I’m pleased I can write this; a few days ago, I couldn’t. The power was out. It went on Wednesday evening and just stayed off. The inverter hung in for about a day, but eventually gave out too. On Thursday morning, the water pressure dropped and by midday, the taps went dry too. This persisted into the weekend.
Welcome to Johannesburg of the 21st Century, with utilities simulating the 19th.
It seems I wasn’t the only one frustrated with the state of the wealthiest city in Africa. President Ramaphosa had been exposed to its decay during the recent G20 meeting, and described it as “not a pleasing environment”.
“As South Africans we are a proud people,” he said, the flag (metaphorically) waving overhead, “Let us get that self-pride to lift us up so we present a G20 that will wow people. This is so that when people look at what we offer they just say ‘wow, this is how South Africans do it’.”
It may have taken the embarrassment of international exposure to bring the state of the city to the President’s attention – such is the isolating privilege of personal wealth and political power – but it would hardly be a revelation to most of its residents. Many would express this in more robust phraseology than the President used. But they could probably reassure him that he needn’t look to his foreign guests when seeking comment on the city, since most Johannesburgers would confirm that it is their experience that, indeed, “this is how South Africans do it.”
So, too, would millions of their counterparts across the country when looking at their localities.
Frontline
Local government was intended as the frontline of what the South African lexicon calls “service delivery”. More than that, it was meant to propel the country’s bold developmental agenda. Local government was even given a defined constitutional role, a rarity internationally. But there has been no part of government that has proven more troublesome, more dysfunctional and more burdensome to South Africa’s people. (That is, perhaps, unless one includes the country’s mismanaged state-owned entities, whose impacts on people’s lives are frequently indistinguishable from municipal failure. Fun fact: a few hours after City Power got our lights back on, load shedding was back to switch them off again.)
This is hardly a new issue. I’ve remarked before that the first substantive piece of work I did at the Institute – nearly thirty years ago (that dates me, and not in a good way) – was on the emerging system of local government and how it would be funded.
At the time, it was fairly clear what the broad contours of the challenges were: inadequate revenue bases, longstanding resistance to payment (this being compounded by rate boycotts by suburbanites, as was happening at that time in Sandton), along with the sheer scale of administrative and infrastructural demands.
At this point, the talk was, quite correctly, about expanding access to services – but concerns were also being raised about the state of what existed. Burst pipes and the phenomenon of “lost water” were a signifier of what was to come, and predated the electricity crisis.
I had hoped that the experience of governance would lead to an appreciation of the realities of running a town or city, and adjustments made on that basis. However, this was not “how South Africans do it.”
No. The way “South Africans” did it was to see urban administrations as sources of patronage. This was both direct, awarding positions to favoured loyalists, and indirect, in declining to pursue outstanding defaulters. The most noxious part of this was the deliberate politicisation of administrations, together with the ANC’s counter-constitutional programme of “cadre deployment”. This was fine for providing well-paid sheltered employment for the politically- connected, but had the makings of a disaster when it came to actually making local government work.
Unspoken conspiracy
It’s not even as if this is some sort of scandalous unspoken conspiracy in the dark heart of our governance. It’s right there out in the open, flagged in euphemised bureaucratise for all to behold, “the political-administrative interface”. As the 2021 State of Local Government Report put it: “The political-administrative interface is often the source of poor financial management and poor governance. This can only be addressed if the political and administrative leaderships both understand their responsibilities and clear lines across which neither should stray.”
Just so. Though bear in mind that transversing these lines wasn’t an aberration, it was the ANC’s express intention.
By the way, I’m not sure if any State of Local Government reports have been produced since 2021. I can’t find any. Maybe the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs website is as poorly maintained as our cities.
Speaking of maintenance – or rather its absence, since that is what concerns the President after his guests got a whiff of Johannesburg reality – there has been a longstanding indifference to the technical matters. The capacity to keep things working has been in decline for decades. This is the state of our roads, waterworks, power cables.
Engineering skills, as the Bureau of Economic Research put it in a recent research note, are the hard foundations of a modern city. They simply aren’t available in the quantities needed. Nor are the pipelines for producing them working properly. Analyses by Dr Allyson Lawless demonstrate that over the past two decades, the profile of technical skills employed by municipalities has shifted away from the more highly qualified (call these professional engineers), and also towards a markedly younger cohort.
This means that younger employees are denied much of the mentoring and the transfer of experience and expertise that would acclimatise them to dealing with their responsibilities, and prepare them for their careers ahead.
