The following is based on an address I delivered last evening in a discussion,“Ballot or Build-It: How to Save Our Cities”, with DA mayoral candidate for Tshwane Cilliers Brink at the Free Market Foundation (FMF). The discussion was moderated by FMF CEO David Ansara.
In his interview last week with The Common Sense, Cilliers Brink said: “We’re not going to be asking the officials, we’re not going to be trying to seek some kind of a consensus of what is comfortable. To fix local government and basic services, to restore law and order and confidence in the future of cities, we need to make fundamental and decisive changes.”
The prospect of voting in Pretoria in the upcoming elections is an immense privilege.
And though I have long had very visible and unambiguous problems with Brink’s party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), I have long been an admirer of Brink, his ethic, his Thatcherite courage in standing up to thuggery, and perhaps most importantly, his conscious grounding in classical liberal principles.
What we are discussing tonight is a broader question of what it will actually take to rescue localities in South Africa. Brink correctly said: fundamental and decisive change.
The law
In our view at the Free Market Foundation, you cannot speak of fundamental change while still operating from the playbook written over decades almost exclusively by the African National Congress (ANC).
Now the ANC has written this playbook into legislation and regulations, yes, but also into the very ways we think about governance. Our sense is that even opposition parties have, perhaps unconsciously, adopted this mode of thinking under the guise of, “Well, it’s the law”.
Our Western heritage and our very own experience in South Africa’s recent history tell us that we need to have a healthier and more discerning approach to the law. This was confirmed globally in 1945 when the world declared with one voice that simply saying “I am following orders or the law” is baseless. It means nothing if you are doing something that is wrong in substance.
Our own history has many more examples of the diktats of politicians dressed in legal garb being ignored, because they made serious inroads into people’s basic human dignity, freedom, and their ability to secure their own vital interests. So, I do not worship the ground upon which the ANC’s parliamentary caucus walks, and I think we should offer it very little deference.
Liberty and true order are our lodestars, not the mere formalistic desire to be perceived as “law-abiding”. Constitutionalism, properly understood, supports freedom. And if we ever find ourselves saying “but the law this”, “but the law that”, or “but the bylaws”, in response to elementary responsibility-taking, then the law itself is a problem that we must overcome rather than accede to.
Rearranging deckchairs
The premise of this approach is that the situation in South Africa is so dire that we cannot continue to pretend that this is a normal society with normal public order and even normal rule of law. Not with our rates of unemployment and violent crime. These alone would scare any other society half to death and lead to the declaration of states of emergency and the fundamental reconfiguration of political thinking.
That is real, but we in South Africa continue to operate as if things are essentially normal. I do not, and the Free Market Foundation does not, seek to contribute to strengthening that fantasy. That’s the premise.
We cannot afford to be rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as the ship is sinking. The reality is that South Africa is collapsing – specifically at municipal level – and we cannot strictly continue to play by the rules as we have done for the past several decades.
I see a slight shift towards this way of thinking, certainly in Brink’s approach and perhaps that of Helen Zille. There is a spark of it.
But the process cannot be a waiting game for five years before we see progress. Brink himself has emphasised the crucial importance of those first 100 days, and the closer to day one, the more important. There needs to be a deep change, almost out of the gate. Not in all domains, not in all respects, but in some very visible respects.
Safety and security
What we have often focused on here, since our Section 12 Initiative, has been safety and security. This is one of those areas where ANC-ways-of-doing have taken something relatively easy to solve, and turned it into a complicated, existentially threatening mess.
Evidence suggests that neighbourhoods that have acted proactively by establishing special ratings areas have collapsed local crime rates. Active neighbourhood watches, boomed-off roads, and a vigilant community disincentivise the worst kinds of violent crime.
This all happens, practically and realistically, long before police ministers get around to devolving policing authority, or local councils deign to pry the metro police off the gravy train that is speeding fine collections, and onto actual public safety.
This is all good news, and should be grabbed with both hands by reform-minded politicians. There are neighbourhoods in our cities that are atrociously violent, and it would be better for all metro police to be deployed there, rather than hanging out by the roadside in those areas where the community can take care of its own safety.
Securing infrastructure
Let us take an even more practical example from Centurion, south of Pretoria.
Last year, for the umpteenth time in as many years, the Brakfontein power substation blew up or burned down, this time because of vandalism.
Perish the notion that this critical infrastructure asset or the lines running to it had any security nearby, whether during the ANC, ActionSA, or DA eras.
A big portion of Centurion was without power for two weeks, just because something as basic as securing vital assets in the most criminal country on the continent was not done.
And do you think there is a permanent security presence at Brakfontein today? No, of course not. As we speak, someone could be setting the substation alight to cause millions in economic damage to thousands of people.
