South African municipal government is in crisis. Many municipalities cannot even provide basic services. Rubbish remains uncollected, water (if it even gets to a tap) is dirty, electricity supply is unstable and erratic, and roads fall apart.
And while this used to be fairly common in small-town South Africa, especially outside of the Western Cape, these failures now often occur in South Africa’s biggest city.
Nobody living in or travelling through Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni regularly can ignore the decay all around them. Driving through parts of Johannesburg makes you feel as if you are on the set of a post-apocalyptic movie; the reckless driving, huge potholes, and very few working traffic lights are enough to make you think that central government authority has collapsed and bandits are running riot.
Of course, we know this is not the case. Our municipalities nominally still have governments. Even Johannesburg allegedly has a mayor, Dada Morero. His absence in public, however, has led to rumours that he is a professional hide-and-seek player and is practising for the next World Championship. I have not been able to verify this.
Apart from the breakdown in service delivery, municipalities also struggle to fund themselves. Outside bigger municipalities there is very little in the way of a rates base to sustainably fund a municipality.
Vicious cycle
In addition, something of a vicious cycle emerges. Businesses and people with the means – those who are the core rates base – leave failing municipalities where there is no service delivery and where property prices are collapsing. This means that the number of people and businesses paying rates shrinks, which in turn makes it harder for a municipality to fund itself.
It is clear that the way municipal government in South Africa is organised must be rethought. It is simply not working and has real consequences for people. Collapsing municipalities also have a severe economic effect – as noted, businesses will move away from poorly run municipalities to ones that are better run – leading to economic activity and opportunity becoming more concentrated.
Failing municipalities also negatively affect the value of property, which for many people is their primary asset.
Municipal governments are at the “coalface” of governance – for most people, interacting with government occurs at this level. It is vital that it works well and is responsive.
One reform that should be considered is reassessing the sizes of our municipalities, not just in terms of geographic area but also in terms of population.
Large populations
Five of our metros have populations of over four million – Johannesburg, Cape Town, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, and eThekwini. Of South Africa’s six neighbouring countries, only Mozambique and Zimbabwe have higher populations than any one of these cities.
Thought should perhaps be given to breaking up these municipalities into more manageable entities, rather than having one single unitary government for such a large number of people.
Many large cities around the world might have some overarching city government but split into more manageable administrative units which are, in their own right, local governments.
London is a good example of this. The population of London is over ten million and the city has an elected council and a mayor. However, the city is split into 32 boroughs, each with its own elected councillors and mayor. The population of the various boroughs ranges from between 150,000 and 400,000 people. They have similar functions to municipalities in South Africa, being responsible for service delivery, such as waste collection and road maintenance, and libraries. Schools and social services are also run by these local authorities.
New York is another example. While it has far fewer boroughs than London (New York has five), the city has been split into subdivisions to make managing it easier. The population of the five boroughs ranges from the 500,000 people of Staten Island to the 2.7 million people of Brooklyn. These boroughs do not have as much power as a London borough, but they nevertheless fulfil some governance functions and have some financial and administrative oversight.
Serious consideration
South Africa should give serious consideration to breaking up its metros. It is clear that they are simply too unwieldy. Johannesburg would be far more manageable if it was broken up into, say, five smaller municipalities, with an average population of about one million each.
There will be political resistance to this from the ANC – it would be likely that a number of these smaller Johannesburg municipalities would see the DA being the single-biggest party, if not a majority party. This would likely be the case in other metros too, should they be broken up along similar lines.
But the ANC is not the force it used to be, even though it believes it still is, and reform may be easier than we think.
And we should also consider whether each patch of land in South Africa needs to be covered by a municipality – do we need wall-to-wall municipalities? An argument is to be made that some towns – especially those that are incapable of raising their own funds and managing those funds and services properly – should rather be governed from the centre, whether that is from the provincial centre or national centre.
Neither of the above are concrete policy solutions. Perhaps the way we manage our municipalities should be left as is with minor tweaks. But, given the disaster in municipal governance across South Africa, we do need to start considering these questions.
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