Mark Swilling
The irony was not lost on Minister of Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development Valli Moosa when he unveiled the new White Paper on Local Government at a ceremony at the Castle in Cape Town this week.
As the fortress that housed South Africa’s first colonial local government, it was a fitting venue to announce a policy framework that, if implemented, will lead to the end of our long violent history of race-based local governance.
The alternative proposed in his White Paper combines a vision of strong, decentralised local governance with sophisticated service-delivery mechanisms, a redistributive conception of economic growth, clear planning and performance-management tools, conservative financial provisions and a range of capacity-building suggestions. But, as Moosa pointed out, there is still a long road ahead and he insists that real implementation will only be possible after next year’s national and local government elections.
Not many South Africans realise that we have nearly 800 local governments. During the 1996/97 financial year they budgeted for a total expenditure of at least R48-billion, just more than 20% of the country’s Budget, or 7,5% of the gross domestic product.
But most remarkable of all is the fact that more than 90% of this revenue is collected from local tax bases. This attests to the high level of fiscal autonomy enjoyed by our local governments compared to those in most parts of the world, where nearly two decades of neo-liberal economic policies have resulted in the virtual decimation of democratic local governance.
It is common cause that our local government tax bases remain racially structured in favour of the developed areas of our towns and cities, mainly because local governments have not found a way of redirecting existing resources to meet the dire needs of the historically marginalised urban poor.
The drafters of the White Paper had to marry three things: improved democratic accountability, a role for local government in meeting the needs of the urban poor – who are the majority of voters – and the severe fiscal constraints imposed by the government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear).
The widening inequities that plague the urban system seem to be the primary concern of the White Paper. Hence the attempt at the outset to define what is referred to as “developmental local government”.
The four characteristics of a developmental local government are seen as maximising social and economic growth; integrating and co-ordinating government/business non-profit sector activities; democratising development through empowerment and redistribution; and fostering “social capital” at the local level via a leadership approach committed to learning.
At the service delivery level, the White Paper proposes a wide range of options that thankfully go beyond the limited imagination of the privatisation missionaries.
In addition to strengthening existing public sector capacities to deliver, it is proposed that local governments explore options such as corporatisation of existing utilities, public-public partnerships, partnerships with non-profits, contracting out, leases and concessions, and responsible privatisation (what the White Paper coyly refers to as “transfer of ownership”).
In essence, the White Paper is telling local governments they must no longer assume that old-style bureaucratic delivery, or new-style simplistic privatisation, will do. Instead, it calls for strategic analysis of the costs and benefits to the fiscus and the citizen of each option given the unique conditions in each sector. This is not surprising given the severe fiscal constraints within which local governments must operate.
The chapter on municipal finance makes this very clear. No radical changes to the existing system are envisaged, other than what amounts to improvements to the way finances are managed. The local tax bases will remain intact and there is a healthy warning against what are referred to as “unfunded mandates” – functions given to local government without corresponding funds to do the job.
The debate about metropolitan government is far from over. Moosa needs to be congratulated for doing what very few developing countries have dared to do: saying that our big cities are important and they must be governed as coherent urban systems.
The White Paper says metropolitan areas must have metropolitan governments and all powers and functions must be lodged at that level. They can be decentralised to ward committees, special purpose committees or even substructures, but the metropolitan level is the point of departure.
This, however, is not what key actors in the Cape Town context have argued for. They argued for a single “integrated tier” which must not be a metropolitan government.
In other words, like quite a few North and South American cities, the city is governed by a multiplicity of smaller local governments who either agree (or are required) to co-operate with respect to matters such as land-use planning, bulk infrastructure, finance and transport. This amounts to voluntary metropolitan governance without the risk of power becoming centralised in a large, distant metropolitan government.
The problem with the debate, however, is that it is about structures. And it is a debate that is heavily influenced by the cataclysmic governance disaster that has beset Johannesburg.
As this author argued in the Mail & Guardian at the time, incompetent boundary decisions by the Gauteng provincial government and fudged decisions about the allocation of powers and functions between Johannesburg’s metropolitan and substructure levels resulted in the creation of five unviable megacities in one city.
However, there is no guarantee that collapsing it all into one metropolitan government is going to work. In theory, Johannesburg is one of the most fiscally, developmentally and economically viable cities in the developing world. There is only one reason it went wrong: the 10 most powerful politicians and officials who run it have failed hopelessly to form themselves into a tight strategic team with a shared vision, clear programme and a functional modus operandi. No structure or policy will resolve this problem if they do not put together a process to resolve this problem themselves.
There are repeated references throughout the White Paper to the need for a new kind of leadership at local government level. Given the levels of corruption, tension and paralysis in local governments, this is a timely call. It will, however, not come from communities or political parties. It will need to be rebuilt once again.
But what goes for “councillor training” today is effectively a mass lobotomisation aimed at destroying political imagination in order to ensure party discipline. It’s time to build a new generation of critically minded leaders.