POLITICS: An expert warns against moves to weaken local democracy
The triumphant election of 30 000 councillors is already being undermined, argues Mark Swilling
By the end of the local government elections in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape later this year, South Africans will have elected more than 30 000 councillors to over 800 separate local governments. This is a remarkable democratic achievement.
There is no other example in the world where a transition to democracy has taken place simultaneously at national, provincial and local level.
But is it all going to survive? There are worrying signs that well-intentioned policy initiatives are in combination contributing to the dismemberment of local government. The best and most alarming case is that of electricity. Electricity monopoly Eskom is finally beginning to realise the results of a 10-year policy campaign to convince both the old National Party and new African National Congress-led governments that Eskom and not local government should manage the delivery of electricity.
It has constructed a virtually unchallenged consensus around the bizarre notion that, because local government does not have the capacity to deliver electricity on a large scale, money should be spent on building Eskom’s capacity to do the same thing. This may sound logical when presented by slick Eskom managers (especially when stamped RDP- compatible) but, when local government managers point out that without the surpluses generated from electricity they will be unable to finance service delivery at affordable levels, the picture changes.
Because no matter how it is done, the reality of the matter is that local government in the past was able to deliver a package of services with built-in cross subsidies. Take away the electricity surpluses, and the taxpayer is going to have to make these up, either through higher local rates or via redirected subsidies from central government to make up for the lost revenues.
Hot on the heels of Eskom are the water boards who, possibly with the backing of the proactively developmental Department of Water Affairs, are also bent on stripping local government capacity by taking away bulk water functions. Using the same logic as Eskom, they argue that delivery in their sector will be improved if they do the job and not local government.
If electricity and water are taken away in the name of improved sectoral delivery, the heart will have been ripped out of local government. The rest will follow without a fight. No longer will service provision take place within an integrated framework, but according to the business plans of each service provider. Communities will no longer be able to hold local government accountable for service delivery, but they will end up dealing with a multiplicity of bureaucracies, each located in different places and governed by different rules and cultures.
The greatest irony of all is that we invest so much time and money putting thousands of councillors into local democracies, only to remove key services from democratic control soon after. Although the systematic removal of key public services from democratic control and accountability has been a policy of neo- conservative governments around the world over the last 15 years, it is most surprising that this is not seriously questioned in South Africa, where we have a left-of-centre government.
There are other similar trends. Take, for example, the decision government took last year to prevent local government from increasing its property taxes and service charges. No account was taken of the implications of this decision for local government capacity. Put this together with certain moves within provincial governments to redirect the old Regional Services Council levies upwards to provincial government and not downwards to local government where they currently go, and the signals are there that our local governments will face a revenue crisis in the future. A R250-million shortfall in Pretoria has already brought home this reality in the administrative capital.
The recently enacted Development Facilitation Act is another example. This Act could, if used incorrectly by provincial governments, deprive local governments of their traditional control over land-use planning. Although this may well become justifiable if conservative (increasingly multi-racial) suburban communities use the old planning regulations to maintain the structure of the apartheid city by preventing the establishment of nearby informal settlements, what the suburbs will have achieved in the end is the disempowerment of local government. This may work in favour of the poor at first, but in the long run it is not the poor who are good at lobbying higher levers of government, but the middle class and their powerful NGO lobbyists.
The conflict between provincial governments and those which wanted strong metropolitan government is now well known. In the end, it is provincial government that has won in all those provinces where this has been an issue. Despite huge pressures to the contrary, metropolitan government in the true sense has not been allowed to develop. Even where it has got a small chance (Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg), politicians are opting for extremely conservative administrative models that ape the British colonial tradition of segmented competitive units that deliver services, but fail when it comes to the strategic management of development.
At the root of the gradual disempowerment of local government is the notion that local governments are merely the “arms and legs” of higher levels of government and not “governments” in their own right that have their own “heads” as well as “arms and legs”. National ministers, provincial MECs and local councillors often refer to local government in these terms. What the “arms and legs” image fails to capture is the fact that local governments collect their own taxes, have the constitutional right to autonomously set policies and make laws, and they can trigger coercive action to enforce the law. They are not, in short, the local extensions of a unitary structure where policy is made by the head at the top.
The poverty of local government policy is most dangerous because what many do not realise is that strong local government is the mirror image of a strong civil society — you cannot destroy the one without harming the other. After all, the township struggle of the 1980s and early 1990s for “one city, one tax base” was not simply a struggle for democratic local government, but also a struggle to build a locally constituted civil society with the capacity to express the real interests of the citizenry.
Professor Mark Swilling is director, Graduate School of Public and Development Management