To rescue local governance – travel back in time

THE spike in service delivery protests in recent years and the recently published and much discussed Auditor General’s report on the financial management challenges afflicting local government clearly point to a need for a robust and deeper discussion on the state of local government in our country.

The circumstances that have pushed this important indicator of unhappiness with our democratic state to the precipice are well documented.

In the midst of the current discussion, I found myself casting my eye to the genesis of our local government system.

This was in the hope of finding a potential remedy in the vision that catalysed the local government transformation process.

It is now 19 years since the Local Government Transition Act laid the foundation for the third tier of our democratic state.

The transformative path of local government has been long and supposedly measured but its lofty goals are yet to be attained.

Notwithstanding the current and much publicised criticisms, another critical look at the evolutionary path of this system reveals some fundamental design flaws.

From the Local Government Transition Act (1993) to the White Paper on Local Government (1998), the process did not adequately consider the importance of building on already existing forms of community self-governance.

Communities had developed various forms of local governance capabilities long before the current democratic local government structures came into being.

These were diverse: from traditional structures to civic organisations. Some of these emerged as a direct consequence of illegitimate apart- heid era councils.

Beyond the resistance traction derived from these structures, they were able to build endogenous local governance capabilities that enabled communities to mobilise action for their own development.

Even the Reconstruction and Development forums, an important element of the RDP delivery machinery, were imbedded in the social capital that had been locked into these structures.

One must hasten to add that, by 1993, the world had already established indigenous forms of local government that we could have learnt from.

Here I’m reminded of the panchayat (village council) system in India, a traditional concept of local government which has outlived different po- litical epochs but remains central to India’s local government to this day.

These structures have been used by successive governments to drive community planning, manage development resources, and govern localities with good results.

Surprisingly, the establishment and evolution of our current local government system did not build on our own panchayat equivalents.

Instead it embarked on an ambitious path of rooting new institutional capabilities, forcing municipalities to invent the requisite intellectual capital from scratch, a task that has clearly not been achieved.

An unintended consequence of the process was the demobilisation of indigenous structures that could have better enabled community-driven service delivery models.

This was a far cry from the disoriented ward committees and ineffective community development worker arrangements we are witnessing today. Looking at the wide-ranging and complex role of local government to- day, it was predictably difficult for municipalities to succeed without the strong community-based partnerships that could have been offered by the previously mentioned structures.

So, as we seek new answers to the maladies of modern day local government, let us also embark on a journey back to a difficult but inventive past.

Study the patterns of resistance and traditional local self-governance that existed then, and find new opportunities of replicating these in a broader local development partnership framework with the democratic local state.

This will obviously require a serious paradigm shift among the existing local government apparatchiks, but given the obvious failures, this is a much needed direction for our municipalities.