Steuart Wright: East London
THE birth of the Eastern Cape province has been traumatic and the new government is sweating to curb a slide into anarchy.
For the ANC-dominated provincial government its initial period in power has been a baptism of fire, with a strike by Transkei Police, a mutiny by Transkei soldiers, blockades on national roads by protesting municipal employees and parastatal workers, a taxi war, civil service strikes, pillaging of marine resources on the Transkei coast and rampant lawlessness throughout the province.
Nine months of damage control have done little to instil confidence in the Bisho government faced with the daunting task of unravelling the tangle of three overlapping apartheid-inherited administrations.
The weak and ponderous leadership of 74-year-old Premier Raymond Mhlaba hasn’t helped.
“You find those in government have had to be engaged in fire-fighting instead of seeing to the smooth and fast amalgamation of administrations from the former Transkei, Ciskei and the old Republic of South Africa,” says Eastern Cape ANC Chairman Dumisani Mafu.
Barely a month after its inauguration the government was sent scurrying to attend to a strike by Transkei Police over salary adjustments and rapid promotions demanded by junior officers. Transkei Police top brass have dug in their heels and their reluctance to accede to their subordinates’ demands has seen morale in the force plummet.
This culminated in the slaying on December 13 of top Transkei policeman General Mdluli Mbulawa, just days after bombshell disclosures by members of the provincial legislature of a virtual collapse of policing in the former homeland. There is a strong suspicion that Mbulawa died in a hail of automatic rifle fire outside his Umtata home because of discontent among junior officers who perceived Mbulawa as an obstacle to promotion and pay improvements.
Scenes like these foster the image of a province which provincial National Party leader and cabinet member Dr Tertius Delport describes as being on the “brink of anarchy”.
“Right through the province, from Umzimkulu to Willowmore, the safety and security of our people cannot be guaranteed,” provincial safety and security select committee chairman Mzimasi Mangcotywa declared in a parliamentary address on the sad state of policing in the Transkei region.
Like many of the crises faced by the Bisho government, the general state of lawlessness and police strikes in the former homeland are nothing new — they are leftovers of a failed apartheid policy.
But the Bisho government has failed to tackle the crisis head on. Safety and security MEC Maliza Mpehle says the policing crisis is a case of “apartheid chickens coming home to roost”, but as yet he has taken no concrete steps to resolve the crisis. Instead, he is awaiting the outcome of a national government investigation into the salary and promotion debacle.
His problems are compounded by national government delays in permitting the appointment of a single police commissioner for the province. At the moment three regional police forces, which are unco-ordinated, are losing the battle against crime.
This dragging of feet is affecting the entire administration. It’s a kind of Catch-22: the government’s fighting fires and can’t set up the new administration, but needs a new administration to put out the flames.
Politicians and observers regard the delay in establishing a provincial Public Service Commission as the government’s biggest failure in its first nine months in power.
The province’s novice parliamentarians patted themselves on the back after they passed the Public Service Commissions Act along with four other Bills, but after various delays it was only signed into existence by Mhlaba in mid-September.
This has been the Eastern Cape experience: laws are being passed, the legislature is working, but its decisions are not being translated into action by the administration.
Public Administration MEC Ezra Sigwela says the Act unnecessarily stipulates a further 21-day delay to allow for the advertisement of posts. This was followed by a time-consuming shortlisting and interviewing process. The commission was finally appointed early last month.
“It was too much. At the time I felt we should revisit that legislation because we were not obliged to have it (the 21-day delay) in law,” he says.
Now he is faced with finding posts for about 130 000 civil servants whose jobs are guaranteed in the new constitution. But the unified administration will have drastically fewer positions.
He says the task will be insurmountable unless the provincial government moves on implementing the reconstruction and development programme so surplus bureaucrats can be deployed in its projects, “or we will have to pay people to dig holes and fill them again to keep them busy”.
Mafu believes the Eastern Cape government is moving too slowly on the RDP. Although it has launched the RDP with an urban development programme for the East London’s Duncan Village township, Mafu says it should have done more.
“The government must prioritise in terms of its delivery. You can’t talk about delivering houses in the first six months but there are other smaller projects such as bringing water and electricity to rural areas which it could have moved on,” he says.
Despite his criticism he is satisfied with the provincial government’s overall performance: “The government has performed well, but saying well doesn’t mean it was the best. There is still room for improvement.”
Looking at its successes, he points to the five Bills passed by the legislature, the establishment of 14 select committees and the replacement of former education and culture MEC Neela Hoosain with dynamic and energetic Nosimo Balindlela.
Indeed, it’s not all bad news. The government has declared war on the Western Cape’s dominance of Eastern Cape fishing waters and is determined to take control of a domestic industry it says can create 5 000 jobs overnight. This is a first step towards reversing the region’s past neglect under the old dispensation.
It’s easy to use the tired argument that the problems of the present are a result of the apartheid past, but in the Eastern Cape this is more true than in any other province. The question that remains to be answered is whether the administration of veteran Raymond Mhlaba can meet such a huge challenge. — Ecna