Central control is no panacea for success

Britt Youens delineates the causes of local government delivery failures and questions government's remedy.

Summary - The recent sporadic series of protests by residents of municipalities in response to poor, unpredictable and often non-existent service delivery is a very visual and emotive message of what is wrong in local government. People have chosen to show their dissatisfaction by barricading roads, burning tyres, clashing with police and attacking officials and politicians who work in and represent their municipality.

Many of the protests are in reaction to poor delivery of housing in particular. Local government plays a co-ordinating role in housing provision, but it is provincial government that is responsible for its actual delivery. Demonstrators either do not know this or do not care about this nuance in the constitutional allocation of powers and functions.

In fairness, the government has responded with various programmes and legislation to provide an overall assistance plan to local government. The flagship of this attempt is Project Consolidate, launched in 2004 and targeting 136 municipalities across the country. The project is carried forward into each municipality by service delivery facilitators, who have each been selected by matching their professional skills to the major problem areas identified in the municipality to which they have been assigned.

However — given that various municipalities are deemed bankrupt and even financially unviable, that corruption is endemic, and that many skilled local government practitioners have left the municipal services resulting in severe gaps in the capacity to plan, budget and simply organise a basic delivery project — we have to ask whether these lofty aims will be achieved and what will happen once the facilitators disband. The project is scheduled to end in 2006, conveniently organised to span the period prior to the next local government election.

Enter the Intergovernmental Relations Framework Bill, which allows for improved coordination in the implementation of policy and legislation, increasing the effectiveness of service delivery and generally to address national priorities, including poverty alleviation. The bill only deals with improved relations between the executive areas of each sphere of government.

The government needs a co-ordinated programme of action. However is co-ordination just another word for interference, centralization of control and compulsion, particularly in the only sphere of government where residents of municipalities vote directly for some of their public representatives as opposed to accepting those representatives offered to them off a predetermined list? Is it democratic to allow for such intervention at the expense of clear accountability between voters and those voted into position?

Attempts by government to overcome problems in service delivery and financial mismanagement are increasingly being made by oversight supervisors and additional committee structures. None of these bodies are accountable to the residents of the municipalities for whom solutions are supposedly being designed.

Project Consolidate and the Intergovernmental Relations Framework Bill are two examples of solutions to a problem that rely heavily on external expertise and top-down decision-making. There appears to be little input from local communities to the provisions made in either programme and there is a real risk that the autonomy and functions of local bodies will be subordinated to the objectives of the service delivery facilitators and intergovernmental forums. While some officials and councillors deserve to be relieved of their duties, it should be through due political and employment procedures.

The recent sporadic series of protests by residents of municipalities in response to poor, unpredictable and often non-existent service delivery is a very visual and emotive message of what is wrong in local government. People have chosen to show their dissatisfaction by barricading roads, burning tyres, clashing with police and attacking officials and politicians who work in and represent their municipality1.

In Port Elizabeth earlier this year, people protesting against inadequate housing delivery and what they saw as selective housing provision, only appeared to calm once the housing minister, bodyguards in tow, came personally to speak to them and assured them that measures would be taken to improve the situation. In Harrismith, in 2004, the response of the police to protest action blocking the N3 highway resulted in the death of a 17-year-old youth, who was fatally injured by a bullet aimed at dispersing the crowd.

Presidential Spokesperson, Bheki Khumalo2, has commented that the protests we are seeing are nothing more than a few individuals trying to improve their community profiles ahead of candidate selection for the local government elections. Shortly thereafter however, Kgalema Motlanthe, African National Congress (ANC) Secretary General, was quoted as acknowledging that the protests highlighted “a number of challenges facing government, the ANC and society more broadly,” and that the ANC’s National Executive Committee had resolved “to work to further strengthen the capacity of local government to meet its developmental obligations”3.

Despite its failings, government cannot condone violent protest on the part of demonstrators, which often results in vandalism and refusal to co-operate with authorities. However it is clear that residents of municipalities, mostly the poorest of the poor, and local government councillors and officials are failing to find a less confrontational way to communicate needs and programmes for delivery.

