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Cape Town - As the ANC ratchets up its pre-election fire and brimstone on how it plans to turn local government around and make its councillors more accountable, members of parliament’s opposition benches – especially the Democratic Alliance – are brimming with anticipation.
They believe there’s enough dissatisfaction with ANC-led municipalities for there to be significant votes shifted in their favour.
Voter dissatisfaction in cities and towns countrywide is indeed well documented. Aside from research confirming public confidence in local government has waned and, apart from the government’s own development indicators that acknowledge good governance is still firmly in the worst “regression” category, public protests against poor government services have increased in frequency and violence since 2007 (the same year Jacob Zuma was elected ANC president).
While official statistics claim 82.6% of all households now have access to electricity and 83.3% have running water, the post-recession reality hasn’t helped Zuma’s pro-poor, populist promises.
Cash-strapped municipalities are having to make significant budget cuts.
For example, the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality has slashed budgets for several pro-poor infrastructure projects. The municipality has had to cut almost R800m from its 2010/2011 budget.
The ANC is also going to have to explain why municipalities such as Buffalo City in the Eastern Cape can’t account for more than half of its R3.7bn/year budget for the 2009/2010 financial year.
The province’s auditor-general, Singa Ngqwala, blames the city’s poor performance on the suspension of key officials, dismal financial skills, political in-fighting and deficient supply chain management.
While Parliament’s public accounts committee warns how vulnerable the system is to corruption, Derek Powell, of the Local Democracy, Peace and Human Security Unit at UWC’s Community Law Centre, cautions not all mismanagement is graft.
Much has to do with unskilled staff who aren’t able to implement complex systems, such as the Municipal Finance Management Act.
However, that doesn’t detract from the fact that mind-bending unaccounted for sums of money grab headlines regularly.
Voters have taken to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction. According to a UWC study about community protests (against government services) – conducted by Harvard Law School researcher and visiting fellow Hirsch Jain – there were an average of 8.73 protests/month throughout SA in 2007.
That increased in 2008 to 9.83/month. In 2009 the average number of protests almost doubled to 19.18/month. Community protests remained a frequent occurrence throughout first-half 2010 (January to June), with a monthly average of 16.33 protests countrywide.
July 2009 and March 2010 featured unprecedented levels of protest (at 37 and 38 respectively).
So the question is: will ANC voters express their dissatisfaction at the 2011 ballot box by giving their vote to an opposition party, especially in provinces such as Gauteng, where the most protests have been recorded and where municipalities like the City of Johannesburg have bungled the most basic functions, such as billings?
Politics Professor Sipho Seepe agrees the ANC will come under increasing pressure from young voters with no memory of the struggle or 1994.
They’ll judge the party on performance, not history. But that’s not a threat for the ANC at this year’s municipal polls. Why?
First, says Seepe, because politics is still seen through the lens of race in SA (blacks vote for the ANC and those who don’t are somehow against reform).
Second, public protests tend to be against a particular person and not the party running the municipality. Protests are calls for correction rather than condemnation of the ANC.
While Seepe also points out many protests are billed as services delivery protests but are actually fuelled by individuals seeking positions themselves, he argues the ANC understands communities don’t like councillors imposed on them by the ANC and, consequently, have come up with “something of a trump card” for this election.
“The ANC has been very clever in introducing a system where the community itself will select people from the community. People who stand as councillors will be people they know,” says Seepe.
Seepe’s arguments dovetail with earlier research conducted by Wits Professor Susan Booysen. She concludes that, far from voting the incumbent party out, protesting communities end up returning it to office.
Powell says the 2011 election will be a test of that theory.
“If it occurs it will be a signal that protests – not elections – are the main mechanism for calling elected local officials to account and hence that local democracy isn’t maturing,” he said.
Powell argues if personal agendas, divisions and systemic issues are ever to be countered a completely different system of representative democracy is required at municipal level.
“It’s not just the ANC-led councils that experience systemic (delivery) problems. But the fact is our electoral system is a ‘winner takes all’ one, which means there’s no incentive for different political parties in a municipality to work together – because towns/cities political fault lines tend to track historical economic inequalities.
“What we need is a system that encourages parties to work together and to find compromises. We had that type of system in the early 1990s, where parties were all represented in executive decision-making and forced to work together,” says Powell. She says that would go a long way to establish mature politics and make the system more accountable.
