South African President Thabo Mbeki has himself been frank about the failure of his ruling-party-controlled municipalities to deliver services, Cape Town’s Democratic Alliance mayoral candidate Helen Zille said in Parliament on Wednesday.
Zille, who has stated that she will remain a MP if she is not elected as mayor on March 1, noted that Mbeki told ruling African National Congress leaders in Mpumalanga that: ”I think that we must agree that we should stop offering excuses for the problems that we have with regard to our negligence and tardiness in the provision of services to the people.”
Speaking in the debate on Mbeki’s State of the Nation address last week, Zille noted 203 municipalities could not provide sanitation for 60% of their residents, 182 were unable to remove refuse from 60% of houses and 155 could not provide water for 60% of households.
”The result on the ground is that five million South Africans still have no access to any basic sanitation and nearly one million people face the indignity of the bucket system. Free basic electricity is still a pipe dream for many in ANC municipalities and 3,7-million people still have no access to running water.”
Zille said it is ”apparently more important to have the right political connections than the requisite skills to run a municipality”.
According to the government’s own statistics, as many as 36% of managers ”have a matric with a diploma or less and one municipal manager does not even have a matric qualification. Thirty-seven percent of municipal managers have less than five years’ experience in local government, while 74% have 11 or less years’ experience in local government.”
”This government’s preoccupation with race has nothing to do with empowering those disadvantaged by apartheid. It has everything to do with empowering a small elite through cronyism and patronage,” said Zille.
Services
It is more important to render services to citizens than boast good racial transformation figures, Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder said on Wednesday in the parliamentary debate on President Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation address.
Mulder said a lack of expertise and experience, not money, is the major cause of bad municipal service delivery.
Sound management principles had been thrown overboard with the appointment of new personnel since 1994.
”We are now paying the price,” Mulder said. ”This should not be seen as a racial argument, but as a simple truth of management.”
The FF+ will soon present the government with a list of 1 200 qualified South African experts who are unemployed or ”under-employed”.
Mbeki announced on Friday that 90 experts identified through such initiatives are to shortly take up government jobs.
Mulder welcomed plans for halving unemployment and poverty by 2014, but expressed concern at the apparent exclusion of minority communities from the president’s vision of an ”age of hope”.
”Will they also share in the growth? Most of the programmes focus only on black empowerment,” he said.
Also, Mbeki’s announced review of the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach to land reform has created huge uncertainty among commercial farmers.
”Many willing sellers wrote to me indicating that the problem is not on their side, but on the government’s side — departments delaying deals for years.”
Mulder said doing away with the principle would send a negative message ”and create an instrument in the hands of future small dictators in South Africa to destroy agriculture and the economy.”
Disrespect
The government is showing disrespect to citizens through ongoing corruption and the appointment of incapable officials with political connections, the Pan Africanist Congress charged.
”This nation deserves respect. If it is served by this kind of officials, any hope of halving poverty by 2014 will turn out to be far-fetched wishful thinking,” party leader Motsoko Pheko told the National Assembly.
Pheko said service delivery is a right. ”Every citizen should have decent housing, clean water, health care, education and other basic services. The resources are available, but the political will to provide them to the poor is absent.”
Recent protests against poor municipal service delivery signalled ”the coming storm” if things do not improve.
On Mbeki’s undertaking to review the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach to land reform, Pheko said this model would never have worked. The Constitution should be amended, he said, as it ”consolidated” land robbery from African people. ”We must legislate against the sale of our land to foreigners.”
Pheko again lamented the continued imprisonment of former Azanian People’s Liberation Army soldiers whose crime, he said, was fighting against apartheid.
‘Not all badly run’
Not all municipalities are badly run, Minister of Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi said.
And those who describe local government as dysfunctional on the whole are dishonest, he told the National Assembly.
”Those who with a touch of hyperbole have described our country’s local government system as dysfunctional; they lean over backwards to find fault and pretend that positives don’t exist. They deliberately play down the compelling reality of progress in many of our municipalities.”
The minister listed successes achieved with the provision of water, electricity and sanitation services, among other things. ”Besides the low-capacity municipalities, which are a matter of concern to us, there also exist medium- and high-performing municipalities.”
Sceptics have used the existence of challenges to make a gloomy prognosis about the future in a bid to enhance their own ”electability” in the upcoming local government polls, Mufamadi charged.
Progress achieved, he added, will accentuate the mood of impatience of those who have not yet benefited yet. ”People who are resident in low-capacity municipal areas are expectant of accelerated progress. They have seen it happen elsewhere and they want to see it also happen where they live.”
To this end, they should rely on the ruling ANC with its benefit of ”accumulated experience” in local government, Mufamadi said. He reiterated plans to focus more national and provincial government efforts on helping municipalities with resources and expertise.
These include the filling of critical technical posts currently lying vacant.
Mbeki replies to the debate on Thursday. — I-Net Bridge, Sapa