary people have a right to be part of deliberations and decision-making that will affect their lives. And commentators and experts, be they in the media, business, academia or NGOs, need to listen to these voices.
A crisis of local democracy means less reliance on experts and more listening to the needs of the vulnerable, fewer PowerPoint presentations and more community meetings.
Buccus is a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN