Promising improvements in people’s standards of living is a de rigueur part of a South African election. Back in 1995, at the time of the first post-transition local election, the ANC had as its slogan, “Let’s make it happen where we live”.
This was the successor to “A better life for all”, both catchy if banal slogans that encompassed uncontroversial and hopeful sentiments.
It’s a measure of how far South Africa has fallen that the dominant conversation about the upcoming polls is about something more elemental: how can we get local government working again? Or working for the first time?
Local government is not only a set of administrative institutions. Across the world, it is recognised as a key determinant of the business environment, shaping decisions by entrepreneurs and investors as to where to sink their money. In South Africa, local government is enjoined to take an active role in doing so. The principle of “developmental” local government is built into the system design, from the Constitution onwards.
In practice, the record on this has been uneven and hardly exemplary. Turning local government around is still about more than merely institutional functionality, and revitalised municipalities stand to deliver a significant return in terms of economic growth.
All South African municipalities are required to produce an Integrated Development Plan, setting out a strategy for broad community upliftment. The demands for doing so are extensive and intricate, pairing local economic development with a raft of other requirements, such as public participation, spatial planning and environmental stewardship. And, of course, the ubiquitous demand for “transformation”.
On paper, this is taken seriously, and not only in election campaigns. Government officials repeatedly exhort municipalities to live up to their growth and development mandates. A national conference was held in April on this theme, with an emphasis on the role of small business.
As with the state, a great deal is made of the need for municipalities to provide support to business enterprises, to promote investment and so on.
It’s a tall order, and one whose execution is frequently – perhaps invariably – compromised by a dearth of capacity to act competently.
State of municipal governance
Indeed, the state of municipal governance is arguably now one of the central brakes on local economic development. There is some survey evidence confirming that this is how businesspeople see it, notably research work by the erstwhile Small Business Project, and more recently by the Small Business Institute and the Brenthurst Foundation.
A report published by the Brenthurst Foundation in 2024 found that even in well-performing municipalities, there was a widespread sentiment among small businesspeople that municipal performance had a negative impact on their operations. Some 60% of those surveyed reported losing revenue as a result of municipal under-performance – and in the worst performing municipalities, a staggering 93% had had to invest in systems to mitigate failure. All told, it bespeaks a chronic lack of confidence in municipal performance, and the view that this expenditure is well justified. Much the same impression comes from an SBI study in 2022/23: “It appears as if despondency has set in regarding the functionality of business support systems in the municipalities”. There were very low satisfaction levels with regards to service delivery by municipalities to the businesses.
Finally, the results indicate low levels of satisfaction associated with municipal officials being available to deal with queries and requests, their approachability, politeness and courtesy, honesty, information-sharing, and willingness to remedy mistakes.
The takeaway from this is that the material upliftment, the integrated development planning and the local economic development have to start with building a modicum of capacity. Good governance is not possible without the staff first being able to perform basic governance. Providing support for local growth and development is only possible where government is not undermining them.
It is folly to expect a municipality to run an effective local development agency when it is unable to render accurate bills, collect revenue due, maintain its roads and water pipes, reliably keep the power on, expeditiously deal with planning or licencing applications, or enforce its by-laws.
Mundane functions
Local economic development as an idea or an aspiration must be retained. But it must be recognised that economic development starts with the mundane functions of governance. Functioning local administration should be an accepted and uncontroversial norm. Get this right, and it will make the most important contribution it can make to the local economy.
Without getting the administrative and service basics right, there is just about no case that can be made for the competitiveness of a locality. No binder of elaborate plans, AI-written speeches at conferences, or promises of “support” are likely to compensate for roads that can’t carry traffic or taps that are permanently dry.
Think of this as a hierarchy to the economic contributions that local government can make. The higher-order functions – attracting investment, developing business-support programmes, building skills partnerships and promoting entrepreneurship – matter. But they depend on the lower-order functions being in place.
The temptation, however, has invariably been to start at the other end: to announce another economic-development strategy, establish another programme or hold another conference promising jobs and investment. Over decades, South Africa has had plenty of these. What it has lacked is attention to the institutions expected to deliver them.
Modest starting point
Getting local economies moving may ultimately require a modest starting point, something that rolls back to its administrative imperatives, and accepts the current limits to its developmental capacities.
Fortunately, in some respects, the two cannot be separated, and improving the former will be of substantive benefit to the latter. If that can be achieved, “making it happen where we live” might finally become less an election slogan than a description of how local government actually operates.
This article, which draws on the research for a forthcoming paper on local government, which is being produced with the generous support of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.
[Image: Johannesburg, 2015. Andrew Moore – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43204285]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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