Disservice delivery and the crisis of local government

The most disgusting example of the failure of local government in South Africa also happens to be the place my mother’s family calls home.

The gateway to Mpumalanga’s Cultural Heartland, the Kruger National Park and the Lowveld juts out like a scar on the otherwise awe-inspiring rolling grasslands a mere 100km from Tshwane.

The near collapse of efficient and effective government in the eMalahleni Local Municipality makes the Johannesburg billing crisis and the occasional water and electricity interruptions in Gauteng metros seem like a bad thunderstorm in our Gardens of Eden.

The municipal government’s peculiar understanding of its constitutional responsibilities embraces an approach that insists the city’s aging network of water pipes burst before undergoing maintenance or upgrades. The city’s water crisis is confined to an ancient pipe network, as large swathes of the municipality experiences regular dry spells due to a failure to service the area’s main source of water, Witbank Dam. Despite having been overflowing during the last outage (and currently sitting at 95,46% capacity), faulty and neglected valves at the dam plunged the city into its own version of load shedding, greatly impacting on both residents and businesses. My grandmother tells me that they sat without water for the greater part of two weeks.

The water network is unfortunately not the only severely neglected part of infrastructure in the municipality. Urban and suburban road networks lie in such a state of disrepair that the roads are indistinguishable from the potholes, and it makes driving in residential areas an adventure as one swerves to avoid permanent damage to one’s vehicle.

The Witbank News has seen astonishing photographs that would make great contenders for Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

Entire vehicles, from a Volkswagen Golf to a city bus have been engulfed in potholes akin to the sinkholes on the West Rand. In the last incident the passengers on the bus were forced to evacuate the stranded vehicle through broken windows as the doors were inaccessibly stranded within the hole.

‘Totally dilapidated’
Broken refuse removal trucks, or a lack of fuel, have left garbage piling up on the sidewalks of city streets for periods as long as three weeks.

eMalahleni’s disaster management capacity is in such an appalling state that citizens are left virtually unprotected in the event of a major fire-related disaster. The local fire station is compared to a dumping ground and scrap yard strewn with an old car wreck, a caravan and rubbish littering the premises.

Naturally the municipal spokesperson was not available for comment to explain why the grounds of the fire department and traffic department were in such a state, where the red fire trucks are hidden behind tall grass. The station has fallen into a state of disrepair while the new station is being built nearby, but this construction project has frequently grinded to a complete halt as the money dried up in a bankrupt municipality.

Unsurprisingly the bankrupt municipality has spent millions on changing the city names, those of its major roads and adorning the main traffic arteries with massive billboards proclaiming the beauty and grandeur of eMalahleni.

It is sad that one has to travel down boulevards named after struggle veterans Walter Sisulu, OR Tambo and Nelson Mandela who, I doubt, had this vision in mind for our new South Africa supposedly premised on the delivery of basic services in a country that belongs to all who live in it.

I posted my observation of the state of eMalahleni on Facebook, which evoked the following response from a friend:

“Sandile, people in eMalahleni will fight with you for trying to pledge blind loyalty of dishonesty, I cannot comprehend your belief in eMalahleni. This town is totally dilapidated, the water system has collapsed and if there is water it is undrinkable, which is why the people selling water in this town are making a killing! The sewage system is a state of disrepair, the graveyards are in a state of serious discomfort, the roads like you said yourself, although with an attempt to justify the reason thereof, I honestly find it difficult to find anything good in eMalahleni. I shudder to even talk about the tender fraud and corruption. The inner town is filthy as hell. [So] I wonder which development you talk about?”

With more than half of urban South Africans feeling let down by their municipality, I can’t imagine that it is any different in eMalahleni, and that it is equally pronounced, if not more so, among the poorest as found in recent surveys.

Who is your counsellor?
Rumour has it that when the now yet-again fired mayor was phoned up by a concerned citizen at 8:30 one morning, he was told that he should call again later because she was still in bed.

Unsurprisingly, the African National Congress (ANC) received 73,86% voter support in this municipality in the 2006 local government elections. The problem is not the ANC governing eMalahleni, the problem is that it is doing so without any real threat of a change in government due to virtually non-existent vertical accountability. Other ANC-controlled municipalities, Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane as examples, are nowhere near as decrepit as the one in question. The difference here is the substantive threat of opposition parties taking over.

The ANC mayoral committee relies on the miracle-working brand of the ticket they got elected through, and if all else fails blame it on the white agenda, an oversupply of coloureds, or witches, snakes, dogs and foreigners.

It is hard to believe that eMalahleni is a part of the Nkangala District Municipality, and neighboured by the Steve Tshwete Local Municipality encompassing Middelburg. The district has spent millions on building new administrative and government offices, and Middelburg hardly evokes equally emotional responses of anger, frustration and powerlessness.

There is evidently no shortage of funding, and especially not from the national tax base, and one is forced to conclude that the collapse of infrastructure and service delivery in eMalahleni is rooted in maladministration, financial mismanagement, incompetence and, in some instances, blatant abuse of public money.

As usual it is not the suburban middle class that suffers most, they can afford to easily buy bottled water, YoYo tanks, 4x4s, generators and various other means of ameliorating the burden of disservice delivery.

A smiling Jacob Zuma on a billboard next to the N1 between Pretoria and Centurion proudly proclaims that “together we can build better communities”. Mr President, this is only possible if you can actually get a hold of, or know, your counsellor.

Blind loyalty
Local government doesn’t need to be fixed and communities shouldn’t be built. Our local government needs to be changed, at the systemic level, and our communities and the social fabric of our municipalities need to be rebuilt.

We must not only change the faces of local government, but the rules of the game. South Africans are not being served by the mere cosmetic changes of replacing white faces with black ones, or changing apartheid-era town and street names to heroic figures of our liberation struggle. This kind of lip-service delivery fails to deliver economic liberation and true emancipation of our people, and especially those who need and deserve it most.

Local government is and should be about our people, not politicians. The Zumas, Lekotas, Holomisas or Zille’s of our national political landscape will not be our messiahs, and definitely not your ward counsellor.

We deserve dedicated, committed individuals who are pro-actively engaged in the community, accessible, responsive and accountable to us.

The time for change is now, says the Congress of the People (Cope), and the 2011 LGE Manifesto outlines those systemic changes required, those principles for local government in our constitution, and a comprehensive approach to rebuilding communities in partnership, including innovative approaches to sustainable energy and urban and suburban redesign.

Should the Cope candidate for my ward fail to embody the organisation’s principles, I refuse to vote for him or her. Blind loyalty to political “brands” and an uncritical acceptance of characters passed to us by these parties, continue to be one of the greatest obstacles to effective, efficient and accountable local government.