Aspasia Karras
While New York will be able to offer its citizens innumerable time-saving services on the World Wide Web by the year 2000, local government in South Africa is far from doing the same.
Headway is being made, however, with a government-sponsored project to develop a model for interactive local-government websites.
Local government is the locus of most interactions between citizens and the state. In a First World city like New York it is reasonable that networked citizens should be able to do their government business in the least painful manner possible: via the Net.
But in the developing world the situation is necessarily different. For instance, access to technology is skewed: South Africa may rank 16th in the world in terms of its Internet usage, but that figure is made up largely of white males. So when local government gets wired and interactive in South Africa, the issues it has to address and the services it can provide will be very different.
The Department of Constitutional Development and the South African Local Government Association (Salga) are attempting to develop a model that applies to our context: the Local Government Information Service project.
Its objectives are twofold: firstly, to create a website that will inform existing local authorities about the new Local Government Act when it gets promulgated, as well as allow them to give feedback and ask questions through online bulletin boards.
Secondly, the site will act as a means of collecting relevant information through interactive forms directed at the authorities and the public. The information will include statistics, local profiles, election data and physical infrastructure breakdown, and will be made available on the site as well as collated centrally for integrated planning purposes.
The new Act will make local authorities the major delivery interaction points of government. They will be major purchasers of goods and services at local level and hence key players in the development process.
As the site evolves, it will increasingly be able to provide not only important information of relevance to the local authorities, but also act as a catalyst for delivery. In the future services such as grant and tender applications and procedures could be speeded up through the site.
William Bowles and his company, All Things Digital – which has recently amalgamated with one of the most profitable multimedia companies in Canada, Lasso Communications – is setting up the site, to be funded by the United Kingdom through its new Department for International Development.
Bowles hopes to supply turnkey server packages from the site, so that local authorities can download the free software and set up their own sites.
But Bowles acknowledges the drawback to the vision of truly interactive local government is the fact that most local authorities do not have access to the Net, let alone the training and capacity to set up their own sites.
Through Sangonet (a non-profit Internet company), his company is providing extensive training at the Department of Constitutional Development and Salga, so they can provide future support and backup.
Bowles considers South Africa the perfect testing ground for online local government. “The legacy of apartheid has meant that we have one foot in the First World and one in the Third. Somewhere in between there is enormous potential for growth. Web servers are free and you do not need to be an intellectual giant to programme one.”
And never having to interact physically with a bureaucrat again is a benefit not to be taken lightly.