Dr Vincent Maphai, in his article, ”Transition’s long sunset”, provides a clear analysis of South Africa’s much talked about political, social and economic transitional milestones, which, in not so many words, he labels ”probationary transitional arrangements”.
Elsewhere, many people have dubbed South Africa’s transition to democracy a ”miracle”. And its many accolades for its prudent legislative and policy reforms are widely acknowledged. Perhaps the challenge now is how best to consolidate and sustain the gains of this transition, particularly the delivery of basic services to all South Africans.
After achieving democratic independence, most governments embark on — or experiment with — grand infrastructure development programmes. Rightly so, in the quest to address past backlogs. In situations like this, consideration for public participation is minimal because of pressure to deliver and accelerate election promises. As a result of acceleration, the sustainability of infrastructure is compromised because the focus is more on the physical outputs (quantitative) and less on developmental outcomes (qualitative).
Since the 1980s the majority of Latin-American countries underwent a series of transitional political reforms, similar to South Africa’s, and some had to go through structural adjustment programmes in order to meet the social and economic challenges they faced. They looked for solutions to sustain fragile democracies and to consolidate gains achieved from institutional, social and economic reforms.
These countries have similar geographic, demographic and social stratification systems to South Africa’s. Chile and South Africa, for example, have a similar political history characterised by a transitional period from autocracy to democracy. Poor countries like Bolivia embarked on governance reform processes that saw municipal participatory development planning becoming integral to their service-delivery programmes. Bolivia and other Latin-American countries have always been ahead of Africa in terms of political, institutional and economic reforms. In these countries public participation in service delivery is used as a method to inspire a profound vision aimed at social change and transformation. This is evident from their decentralisation of programmes such as water supply and sanitation to the lowest government level.
Since the 1970s the concept of decentralised water management in Latin America has occurred within the context of local management and governance of programmes.
By decentralising water responsibilities to local government level, governments have, in fact, laid the foundations for sustainable development, focusing on people — because development is about people — and their willingness and capacity to participate in their own development through the management of service-delivery programmes.
Decentralisation has become a strategic vantage point for democratic governments to provide opportunities for local communities to take control of service provision. The trend is thus to move away from a supply-driven approach towards a demand-driven approach.
The culture of non-payment for services in South Africa and elsewhere is deeply rooted in inherently supply-driven policies of governments that do not entrench participatory approaches. As a result, failure to institutionalise community ownership, management of resources and services often leads to a culture of dependence in consumers.
From my own assessment, one of the weaknesses during our transition has been our inability to draw lessons from other countries that underwent similar transitional processes. While recognising that there is no focal point for drawing comparative analyses between countries, reinventing the wheel is equally as costly and unjustifiable.
Patrick Ntsime, operations evaluation specialist at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, writes in his personal capacity