The title President of the Republic of South Africa is rich in gravitas, albeit not in the same league as heading the party youth league. Increasingly however, Jacob Zuma more resembles the little Dutch boy who plugged the dike with his thumb, except that there are more leaks in the embankments protecting this country from institutional collapse than Zuma has digits.
This week Zuma promised the inhabitants of Mthatha that the government would never allow the capital of the former Transkei to collapse. Last week a management team was parachuted into Pietermaritzburg to rescue the KwaZulu-Natal capital from bankruptcy and collapse.
Last year Zuma personally assured Balfour’s rioting inhabitants that their service delivery concerns would be addressed. Last month they again, erected barricades, stoned police and looted shops because nothing had been done.
Such scenes are repeated through the length and breadth of the land. Functional local government has virtually collapsed. As the Institute of Race Relations’ Frans Cronje observes, some communities act as if the African National Congress (ANC) government were an illegal regime, rather than the party they voted for by overwhelming majority. “Protest action has escalated and its implications for future stability in South Africa are serious,” he warns.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was not, as one might expect, the extra burden of expanding services to those previously excluded. The final straw has been a hayrick of mismanagement, barely concealed looting, tender-fixing, and nepotism.
In Mthatha there have been knife fights and shootings between the councillors. Black ratepayers have launched a payments boycott, demonstrating to Cooperative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka that it is not only those supposedly unpatriotic whites trying to bring down the government, who withhold rates where services are non-existent.
Aside from occasional flurries of rubber bullets fired at protesters, Pietermaritzburg has seen less political drama than Mthatha but the once manicured capital much resembles that town: filthy, frayed and feckless. Even as Msunduzi council admitted to more than half a billion outstanding in uncollected revenue, the mayor — who boasts on the tourism website that not only is she is the granddaughter of anti-apartheid icon Albert Luthuli, but “charming and enthusiastic” to boot — was prettifying the Mayor’s Parlour with new leather couches for her bodyguards to lounge in.
Spare some sympathy for our embattled but remorselessly optimistic president. It is, after all, not on his watch that the deployment into municipal management of incompetent, dishonest ANC cadres attained a feeding frenzy of self-enrichment. And it is, after all, Zuma who has made tentative clucking noises about the loss of the white technical and administrative backbone of local government, to allow ANC deployment and nepotism.
Nevertheless, it is Zuma’s job to lead the country. Not to sprint between fiery communities, spreading avuncular reassurance like a fire-blanket over conflagrations.
Shiceka states that the government will end service delivery protests by 2014. The previous administration, according to Shiceka, was “lethargic at best and at worst doing nothing” about community dissatisfaction. However, the Zuma government’s turn-around strategy means that by the end of the year “rapid response teams” will be deployed to deal with community grievances within two days of being notified of them.
This is starry-eyed at best, disingenuous at worst, in a country where one cannot summon an ambulance, never mind a managerial resuscitation squad. Rapid response will become vapid response, will become rabid response, as the teams move from optimism to failure to frustration.
Local government can only work if managers are accountable and staff are employed for their skills, not skin colour or political hue. That’s not easily achieved when the ethos of the ANC has shifted from selfless service to self-service.
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