Who will deliver us from delivery?

A colleague who lectures in politics at Rhodes University has banned his students from using the word “globalisation” in class. Someone should follow his excellent lead by preventing all commentators who want to be taken seriously from using the word “delivery”.

The reason he insists that people who use the word “globalisation” are not to be taken seriously is that the word is not used to explain a reality, but to avoid doing so. It is trotted out whenever an academic or commentator wants to avoid thinking and it means whatever the user wants it to mean. And, most important of all, it is also used to make claims about the world that are not true — such as that it is impossible for governments to do anything about poverty any more or that countries which allow their universities to teach philosophy cannot get on in the world.

So it is with “service delivery”. Talking heads of all shapes and sizes insist repeatedly that government is about “delivery”. Whenever grassroots South Africans take to the streets to complain — which they do quite often now — we are told they want “delivery”. But we are rarely, if ever, told what “delivery” is or why it is important. And claims that people on the ground are upset about it are rarely backed up by evidence — it is simply assumed that anyone who is unhappy must want “service delivery”.

But “delivery” is not the main task of the government — nor should it be. And it is not what people on the ground are demanding when they take to the streets.

“Delivery” happens when a person or institution that has something transfers it to someone who needs it. To insist that the main task of the government is “delivery” is to insist that the government has goodies that citizens need and that it is its job to make sure that they get them.

This sees the government as active, citizens as passive. It asks us to see the government as a giver, citizens as receivers. And it suggests that the best government is one that has lots of technically smart and qualified people because it is they who can “deliver” best.

But, in a democracy, citizens are not meant to be clients of the government — they are meant to own it. And so citizens are meant actively to hold the government to account, not to wait for it to hand out goodies to them. Because democracy is a system in which the people decide, citizens cannot be relegated to receivers while the government is exalted into a giver. In reality, the government is meant to be a servant; those who have needs are meant to be its employer. Since the most important task of a democratic government is to do what citizens want it to, the government should not be “delivering” to citizens but listening to them. And the best public servants are therefore not those who have the most degrees or technical skills, but those who know how to listen to citizens.

To place “delivery” at the centre of the government’s role is to see citizens as hapless beings with needs that those better able than they must provide. We should, rather, see every South African as a citizen with a right to a say — and the government as the institution that enables people to enjoy that say.

What evidence we have suggests that the people who have taken to the streets in protest know this — repeatedly they complain not that they have been denied the latest load of goodies chosen by someone else, but that those they have elected do not listen to them. Obviously, they want better lives and hope that the government can play a role in achieving that. But that is part of a wider desire to be heard — to be taken seriously by those they have elected.

The “delivery” approach believes that the government can win citizens’ trust by efficiently rolling out goods and services. It wants to react to the protest by making the government technically smarter and, often, by giving more powers to a small group of people at the top who are assumed to know what to do.

The “citizenship” approach — which insists that the government should serve citizens, not deliver to them — insists that what is needed is a bigger voice for citizens in decisions and greater respect by the government for voters, particularly the grassroots poor.

That cannot happen unless the government is encouraged to show greater respect fir citizens, to give them far more power and to recognise that centralising power in a few people’s hands makes the problem worse because it stills the voices governments need to hear.

In short, the government will be doing its democratic job not when it learns how to “deliver”, but when it learns how to serve.