How long does state failure take?

On a few nights of late, I’ve had occasion to drive on the streets of our self-styled “World-Class African City”. When I have done so, I’ve wondered whether they still bother to fix streetlights in Joburg. Or whether the responsible parties have decided to let the lights go to pot until the place is plunged into darkness through deliberate neglect.

On the main roads and side streets there are stretches of darkness amid islands of light.

Daytime in the city is no different, with broken traffic lights. The problem has persisted for so long that citizens, defeated by their overlords’ incompetence, meet it with stoic acceptance. They no longer complain or expect excuses that range from rain in summer to stolen infrastructure.

Joburg, being the country’s financial capital and its richest city, is arguably a barometer of decay in the rest of SA.

This week a television interviewer asked the city’s late mayor, Jolidee Matongo, about its grandiose marketing claim, given its failure to adequately provide services to citizens. With refreshing candour, he explained that Joburg’s motto was “aspirational”. Which means it is reflective not of the city’s current state, but what it hopes to become at some unspecified time.

Not a bad thing, aspiration. Except when it equates to lowering standards and betrays a lack of resolve to do what citizens are entitled to, and expect of those who run the city.

And, for crying in a bucket, it is not as if people are asking city authorities to put a person on the moon. It is the more simple, mundane tasks that they expect the city to perform — ensuring that the streets are properly lit at night, and that during the day we don’t revert to the days of the horse and cart and uncontrolled intersections.

The city fathers might say that not all streetlights are on the blink. Maybe, but do we have to wait for all of them to go out? What about a stitch in time?

Besides, as the city demands that residents pay their rates in full when they are due, so should it deliver its mandated services with efficiency and consistency.

In the townships, as in former locations elsewhere in the country, citizens have to put up with the “new normal” of so-called “load reduction” — the practice of regularly cutting off power to prevent overloading the system.

Blamed collectively on residents, the said overloading is largely the result of officialdom’s failure over the years to conceive of a solution to the problems of unregulated settlements and absent law enforcement. This is, of course, outside of load-shedding, the other man-made catastrophe born of poor government choices since 1994.

As reported in this newspaper last week, the city’s failure to provide reliable water supply to many parts in its jurisdiction is mirrored in local authorities from Limpopo through Gauteng to KwaZulu-Natal. The Eastern Cape and the Western Cape have had their fair share of the same problem.

A good 27 years after the advent of democracy, we still have not provided sanitation and potable water to all citizens. Nor have we eradicated pit latrines in all our schools.

The state’s failures have led those with the means to opt out of the public system. Its inability to provide security to citizens in the face of rampant criminality has led those who can afford it to rely on the burgeoning private security industry. The weak public health system is a boon to the private health-care sector, where those with medical insurance, ironically including the politicians and civil servants who run the system, have fled.

A similar migration has played out in the education system.

Which raises the question: at what point does a country begin to fail?

Those who study the phenomenon might want to look at things like the state’s inability to exert its authority over its territory or to secure its borders. That might be useful in academic discourse.

But for ordinary people it is when a government fails to provide their basic needs, such as health care, education, shelter, clean water, effective policing, reliable electricity and, yes, ensuring that the streetlights work.

On the latter score, the telltale signs of failure are all around us. But in our collective denialism, we turn a blind eye to them. Perhaps because of our exceptionalist South African hubris. Perhaps because we choose, like the state, to ignore the plight of those who are less privileged than we are. Perhaps because we cannot face the possibility that, with its fabric sufficiently frayed, the rainbow nation can disintegrate and descend into chaos many times worse than what we saw two months ago.

In a few weeks we will as citizens once more have a window of opportunity to do something about the crisis of state performance. This time at local government level, often called the coalface of public service delivery. It will be our chance to halt the drift towards state failure, or to abet it.