What to do about the decline and decay in our towns
Is it possible to halt or reverse the decay in many of our rural towns and villages? Bun answers Platteland’s questions.
Should residents tackle problems in their town on their own or in collaboration with the municipality?
A lot of research has been done internationally on rural decay that offers great practical suggestions, but these are based on the assumption that municipal officials are competent in their work. Nearly two-thirds of South Africa’s towns are managed in a staggeringly incompetent manner: 163 of our 257 municipalities are officially “dysfunctional”. The chances of meaningful collaboration with local management are slim due to a lack of expertise, willingness and integrity. That’s the sad reality.
One has to give credit, however, to the handful of towns where the whole community can still stand together. How about a Plan of the Year competition for the best project by a town as a whole instead of the conventional Town of the Year?
Can any international solutions be applied here?
The BBC recently reported that
12 water companies in England and Wales have been ordered to pay back £114 million – nearly R2.3 billion – to bill payers for missing key performance targets such as repairing leakages and reducing pollution incidents. The money will be returned to residents through bill reductions in the next year. I think this principle should apply here in South Africa. You cannot collect money for services that you do not provide.
I recently had a long chat with someone who worked in Sweden for years. The Swedes are known for their tolerance, but their legal system – and the public – won’t stand for tax evasion. They’ll come down on you hard, because tax money is what underpins Sweden’s welfare state model. I think we should try to establish the same ethos here through the administration of justice. Government’s kitty is bare, and 5 million people’s tax money provides for 20 million people’s welfare benefits. Anyone who steals or misspends public money belongs behind bars.
Why aren’t we already doing these things?
Our government doesn’t like to see its own members prosecuted for crimes. There are actually a few such cases before the courts, but they’re mostly private prosecutions. This means that any community organisation or pressure group should have the means to go to court if nothing else works. This is tragically what our municipal management currently looks like.
I also feel strongly that officials who are found guilty of theft, fraud or money laundering should cover their own legal costs, otherwise the cases get bogged down through delays and appeals. Our recently dismissed public protector’s legal processes cost the tax payers in the region of R150 million.
Is there a solution for our poor municipal management?
As long as there is cadre deployment, it will be extremely difficult. I hope the higher courts declare it unconstitutional and illegal. You can get academic about it all, but in the end it’s blatant stealing that’s causing the collapse of our towns. It’s like Bob Dylan sings in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handles”.
What can we as individuals do?
One person can accomplish a lot; just look at the houses that have been restored in Calvinia, for example. One person can unfortunately also cause great damage, like an incompetent mayor – more so in a village than in a large town. Here’s one example I know of: A vehicle manufacturer wanted to hold a big meeting in a small town. At first everything went smoothly but things started to get sticky after a while, and then the senior municipal official came out with it: Pay him R50 000 in cash and the wheels would start turning. They did turn… to a venue elsewhere. That town could have earned a few million rands for its residents. And what happened to the official? He was redeployed to a bigger municipality.
One hopes that South Africans will show their dissatisfaction at the polls next year, but it’s a national election, not a local government election. The municipal cadres have another two years to slumber and steal.
Do an online search and within five minutes you’ll find more than 30 plans, committees, departments and projects that seem to be able to assist rural communities. There are as many acronyms as there are towns – IGR, IWPs, MIG, MTEF, OMU, SIPP, SMIF, URP, URZ – but rarely do you see someone fixing a pothole.
Whenever I drive away from such a town, I’m like an Olympic hammer thrower who lets out an almighty yell after letting go of the hammer. How difficult can it be to keep a main street clean? How can highly paid mayors and municipal managers – R800 000 to R1,5 million per year – see all this and not lift a finger to do anything about it?
Between towns, things look equally dismal in places. Sanral, the organisation tasked with maintaining the country’s road network with our tax money, was so busy building toll gates that they were seemingly caught off-guard by the appearance of 25 million potholes in South Africa’s roads.
Their latest attempt at damage control is Operation Vala Zonke, a “war room” with 30 people who will use nanotechnology, among other things, “to monitor and manage all pothole repairs in the country” from the Sanral Central Operations Centre. Here’s a dose of reality, however: Say Sanral gets off to a flying start and repairs 5 000 potholes per day – then it will take them more than 13 years just to fill in the existing holes. So good luck to everyone in that war room. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens are doing repairs themselves.
Whichever way you look at it, the platteland is changing, but likewise, people of previous generations also returned to the platteland and saw that things there were no longer the same. In the 1960s, the Overberg Renaissance man Dr Con de Villiers got nostalgic when he wrote about how the Rûens had changed since his youth: “The outbuildings are no longer acquainted with farming activities. Machines do the work of man and beast; the radio tells you the time up to a quarter of a minute.” And then, how the motorcar replaced the horse-drawn cart: “The farm is now nine miles from town, no longer an hour-anda-half.”
Author Etienne Leroux, who wrote in seclusion at Koffiefontein in the Free State, saw “the nooks and crannies, the shapes that are no longer there”. And, “He will never forget the place, but his place no longer knows him.”
Everyone wants to know how the platteland can save itself, which is a good question (read the sidebars on the previous page and opposite). A starting point would be to make a town more tourist-friendly. Start with the roosterkoek principle: Travellers are prepared to interrupt their trip for something seemingly insignificant, like the roosterkoek sold at Tannie Poppie’s stand in Laingsburg. But they also put in R1 000 worth of petrol, and so one thing leads to another.
People would stop off for a good cup of coffee, and yet you drive through so many towns where not a single place in the main street appeals to you to stop and spend money. I once suggested in a column I wrote that a certain town could at least plant a few trees for some greenery along the 2 km-long main street. In response, I got a call from a resident. After mentioning quite early in the conversation that he was a butcher by profession, he said that trees had been planted. I later
went to have a look and saw three palm trees of about shoulder height, but still not enough to impel people just passing through to stop at a café (or butchery).
Just go and have a look at wellknown farm stalls such as Jasmyn and Tan’ Malie in North West, Milly’s in Mpumalanga, Daggaboer in the Eastern Cape, Dassiesfontein and Kardoesie in the Western Cape, and Pucketty in KwaZulu-Natal. All on their own they manage to get people to stop, get out of their cars and buy something. On my way to the Kgalagadi, I stop to buy a leg of mutton in Nieuwoudtville, eat at Die Blou Nartjie in Calvinia and turn off at Askham to enjoy a good cup of coffee at Diamond T before I enter the park. I turn off the N2 to Kareedouw for boerewors, and I stop at the Tankwa Padstal on the R355 for a cold one and Wi-Fi in the middle of nowhere.
And so you tour through the platteland, driving not just through nine provinces but through the regions that lie beneath the official map: the Bushveld, Springbokvlakte, Biedou, Riemland, Keisie, Zuurveld, Roggeveld, Camdeboo, Moordenaarskaroo, Sandveld, Hantam and Kammanassie.
All charming and picturesque? No, there is wind, heat, dust and cold. And poverty. But in the platteland you experience that mysterious interplay of people and landscape that you only get, in Karel Schoeman’s words, in a country with a distant horizon and high heavens.