* This article was first published in Finweek.
* To read more Finweek articles, click here.
They believe there’s enough dissatisfaction with ANC-led municipalities for there to be significant votes shifted in their favour.
Voter dissatisfaction in cities and towns countrywide is indeed well documented. Aside from research confirming public confidence in local government has waned and, apart from the government’s own development indicators that acknowledge good governance is still firmly in the worst “regression” category, public protests against poor government services have increased in frequency and violence since 2007 (the same year Jacob Zuma was elected ANC president).
While official statistics claim 82.6% of all households now have access to electricity and 83.3% have running water, the post-recession reality hasn’t helped Zuma’s pro-poor, populist promises.
Cash-strapped municipalities are having to make significant budget cuts.
For example, the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality has slashed budgets for several pro-poor infrastructure projects. The municipality has had to cut almost R800m from its 2010/2011 budget.
The ANC is also going to have to explain why municipalities such as Buffalo City in the Eastern Cape can’t account for more than half of its R3.7bn/year budget for the 2009/2010 financial year.
The province’s auditor-general, Singa Ngqwala, blames the city’s poor performance on the suspension of key officials, dismal financial skills, political in-fighting and deficient supply chain management.
While Parliament’s public accounts committee warns how vulnerable the system is to corruption, Derek Powell, of the Local Democracy, Peace and Human Security Unit at UWC’s Community Law Centre, cautions not all mismanagement is graft.
Much has to do with unskilled staff who aren’t able to implement complex systems, such as the Municipal Finance Management Act.
However, that doesn’t detract from the fact that mind-bending unaccounted for sums of money grab headlines regularly.
Voters have taken to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction. According to a UWC study about community protests (against government services) – conducted by Harvard Law School researcher and visiting fellow Hirsch Jain – there were an average of 8.73 protests/month throughout SA in 2007.
That increased in 2008 to 9.83/month. In 2009 the average number of protests almost doubled to 19.18/month. Community protests remained a frequent occurrence throughout first-half 2010 (January to June), with a monthly average of 16.33 protests countrywide.
July 2009 and March 2010 featured unprecedented levels of protest (at 37 and 38 respectively).
So the question is: will ANC voters express their dissatisfaction at the 2011 ballot box by giving their vote to an opposition party, especially in provinces such as Gauteng, where the most protests have been recorded and where municipalities like the City of Johannesburg have bungled the most basic functions, such as billings?
Politics Professor Sipho Seepe agrees the ANC will come under increasing pressure from young voters with no memory of the struggle or 1994.
They’ll judge the party on performance, not history. But that’s not a threat for the ANC at this year’s municipal polls. Why?
First, says Seepe, because politics is still seen through the lens of race in SA (blacks vote for the ANC and those who don’t are somehow against reform).
Second, public protests tend to be against a particular person and not the party running the municipality. Protests are calls for correction rather than condemnation of the ANC.
While Seepe also points out many protests are billed as services delivery protests but are actually fuelled by individuals seeking positions themselves, he argues the ANC understands communities don’t like councillors imposed on them by the ANC and, consequently, have come up with “something of a trump card” for this election.
“The ANC has been very clever in introducing a system where the community itself will select people from the community. People who stand as councillors will be people they know,” says Seepe.
Seepe’s arguments dovetail with earlier research conducted by Wits Professor Susan Booysen. She concludes that, far from voting the incumbent party out, protesting communities end up returning it to office.
Powell says the 2011 election will be a test of that theory.
“If it occurs it will be a signal that protests – not elections – are the main mechanism for calling elected local officials to account and hence that local democracy isn’t maturing,” he said.
Powell argues if personal agendas, divisions and systemic issues are ever to be countered a completely different system of representative democracy is required at municipal level.
“It’s not just the ANC-led councils that experience systemic (delivery) problems. But the fact is our electoral system is a ‘winner takes all’ one, which means there’s no incentive for different political parties in a municipality to work together – because towns/cities political fault lines tend to track historical economic inequalities.
“What we need is a system that encourages parties to work together and to find compromises. We had that type of system in the early 1990s, where parties were all represented in executive decision-making and forced to work together,” says Powell. She says that would go a long way to establish mature politics and make the system more accountable.
* This article was first published in Finweek.
* To read more Finweek articles, click here.