Part of the problem with local government is that it is an often unresponsive megalith of bureaucracy; filled with masters of politicking and not of delivery; unskilled — but overpaid — officials, mayors and members of committees; and programmes designed by a handful of experts expected to resolve problems across an extremely diverse municipal landscape. Many residents however, are waiting with hands outstretched for promised housing and basic utilities, unable and often unwilling to attempt to provide these essentials for themselves.

The other variable in the malaise is money, and the lack of it. The culture of non-payment has not disappeared; financial management of ratepayer’s money is often disgustingly poor; corruption and misplaced spending widespread. And thus, in a response of a different kind, there is growing speculation about rates boycotts in municipalities where mismanagement is untenable.

In addition, many of the protests we have witnessed are in reaction to poor delivery of housing in particular. Local government plays a co-ordinating role in housing provision, but it is provincial government that is responsible for its actual delivery. Demonstrators either do not know this or do not care about this nuance in the constitutional allocation of powers and functions. Whatever the situation, we are seeing protests against representatives of municipalities and it is the municipalities who must co-ordinate a response.

A final point has more to do with the ANC and its recent history of undemocratic allocation of positions and power. Aside from the rising Zuma phoenix, the ANC’s national general council meeting held in Tshwane in late June-early July, noted a proposal by delegates to remove the powers of the ANC president to appoint mayors and premiers without a more inclusive procedure within the party. Thabo Mbeki, it was argued, had appointed premiers and mayors who were not popular in their regions. It was popularity that was of greatest importance to the Mbeki detractors and not, regardless of the seeming unfairness of the procedure for selection; merit, professional acumen or simple ability to do the job.

The project is being rolled out in phases — starting with those municipalities both in the worst condition and considered most responsive to intervention at this time. The objectives are manifold: to strengthen municipal leadership and administration; support the implementation of good governance and anticorruption programmes; facilitate the provision of water and sanitation, electricity and waste removal; and assist municipalities to develop reliable and integrated billing systems, housing provision programmes, roads and other infrastructure4. Additional aims are specific to the municipality and those areas of incompetence that placed the municipality on the Project Consolidate map in the first place.

The department of provincial and local government (DPLG) has been quick to point out that these facilitators will neither usurp the authority of the municipality, nor paralyse those individuals or institutions under intense investigation and overhaul. In an attempt to soften the gravity of this measure, the DPLG has promoted the facilitators as agents who will provide scaffolding to each affected municipality — in order that “affected communities can realize improvements in their quality of life”5.

However — given that various municipalities are deemed bankrupt and even financially unviable, that corruption is endemic, and that many skilled local government practitioners have left the municipal services resulting in severe gaps in the capacity to plan, budget and simply organize a basic delivery project — we have to ask whether these lofty aims will be achieved and what will happen once the facilitators disband. Further scepticism arises as this project is scheduled to end in 2006, having only been in operation since 2004 and conveniently organised to span the period prior to the next local government election.

Enter the Intergovernmental Relations Framework Bill, which the National Assembly has just passed, fulfilling the provision for such relations as outlined in Chapter 3 of the Constitution. What this bill allows for is improved coordination in the implementation of policy and legislation (key to a problem like housing for example), increasing the effectiveness of service delivery and generally to address national priorities including poverty alleviation. As such, the bill only deals with improved relations between the executive areas of each sphere of government.

Essential to the implementation of this bill is the establishment of various intergovernmental forums6 within each sphere of government. At the helm of each forum is the relevant cabinet minister (national forum), the premier (provincial forum), and the district council mayor (district forums at the local level). There are reportage functions from district to provincial forum, and from provincial forums through to national forums. The latter two, provincial and national, have to provide ongoing reports to the President’s Co-ordinating Council.