The municipality will not secure Brakfontein or the known areas of cable theft. It will not tell the Tshwane metro police to stop harassing motorists and instead secure critical infrastructure.
The community has to do it. The City should engage community groups and offer modest rate reductions to those ratepayers who contribute to a fund to place private security officers at and around Brakfontein. Do this across the City, at crime hotspots like the Fountains Circle, too, and see magic happen.
And if for whatever reason this is something the City cannot do because of some ANC provision somewhere at the centre, look the other way with a nod and a wink. Nodding and winking are scoffed at, at the elite level of society, but for go-getter communities with a can-do attitude, they are worth their weight in gold.
The emphasis the DA and others like the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) has in recent years and months placed on private-sector participation is just as important.
Electoral mandates
What Brink and Zille specifically have been emphasising is how important it is for voters to give their party and trustworthy coalition partners a real mandate to get things done and proceed with vigour.
Now, as far as the ballot goes, that is sound advice. But local communities are by themselves living, breathing, organic mandates.
If a community wants to boom-off a side street that has been causing problems, like a high frequency of accidents, the locus of ultimate decision-making authority must lie inside and with the community, not with bureaucrats or some council. The community gives the mandate, so it must be done.
Yes, maybe there are some formalities to comply with, as far as notification of intention is concerned, but this should not be a matter of seeking authorisation.
The ballot alone cannot be our salvation. Part of it, maybe – but the fundamental formal configuration of local government does not lend itself to that saving.
The incentive structure is broken by centralisation. The need for municipal work will always be greater in Orange Farm or Hammanskraal, even though the primary ratepayers live in Sandton or Menlo Park. Cross-subsidisation is meant to be an “extra”, whereby the ratepayers are first satisfied, and only then does what remains go to help the needy.
But in South African municipal politics, cross-subsidisation is one of the key imperatives. Even if you are a social democrat or a socialist, you must understand that the redistribution of wealth is not something that is meant to occur at the municipal level. This is a race to the bottom that not even Cape Town is fully immune to.
Our economy is not growing at all, but the burden on our cities is, astronomically, in large part because of people who do not become net contributors to the municipal fiscus. This is a game that cannot be won, even by the most well-intentioned, capable municipal managers and politicians, because of the underlying logic and operation of the system. There might be moments of relief, but the trend is visible to everyone who cares to look.
Voting and expectation
This is why we need to participate in the ballot, but fundamentally reconfigure our expectations and willingness to solve local problems ourselves, hopefully with municipal cooperation, but if necessary, without.
None of us win any brownie points for being law-abiding while we watch our vital interests and those of our families and communities sometimes literally go up in flames. To the religiously inclined among us, God will not pat us on the back for that, nor, for the less religious, will any awards for sacrificing yourselves or your families for a foreseeably failed political project be handed out.
It does not serve us in the long-term to put all our hopes on overwhelming political mandates being given to specific political parties. It might well be that come election day, these parties do not get those mandates.
We can then say, “Well, the voters are to blame, and they must take their medicine,” but that is highly cynical.
The people who voted DA and FF+ and African Christian Democratic Party, and so on, are the people who need to be allowed to state-proof their communities and neighbourhoods against further collapse. Telling these people that they need to wait another five years is to beg for brain-drain, semigration, and emigration.
Permission structures
We can say that the first prize is a well-intentioned and capacitated municipality being elected in November.
But we need to start creating the permission structures for the second prize.
These permission structures are not laws or regulations.
A permission structure is a psychological, emotional, rhetorical, and discursive framework that gives people and communities a structured and safe way to change their behaviour without feeling that they are doing something foolish, wrong, or immoral. We, and that includes our political visionaries, need to say that it is okay to save yourself, as a matter of necessity, even if you have not yet received a formal letter from the Council saying so.
Chaos, one might say? No, but go walk our streets right this second, and see the disorder of this order.
These two things, ballot and build-it, can work in tandem.
But what we must avoid at all costs is retaining the current permission structure that says, explicitly, that you must tolerate the collapse unless those responsible for the collapse authorise you to do something about it. No.
Now, you might ask, what does this mean in practice? What do we do?
I cannot answer that in the abstract.
I have alluded to some examples and real-world events above, but ultimately each situation is going to be different, with its own needs, contexts, sensitivities, and risks. This is a highly dynamic topic.
But what we have been trying to do here, and to their credit the Solidarity Movement, AfriForum, and Sakeliga, have been doing it as well, is to shift mindsets.
Because in a way, that is the more difficult and important part of this equation.
You need to generate a new permission structure and shift people’s frame of reference away from waiting for formal politics to help them, towards a mentality and mindset where they understand that their responsibility to themselves and their families and their neighbours still exists even, and especially, when formal politics is absent. Once this mental leap is made, the practical, tangible solutions reveal themselves to the people in the circumstances.
[Image: Kuhle Baloyi on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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