With the election over, the hard part now begins. Clichéd, trite, but accurate.
Whoever takes office across most of the country now inherits the responsibility of attempting to make its local administrations function. The campaign period has made apparent how difficult this will be.
Municipal dysfunction has been a concern for South Africa for the better part of three decades, even before the new system was inaugurated, and now it is existential.
Local-level failures are corroding people’s quality of life, and disincentivising business activity. Johannesburg is struggling with water outages – not a crisis, according to the outgoing mayor Dada Morero – and went to the polls with uncollected garbage piling up on the pavements. (A last-minute deal saw the City give in to municipal strikers’ demands – precisely the deal that Treasury had earlier in the year said was impermissible.) Johannesburg is by no means the worst example.
While the election campaign has understandably consumed most public attention, it was accompanied by an equally important policy discussion about the future of the local government system.
This was embodied in the White Paper on local government, which was completed in September and officially launched on 22 October, a mere two weeks before the polls opened, although a precursor Review document had been circulating for months.
The White Paper sets out some potentially far-reaching changes to the structure and role of local governments. Refreshingly, it concedes that the one-size-fits-all approach has failed, and that the future demands a differentiated system. It seems to accept that ongoing centralisation is not necessarily a solution (a concern with the Review), and that the intervention framework was designed for challenges in individual municipalities, not for the sort of widespread, systemic failure that South Africa is facing.
Significant changes are envisaged, and it will take considerable dexterity at leadership and management to navigate them.
Institutions of governance
Institutions of governance are fundamentally the conjunction of the people who staff them, and the systems created to channel and incentivise them. This is so even more for the administrations that are meant to manage the day-to-day lives of the country’s municipalities than it is for the politicians who are elected to preside over them.
Unfit staff, indifferent management, and perverse incentives have denied South Africans the robust institutions they counted on, and this is reflected in the decay in so many towns and cities.
The (nominal) principle behind public administration is that politicians provide leadership, and an impartial, professional public service executes their mandate, standing ready to do likewise for a successor government of a different political stripe. This has not been the reality. Since the 1990s, the ANC made it plain that its vision of transformation – a curiously imprecise term that nevertheless has taken on a doctrinal significance – involved control by the party of all centres of influence (“levers of power” in its nomenclature) in society. It went as far as formalising this with an acknowledged but opaque strategy of “cadre deployment”.
To the credit of its authors, the White Paper not only takes this on, but forthrightly describes the impulses behind the dysfunction. Discussing management and appointments, it reads:
“Political or factional suitability, patronage and so-called cadre deployment must not substitute for merit, integrity and demonstrable competence or influence the recruitment and appointment process.”
Political meddling in appointments and a disregard for qualifications, skills and experience have long been a problem in local government, and has been acknowledged before. As long ago as 2009, the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs produced a study which drew attention to “problems with the political administrative interface”. This would not be the last time official analyses pointed to this as a problem.
Impermissible
The previous year, the Eastern Cape High Court had found cadre deployment to be impermissible, as it amounted to the unwarranted influence of an outside body on an official decision. More recently, the Zondo Commission slated the practice as lacking any constitutional and legal justification.
Indeed, in skewing lines of accountability and conferring political protection, the system that cadre deployment created has transitioned into one that breeds outright criminality. If formal institutional mechanisms are rendered ineffective in demanding probity and enforcing consequences for malfeasance, it’s a short journey to using that immunity for self-enrichment, or to the benefit of the syndicates that are bleeding municipalities dry.
New municipal leaders will have to deal with the fallout, if they are able.
The local polls signal the conclusion of another unhappy chapter in President Ramaphosa’s incumbency. It should not be forgotten that the results are a judgement on the failure of his administration to build a “capable state”. Intrinsic to the ANC’s vision of development, this demanded the highest standards from those who staffed it. But professionalism lost out to politics, and he and his party could not shift their paradigm. Even in front of the Zondo Commission the President defended cadre deployment as a positive good for the country.
Interestingly, as this column pointed out last week, President Ramaphosa belated admitted the damage his party’s approach to the municipal public service had done, referring to having “underestimated” the corrosive impact of wilful politicisation and a disregard for the technical and managerial skills that actually make institutions work.
Those consequences have been ruinous.
Incidentally, these sentiments were echoed by the acting police minister, Firoz Cachalia, on his plans for police reform. He is quoted by the Daily Maverick as saying:
“I want to depoliticise policing. I want to change an environment in which police management thinks they must curry favour with politicians. Appointments should be merit-based.”
Blood sport
Given that this election has demonstrated that South African politics is a blood sport (around 50 politically linked assassinations having been recorded during the year), a revitalised law-and-order ecosystem is essential to getting local government back on track.
The rudiments of solutions are therefore clear: make merit – qualifications, experience, aptitude – the only criterion for appointment. Abandon cadre deployment publicly, without qualification. Allow managers to manage their staff. Institute consequences for negligence and failure, where necessary through legal sanctions. Let politicians take the political decisions and deal with the political heat, and let officials carry on with the administration of South Africa’s towns and cities.
This should hardly be contentious.
These steps follow logically not only from the tenor of the White Paper (and a number of other state initiatives, not least of which is the framework for the “professionalisation” of the public service), or from the words of President Ramaphosa or Minister Cachalia, but from the foundational vision of public administration in the Constitution. The latter sets out the requirements for South Africa’s public administration at length in Chapter 10, and provides a clear denunciation of politicisation:
“No employee of the public service may be favoured or prejudiced only because that person supports a particular political party or cause.”
Or, as President Ramaphosa said:
“The exercise of accountability must be fair, lawful and consistent, regardless of status, political affiliation or personal connections.”
Not easy
Indeed. This is obvious, but not easy. Enormous volumes of political capital, personal loyalty and the spoils of corruption have been invested over a long time in not doing so. It is by no means certain that the rump ANC or any of its offshoot parties are ready to make that break – or if the brand of governance they have espoused would make it possible. Nor is it a foregone conclusion that any new incumbent would be immune to these temptations.
But unless they step decisively away from this failed paradigm, there will be no meaningful prospect of reform, however much systems and institutions are rearranged.
This is where the hard work needs to happen.
[Image: Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash]
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