Paul Stober
THE government has made it clear that South Africa’s overgrown development sector will have to be cut back and that only those organisations which can efficiently deliver services will survive in the new South Africa.
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) active in 15 key development sectors held a summit last weekend to define their role in the reconstruction and development programme (RDP), the ANC’s economic plan to redress apartheid’s wrongs.
“I think there was an acceptance that NGOs have a role to play,” said conference convenor, Yogesh Narsing of Kagiso Trust, which serves as the major conduit for European Union development aid.
The minister in charge of the RDP, Jay Naidoo, insisted NGOs had an important role to play in the RDP. “We expect NGOs to not only help design and implement policies, but also to serve as judges of reconstruction and development initiatives,” he said in his keynote address. But this bland acceptance of the continued existence of NGOs at the summit hides the fact that while the new government has made a policy commitment to accommodating NGOs in the RDP, it is — in many ways — in competition with them for resources.
On Tuesday, RDP spokesman Bernie Fanaroff, commenting on government efforts to raise foreign money for its RDP fund and co- ordinate its development efforts with South African NGOs, is reported to have said: “They (NGOs) will not be forced to close but have been asked to examine if they are still relevant.”
The government is undoubtedly eyeing the large amount of overseas development aid which flows to NGOs. During 1993, South Africa received around US$307- million worth of aid, a large part of which was spent on NGOs. NGO activists took the obvious point — the government cannot afford to bail out NGOs who are running into funding problems as foreign donors change their priorities now that South Africa has a democratic government.
South Africa has about 50 000 NGOs working in the fields of human rights, resource development, housing, trade unions and rural development, among others. They have a reputation, among the mass based organisations and communities in which they work, for being territorial, extremely competitive for resources and having erratic success with many of their projects. Now, NGO activists have to accept that only those organisations which can deliver skills and services — efficiently and creatively enough to compete with government and the private sector — will survive in the new South Africa.
At the summit, Naidoo said: “NGOs must adopt transparent processes and operate in a manner that re-sponds with accountability and dem-ocracy to the communities they serve.”
Naidoo also made it clear that the government had no intention of dealing with thousands of different organisations and NGOs would have to get a representative body together — something which has eluded them so far.
After the summit, delegates said in a statement: ”We have agreed to institute a process to deliver a nationally representative structure which would be a legitimate voice of NGOs.”
If NGOs successfully secure a meaningful role in the RDP, they will be an invaluable fund of knowledge and experience to the government, even if it is only at the level of telling them what not to do.
Collectively, NGOs probably have more experience in empowering and developing communities than the ANC-led government, which has the challenge of meeting township resident’s expectations quickly.
NGO activists point out that if the ANC is serious about “a people-driven, people- centred RDP”, communities must be given the skills to use re-sources the government makes available to them — an area NGOs have traditionally staked out as their own.