Voters repeatedly elect politicians who ignore them
THE government often gets away with not serving us because some voters repeatedly vote for people who do nothing to serve them and use the past to excuse their failings.
Ever since this country became a democracy, people in the suburbs have made this claim about voters in townships and shack settlements – which is ironic, because the voters who really fill the description these days live in the suburbs.
Last week, as the latest power outage in our Johannesburg suburb (we had seven in six weeks last year) reached its 14th hour, and, as usual, the electricity unit, City Power, had offered not a word on progress, a resident contacted our ward councillor.
The councillor, as always in these situations, offered a not very informative public relations reply which gave no inkling of when the power would be back on.
Some active citizenship seemed to be needed. I called the councillor. I expected little, since he had twice fobbed off my requests to do his job.
While he is apparently celebrated for drawing attention to himself on Twitter, representing voters does not seem his cup of tea. My expectations were spot on. The Twitter celebrity greeted my complaints with contempt and indifference.
He said City Power was busy on a more important job and would get around to us when it was finished.
He had no idea when that would be – this was not his problem.
“If you have to wait two days or five days, you will simply have to wait.”
Twice, he called me “stupid”.
He then declared that services did not work in Johannesburg because the damage caused by the previous administration would take “decades to fix”.
Told that this was what the ANC said to excuse failures and that his party, the DA, dismissed this as a lame excuse, he did not respond.
But he clearly plans to use the previous administration for decades as an excuse for acting as a public relations officer rather than a representative.
How are the residents, who had to put up with an electricity outage of, in some case, 36 hours, likely to repay him for a textbook lesson in how not to work for them? By re-electing him in a landslide. DA councillors get re-elected in the suburbs whether or not they do their job.
If we exclude the votes of domestic workers, the average DA vote in suburban wards is probably more than 95%.
Many councillors who benefit may well be much like the Twitter impresario who “represents” our area.
Being a DA ward councillor is never having to say you are sorry.
No-one who had to wait a day-and-a-half for power blamed the councillor.
On the contrary, they were deeply grateful the problem was fixed at all.
And so they behaved in precisely the way suburbanites claim township voters behave.
Few township voters ever fitted the stereotype.
Where they did, the reason may have been that people at the bottom of the pile are not used to being heard; they assume that councillors don’t listen to people like them.
Suburbanites have no such excuse, they are used to being taken seriously.
They never tired of complaining about the previous administration: their problem is tribal solidarity, not fear.
There is a price for this unthinking loyalty: service which, while much better than that in townships, is still poor, with continuing long power outages, random billing and residents who pay their bills being bullied by credit controllers. This is no surprise. The government serves people well when representatives do their jobs.
They are most likely to do this when citizens force them.
As long as they don’t make councillors work for them, people in the suburbs will continue to deal with poor public service entirely of their own making.