Ashley Green-Thompson|Published
Local government is the place where the provisions of the country’s constitution are made real. It is where public servants can be held directly accountable for administration of services, where democracy is practiced more directly than it is at national level, and where we see how committed public representatives are to make real the constitution’s promise of a life of dignity for all.
I recently attended a panel discussion on the state of Johannesburg and our country’s municipalities. The three panellists and the moderator all agreed that Joburg is in a mess, and that too many of the 257 municipalities are not doing a great job of channelling the spirit of the constitution.
Statistics were quoted about levels of debt and financial mismanagement by city and town councils, about their inability to maintain public infrastructure, and about how hard it is to get people to do their jobs. I can’t argue with this analysis because I see the manifestation of these problems every day.
In Joburg there are potholes that could swallow you and the car you’re in. It is the largest city in the world that isn’t built on or near a natural water source, yet water frequently flows from burst pipes in wealthy and poor areas alike. Response times to repair broken systems often show glimpses of what the public utilities are capable of, but you’re never sure if the truck will arrive in two hours or two weeks.
Don’t get me started on the refuse collection, and the neglected inner-city areas and working-class townships that have rubbish piling up in the streets. And then there’s the corruption that deepens the crisis. One municipality was mentioned that had an outstanding debt in excess of R1billion, but employed over 400 ghost workers.
I enjoyed the panel’s analysis and was struck at how I found myself agreeing with people who I know have quite a different ideological stance to mine. One of the solutions offered was to reduce the public wage bill, a measure too often implying job cuts. When service provision is a key part of giving life to what our constitution promises, you’d think that more rather than fewer competent employees are needed to do that.
Perhaps we can revisit the reality that provincial and national public servants outnumber their local counterparts by more than four to one. Perhaps we can look at streamlining expenditure on things like bodyguards and perks for the higher-ups in the municipal food chain.
It’s election season. On 4 November we get to vote for who we want to run our cities and towns, and everyone is promising they can fix things. It was the panel moderator who reminded us of South African’s flirtation with the brink – we teeter at the edge of calamity so many times, only to claw our way back at the last moment. This feels like such a moment.
We have to fix our municipalities, and those with the technical solutions must continue to advocate for interventions. It is important to fix systems and get competent people to run them.
But it is also important for ordinary people to step up and find ways to not just vote, but to hold their elected representatives accountable for doing their job. An innovation that has emerged over the past few months that has been rolled out in parts of Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Joburg involves the inverting of the usual political campaigning logic where candidates arrive with manifestos that promise wonders and miracles to the voters.
Instead, communities are describing what they want to see in an elected representative, and inviting those campaigners seeking their votes to formally agree to those demands. Communities may want their councillor to live in the area they represent. Or they may want a commitment to regular reports on progress to fix the things that need fixing. Will the councillor be responsive to the requests and complaints of residents? And if they do not live up to the commitments made in the community manifesto they signed, do they agree to voluntarily set down and invite a by-election?
These are examples of what a community manifesto could do. If the candidates refuse to sign, an organised community can refuse to vote for that candidate. In local elections, margins of victory are small, and the refusal could have big consequences for aspirant councillors. It’s about time the power was shifted to the voters.