On the face of it, the forums are only consultative bodies and they do not have any executive decision-making power. Each forum does, however, have the ability to propose implementation protocols aimed at providing co-ordinated programmes to oversee delivery or improvement of a particular function. Importantly, aside from determining the overall challenge the protocol aims to address, the forum that designs the protocol also devises:

the roles that each sphere of government will play in the implementation phase and their respective responsibilities,
the oversight mechanisms and procedures for monitoring whether implementation has or has not been effective,
the resource allocation of each sphere of government to the project in relation to their roles and responsibilities to the protocol and,
the dispute settlement procedures to be followed should disputes arise in the implementation of the protocol7.

Much can be decided in the design of the protocol at the expense of an individual local government’s autonomy and mandate given them by their residents. That said, the execution of each protocol falls to the sphere of government or agency concerned and not to any of the intergovernmental forums, including the Presidential Co-ordinating Council or national forums.

In addition there are procedures for intergovernmental disputes, but this resolution mechanism is only for use in the execution phase of each protocol and not in response to the protocol itself.

It is of concern that the attempts by government to overcome service delivery and financial mismanagement problems are increasingly being made by oversight supervisors and additional committee structures. None of these bodies are accountable to the residents of the municipalities for whom solutions are supposedly being designed.

Also, given the ANC’s overwhelming dominance nationally, provincially and in the number of local councils it controls in the country, it is quite conceivable that the intergovernmental forums will simply be bodies that are themselves better co-ordinated to gather information from councils and provinces, with resultant ANC driven protocols being accepted and implemented back down through the provinces and councils.

As political parties and voters await the announcement of the date for the local government elections, concern shifts to persistent, highly politicised issues such as the controversial defection periods and the fight for control of municipalities, mainly fought between the ANC and DA, and the ANC and IFP (the latter in KwaZulu-Natal).

Much depends on the success of each party’s registration campaigns and their ability to convince their voters to take part in the election. The DA and smaller parties will be hoping to capitalise on the ANC’s usually lower voter turnout for local elections, but of course that depends on the relative support they are able to muster in an increasing battle against voter apathy.

In trying to encourage a higher voter turnout, one can only hope that the parties shift away from concentrating their energies on fighting political wars that hold little importance for voters, and, instead, focus on the core issues that face voters in their municipalities and provide solutions that are relevant to their communities. Those choosing to protest, despite other hidden agendas, are essentially concerned about issues that affect their basic humanity. Government cannot rely on short-term measures provided through ad hoc interventions to turn those needs into a sustainable reality.

Endnotes

In late June 2005, protest action had spread to Diepsloot in Gauteng, Gugulethu and Ocean View in the Western Cape, Secunda in Mpumalanga, Nelson Mandela Metro in the Eastern Cape, Cato Manor in KwaZulu Natal and Vrede, Harrismith, Clocolan, Hennenman and Kroonstad in the Free State.
Municipal demonstrations are a farce, The Star, 14 June 2005
ANC concedes grievances exist, The Citizen, 31 June 2005. In the same article Motlanthe was quoted as speaking out strongly against protest action and referred to Khumalo’s theory of partisan orchestration of the protests.
Press statement — Project Consolidate: Deployment of High Calibre Service Delivery Facilitators to Targeted Municipalities, Department of Provincial and Local Government, 1 April 2005, pp. 2.
Press statement — Project Consolidate: Deployment of High Calibre Service Delivery Facilitators to Targeted Municipalities, Department of Provincial and Local Government, 1 April 2005, pp.4.
An intergovernmental forum exists for each sphere of government. The national forum can be established by any cabinet minister so as to promote and facilitate intergovernmental relations in the functional area for which that cabinet minister is responsible. In addition, Minmecs, which are in operation when the act takes effect, will be identified as an intergovernmental forum effective for the national sphere. Provincial forums are to promote and facilitate the relations between the province and the local governments in that province. District forums provide the same role, but between the district municipality and the local municipalities in that district.
Intergovernmental Relations Framework Bill, (Bill 3 of 2005) Department of Provincial and Local Government, Republic of South Africa.