South Africa’s municipalities, with a few notable exceptions, are spiralling into an ever-deeper mess. Many are now in a cadre-created management and political rut from which there is an evident lack of political will to extricate them.
The best hope for now is that the piles of uncollected garbage, filthy streets, sewage overflows, water and power cuts, robots that do not work, and corruption will force residents to find their own solutions.
The extent to which the municipal service delivery disaster will translate into the replacement of councils at next year’s local government elections is doubtful. ANC rule in many areas is, for the time being, seemingly entrenched. The party seems able to get by successfully with promises of change and renewal.
Despite the atrocious delivery record, municipalities were given an extra R20bn as part of the government’s emergency Covid-19 response package.
Warning from the AG
The Auditor General (AG) last week released the annual report on municipal finances for the financial year ending in 2019. This report, entitled “Not much to go around, yet not the right hands at the till”, should be a political bombshell. The report presented a picture of steep decline, poor accountability, lack of capacity, and in most cases an absence of political will to improve the situation.
Only eight percent, which translates into 20 of South Africa’s 257 municipalities, received clean audits. Most of the clean audits went to DA-run municipalities in the Western Cape, but there are still problems in this province.
The first message of the AG’s report was that the lack of adherence to tight financial controls and accounting guidelines opens up local governments to massive fraud and abuse. The second message is that sources of revenue are on the decline. Businesses have a diminishing ability to pay or increasingly “completely refuse to pay” the municipality.
Many municipalities are highly indebted, are unable to pay creditors on time, often cannot pay Eskom for power, and rely heavily on grants from the national government. Yet they pay salaries, which in some of the largest metros have increased way over the inflation rate over the past decade.
Irregular spending, a term for spending that does not conform to legislative requirements, amounted to R32 bn, the equivalent to about half of the amount municipalities receive from the national government.
Spending on consultants rose by nearly 60 percent to R1.26 billion from the previous financial year. But the AG’s report says these services were of little use. Some 59 percent of financial statements submitted for auditing included material misstatements in areas in which the consultants had worked.
South Africans taking matters into their own hands
Stories of municipal turnarounds are rare, but the story of Okhahlamba in Bergville in KwaZulu-Natal is one. This municipality has had a clean audit for the past four years. The Auditor General’s report says the municipal finance team was adequately resourced and understood what needed to be done. The key has been tight financial controls, which reflect overall good management.
Earlier this week the DA leaked a report that is allegedly a confidential report of how the government envisages a post-Covid South Africa. The report shows the ruling party recognises the problem of atrociously managed municipalities, although its proposed solution is questionable. The document describes the Covid-19 as a chance for the “massive re-organisation of the state” to take the National Command Council model down to the local level. The “District Development Model and Command Council System” would involve new governance structures at local level and the building of compacts with businesses and communities. The DA has rightly questioned whether this is a ruse to bypass elected structures. How this would solve local problems is open to question, but it might well involve a lot more government.
Whatever “massive reorganisation of the state” is ultimately imposed, those who live in municipal disaster areas require services. Plan Bs are emerging in some big cities and the smallest of dorps.
The most well-known case is that of Harrismith where a long period of water shortages spurred Petrus Claassen van Eeden, a farmer, and Sam Twala, a driving instructor and community leader, into getting the town’s water flowing. The farmer brought in pumps and the community leader mobilised labour to do the job. With the help of cash from business, they also removed rubbish and filled potholes.
The BBC reported in February on Harrismith, “a town that seemed to have become the symbol of a country rotting from the bottom up.” With an unpaid electricity bill and the council in administration and service delivery protests, the volunteers decided to act instead of waiting for the council
SA Day is an organisation which has worked to encourage improvement in communities through partnerships in troubled towns such as Harrismith, Coligny, and Cradock.
Barend la Grange from SA Day says its advice for communities wishing to turn towns around is to go first for the easy victories. SA Day favours a Clean, Repair, Paint, and Plant (CRPP) approach in the towns it advises. The idea is that the community, and ideally, the council, should join forces to do work that is initially not too ambitious.
In Coligny, the town in North West where businesses were burned and looted after two white farm hands were charged with the murder of a young black resident in 2017, businesses and the community realised something had to be done. Township volunteers joined with local farmers and businesses to clean up streets, fill potholes, and give buildings on the main street a new coat of paint. Farmers brought in workers and equipment, local businesses donated the paint and tar to fill the potholes, and the volunteers helped with jobs.
“The Great Cradock Clean-up”, as described in Country Life, began after residents, infuriated by water and electricity cut-offs, sewage overflows, and blocked drains, formed the Cradock Community Forum WhatsApp group.
Even in Sandton, Johannesburg, local business is having to pick up the municipal slack. The Sandton Central Management District was set up by commercial property owners to ensure public safety and a clean environment, and employs a team of public safety “ambassadors”, a cleaning staff to provide a 24-hours a day, seven-days a week service.
The fury of ratepayers is bound to rise if councils seek to impose higher rates in the depressed post-lockdown environment. In the proposed Johannesburg budget, the plan was for a 4.9 percent increase in rates to bring in R1bn in revenue. According to the Organisation for Undoing Tax Abuse, some R840m of this would go towards salary increases. That is something that could well push ratepayers into thoughts of a rate boycott.
Businesses pay taxes and rent, but are also having to make up for the failings of both central and local government. For the moment many accept this as the cost of doing business, but ultimately, as this rises, they will have to pass on the cost to clients. There is a limit to largesse.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, subscribe to the Daily Friend
Image by Gia Conte-Patel from Pixabay