Jay Naidoo
MENTION the “word” RDP and what’s the reaction? People look around for the bricks and houses. Where are the houses one year after? How many are there? Yes, ultimately, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) is about putting roofs over people’s heads and food on the table. But before getting there, we need to transform our government and our country.
In fact, the RDP can be called the Transformation and Development Programme. Because that’s what the RDP is all about: transformation. You can’t develop and then transform. You have to transform first. Transform what? To start off with, transform how people think so that they can deliver what should be delivered.
Yes, there could have been a few hundred thousand houses built by now. There are contractors from all over the world lining up in front of the RDP Office. They have the expertise, they have the manpower, they have the perfect houses for our kind of people and weather and country. They thought of everything — even of the perfect methods of payment.
They thought of everything except one thing, one crucial thing: our economy. The RDP is about getting our economy going, about getting jobs for our people, getting expertise for our country.
Our first year in government has been a very hectic one even though you can’t see the millions of bricks being laid. Our achievement is not quantifiable. It is about transforming the culture, the minds of people, and especially of government.
First and foremost, we have to change the attitude of the civil service. The reality today is that if you go into a hospital or a school or a post office, you find that the attitude of the people employed by government is not one of providing a service to the people.
That’s why we are introducing what we call the performance assessment system. This must be a results oriented and customer-friendly civil service. There must be a way for the public to assess whether they are getting the service that they require or that they want. The public must be able to assess whether the government and its departments have achieved the goals and targets they have set.
One of the biggest problems we have now is asking the civil service to perform RDP tasks. For example, we send the people of the current civil service into a community. The criteria of the RDP, we say, is not to do work for the community but to work with it. Working with the community is a much slower process indeed. But it is a much more effective and sustainable one, a process that will ensure growth in the economy and the ability of people to direct their own lives.
Take the Moretele water project. This project has begun bringing water to 150 000 people in 17 communities in Moretele 1, north of Pretoria. We didn’t send in five engineers — a method of working that would have been used in the past — to work out what people need, where they need it, why they need it and then send in big contractors to do the work for them. Working with the community is helping them build, use, exploit, and manage their own resources.
We went in to work with the people of the communities, working out with them which village will get water first, how long it will take for all the villages to get water, where the taps will be. We then worked out with the community who should be employed and trained, thus creating the potential for small businesses to be created to help run the project. What is happening in Moretele is economic and social development.
This is a very important goal of the RDP: To change the culture of people for them to see that meeting basic needs of people is a way of building the economy. Development is too often seen as a burden on the economy. The RDP wants to prove the contrary.
So delivering houses is much more than laying the bricks. Who lays them? Where? How? For whom? Delivering houses is like building a big puzzle. We have to sort out who are the stakeholders.
Take the Katorus example, a big urban renewal project on the East Rand. The first phase of the project was to clean up the townships, restore the services, repair the roads, schools and playgrounds. The second phase is repairing the houses that were illegally occupied and destroyed in the violence. But to do that, we had to have negotiation and a political settlement between the hostel dwellers, who are mainly IFP, and the township dwellers, who are mainly ANC. We could have just sent in the police to evict those who were illegally occupying the homes — methods of the past — but it would have started another war. Development can cause conflict if not managed properly.
Another example is Alexandra township. There are so many different communities that require housing — the people living in the backyards of the township’s houses, those who were displaced by violence, those who are living in hostels — they all want housing and they all want housing now and first! We therefore have to organise that community, to set up a local development forum with every single stakeholder, from the stokvels to the hostel dwellers, from the IFP to the ANC, from the women’s organisations to business and the civics. And then you have to find an agreement about where you start the housing, who gets the first houses and why. If you don’t do that you will have wonderful houses standing empty, surrounded by conflict.
Once you have identified the stakeholders, your other piece of the puzzle is the subsidy system. Government provided this, a subsidy system of between R5 000 and R15 000, depending on what you earn. There are now 196 000 subsidies!
But that is still not enough. R15 000 is not enough to build a house. You have to get the banks to lend people money. Banks didn’t want to lend money to people who were not paying bonds so you have to get people to start paying them.
This is one of the reasons for the Masakhane campaign. One of the goals of this campaign is to encourage people to pay for their services and bonds. And it is already bearing fruit.
Then you have to put in place a “mortgage indemnity system”. This means you give certain guarantees to the banks that if the payments don’t come forth from the community for political reasons, they will have some support from government.
You also need a warranty system for the community. This is a guarantee against bad workmanship. If the houses crack after a few months, people will have a way of forcing those builders to pay for them and fix them.
You have to have in place organisation at provincial and local level. The delivery of housing is co- ordinated mainly at local level. It is the most important layer of government. We therefore have to develop the skills of the people working at the local and provincial level. It comes back to training, to introducing a new culture in the civil service. The local councils will have to develop their own capacity to run government.
And so, the housing programme is not just about building houses. It is also thinking of where you put the house, how you provide it with water, electricity, where the schools go etc. Planning this kind of programme doesn’t take six months. It takes time. Some people call it slow delivery. We call it building a solid future.
The RDP is about changing the priorities. In the health sector, for example, we need to provide primary health care and shift resources from the hospitals to the clinics. One of our major problems in this country is that we can transplant hearts but we have dozens of children dying each day of diarrhoea and kwashiorkor. We have to develop the prevention of disease instead of concentrating on curing it, shifting from tertiary health care to primary health care.
This is what we call in our jargon “budgetary reprioritisation”. It is about shifting money from the old priorities to the new ones. It is the only way to make the RDP sustainable.
The whole of government has to be “RDP driven”. It is not just an RDP fund that does RDP projects. The government runs on one budget. We are reorganising that budget. We don’t have more money for the projects we want to do. It is as if we had the same full tank of petrol but had to change the vehicle. You can’t stop the vehicle, just as you can’t stop society from running. So we have to transfer the petrol at the same time without stopping the machine. That is our
Another bit of jargon is “fiscal discipline”. The money we use is not our money, it belongs to all our people. We have to ensure that money is not wasted, and that it is accounted for. With the RDP Fund we will make sure that money is shifted to our new priorities. That is why we are also bringing all funds, including foreign donor assistance, on budget — thus ensuring that all monies will be spent on our new priorities, and that it won’t be wasted. We must also make sure that we can pay in the future for running the things we are building
Right now, the priorities are in education, jobs, housing and municipal services.
The most important economic factor will be our housing programme. It will have a multiplier effect. That is why we have doubled the housing budget and the budget for infrastructure. People will start to get jobs, start to need furniture. The homes will be electrified and people will be able to buy electrical appliances. All this will kick-start the manufacturing sector.
Yes, what we are doing is slow. The fastest way is to throw money at the problem, as has been done all over Africa, and then to turn our back on the problem when the money runs out.
The RDP way of thinking will ensure that each project, each programme, each house, each tap of water, each child being immunised, each cent spent, will be carefully planned out. The end result is solidity, sustainability, reliability, jobs for our people, growth for our economy.
Changing the minds of people, transforming the way people think, work and deliver, transforming our budget to meet the new priorities we have set out, transforming how we spend money, transforming attitudes is what the RDP is all about. Sadly though, transformation cannot be quantified like houses can. You can’t count quality.
Our people need houses and jobs and water and education and electricity. And they need it now. We know that. We also know that we will not be giving them a service or doing our jobs properly if we don’t give them the quality of life they deserve.
The new South Africa cannot, will not, be reconstructed and developed with old methods.