To wit, in a carefully worded article in 2017, Dr Lawless wrote: “While the transformation is impressive, the loss of knowledge has impacted on the progress of the young engineering staff who would have benefited from the supervision, coaching and mentorship of experienced staff.”
But that was how state policy insisted it be done.
Lack of investment
And that’s just maintenance. The BER points out that there has been a chronic lack of investment in new assets, particularly outside the Western Cape. The underinvestment in infrastructure, the BER remarks, is a serious matter for a province like Gauteng, with its growing water crisis. I understand that my own travails owed something to old pipes that were simply not designed to handle the water pressure they are being subjected to.
This is also not just a matter of money. Recognising that infrastructure represents big-ticket expenditure, and that many jurisdictions don’t have the funds for it, municipalities receive grant funding from the national fiscus. Problem is, it’s often not properly spent, and sometimes not spent at all.
For a flavour of this, I paged through the Auditor General’s report on Local Government for 2022-2023 (unlike COGTA, the A-G has its act together and runs a functioning website). It pointed out that “although municipalities are highly dependent on these grants to finance their infrastructure projects, they often do not spend all the funds they receive.” In that year, the cumulative amount given in grants stood at R37.99 billion, the amount actually spent at R34.56 billion. That’s around R3.43 billion, 9%, not used.
Actually, I would have thought that the amount would be higher. Still, R3.43 billion is a lot of tom, certainly enough to deal with the archaic pipe that ruined my week. Or to tart up the city so as not to make too poor an impression on visiting bigwigs.
Meanwhile, a story emerged about how City Power – they of the multi-day power outage – had paid a politically connected “businessperson” R12 million before the work was completed. This was in defiance of public finance rules and allegedly over the protests of the officials meant to process the payment. City Power, it turns out, ended 2024 with an overall loss of R2.8 billion. This is also a lot of tom, which could have repurposed those knotted cables and rickety sub-stations. The entity is technically not a going concern, since its liabilities exceed its assets by R1.1 billion.
Resilience
That probably applies to a great many of our municipalities now. COGTA’s website has a page that sorts South Africa’s municipalities by their resilience. The latest data for the year ending March 2023 (yes, dated, but that’s the lay of the land…) put 66 of the country’s 257 municipalities -that’s about a quarter – in the dysfunctional column. A mere 27, or just above one in 10, were viewed as stable. The rest were described as either low-risk or medium-risk (I can’t shake the feeling that medium-risk is something of a euphemism). Johannesburg was one of those medium-risk propositions.
I also see on the Department’s website the bold motto “Every Municipality Must Work”. Well, maybe they must, but they don’t. It’s not how “South Africans” do things.
I also see that the President is punting the Expropriation Act as a solution to urban decay. Well, okay. If he says so. Though I think it might have something to do with lousy administration, a disregard for law and order, the difficulties of shifting illegal occupiers and so on. In other words, just the general malaise that decades of sub-standard governance were always bound to produce. Too bad it showed us up when the G20 was in town, but it’s no surprise to those of us who get to look at this reality every day.
Combative
And as the President was bemoaning the state of Johannesburg, his colleague, ANC Secretary General Fikile Mbalula, was striking a combative tone in Free State. Free State is not well served by its municipal system, to put it mildly. Of the 23 municipalities (including district councils and the Mangaung Metro), only one managed to be low-risk. Everything else was dysfunctional or medium-risk.
At least there was a recognition of that. “Free State,” he said, “was an epitome of what we call state capture; all sorts of corrupt activities came from here. This leadership, it is our duty to remind them that the ANC has been voted in in the Free State to ensure we undo all these corrupt activities of the past.”
Okay. His solution? Better cadre deployment. Gone are the days that the ANC would be ranking politics over competence. IOL reported that he pledged that only the “crème de la crème” would be deployed. (I hope against hope that that phrase emerged from a journalist’s imagination or an AI programme, and not from Mbalula himself.) Forgive me for my cynicism, but we’ve heard this before, and in relation to local government.
The hard reality is that it is exactly that sort of political meddling that brought local governance to its current malaise. Cadre deployment – like any pathology, say chronic diarrhoea – cannot be improved. Its inevitable consequence was always and remains the destruction of professionalism and the ruin of technical expertise. The results were “not pleasing”. It needs to be halted.
“Not pleasing” is not only the state of a city like Johannesburg, but the political choices, and behind them, the political processes that have served to create it. But a view of Johannesburg is a grim illustration of “how South Africans do it” – at least from the vantage point of the President and his sclerotic party, for whom the country and the party are coterminous. To quote the President again, Wow!
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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