If enough wine has flowed during an evening, eThekwini municipal manager Michael Sutcliffe has been known to start balancing empty bottles on his bald pate.
This late night party trick serves as a metaphor for what Sutcliffe feels is the hardest job he’s done: managing South Africa’s third-largest metropolitan area with close to 3,5-million residents and an annual budget of R17,4-billion.
Responding to criticism of Durban’s budgetary penchant for big-scale glamour projects like the debt-ridden uShaka Marine World (built at a cost of R700-milion and bailed out by ratepayers to the tune of R147-million and counting) rather than greater focus on the seemingly more prosaic nuts-and-bolts of public infrastructure delivery and maintenance, Sutcliffe says: ”In the end it’s always about that balance. There is no cookbook or manual to say that this is the balance — In the end you are always damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
Sitting in his Durban City Hall office at a kitsch wood and glass table shaped like a Zulu shield, Sutcliffe outlines the other ”tensions” to be balanced: immediate expectations, mainly of the poor, with the municipality’s long-term vision of a ”world-class city”; navigating ever-changing global capitalism and ”how it interacts with, or doesn’t interact with, local capital”; and understanding and responding to new challenges that come with development and increased economic growth locally — such as the impact of housing roll-out on electricity demand.
Add the unsaid to all this: keeping a pro-Jacob Zuma ANC eThekwini region on side during a volatile time for the ruling party, while delivering to his employers, the ratepayers. Possibly one of the harder party tricks to accomplish.
John Steenhuisen, the Democratic Alliance caucus leader, believes Sutcliffe is unable to ”separate his political role from his role as town clerk or city manager” and cites it as a major weakness. ”It’s obvious that he is a hard-working, capable man possessed of a great intellect — He just can’t seem to get that he is not there to do the work of the ANC but rather to work for the people of Durban.”
The 53-year-old Sutcliffe, a former academic at the then universities of Natal and Durban-Westville, was handpicked by President Thabo Mbeki to take over the reins of the city in 2002. His appointment came after three years as chairperson of the Municipal Demarcation Board and time spent as a member of the provincial parliament.
A graduate at the then University of Natal with a doctorate in town planning from Ohio State University, Sutcliffe is a self-styled ”Marxist geographer” who believes his task is to be a ”developmental municipal manager”.
On housing, he says the city is rolling out 15 000 to 16 000 houses a year and that ”if we get the subsidies and put the mechanisms in place — and the capacity is building up – we can address the housing backlog in the city within seven or eight years”.
While the ”developmental municipal manager” cites Govan Mbeki’s The Peasants’ Revolt and Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks as influential to his political and professional life, his interpretation of ”developmental” is questioned by those in the city’s wretched slums.
Sbu Zikode, president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers’ movement, which represents more than 20 000 people in Durban, describes Sutcliffe as ”anti-poor”.
”I know him only as boss of the city and he doesn’t appear to be people orientated. He is an anti-poor figure who has turned the police on us when we’ve tried to hold protest marches. When [our lawyers from] the Open Democracy Advice Centre used the Public Access to Information Act to find out what the city plans for shack dwellers were, we have him quoted on tape saying ‘information is dangerous’– obviously for dirty, poor shack dwellers,” says Zikode.
Zikode lives at Kennedy Road informal settlement which houses 8 000 people next to a municipal dump. A baby was bitten by a rat there last week after a similar, fatal incident last year. There are six toilets and 130 pit latrines ”which need to be emptied” in the settlement and five water standpipes.
For Sutcliffe housing is about ”depth” (quality) rather than ”width” (quantity) and he believes these things take time.
He says South Africans have a ”tendency to look at the challenge side of what we do, not at the fact that many of the challenges are being addressed”.
The DA’s Steenhuisen likens Sutcliffe to the typically flawed tragic Shakespearean character where his ”undoubted ability” is allied to ”an arrogance coupled to a low tolerance for criticism, which is legendary”.
On how he believes he deals with criticism, Sutcliffe says:”I think the key problem at the moment is that there are a lot of lies being told.”
Whether addressing the emotionally charged street-renaming process in Durban or deflecting concern from a recent report which showed that the city’s fire department was woefully understaffed — to the extent that some fire-stations had only two firemen on duty — Sutcliffe has consistently attracted criticism from political parties and civil society for assuming an almost Mbekite-Stalinist grasp of the truth: where denialism, racialisation and obfuscation are hand maidens to that sacred version.
General consensus is that Sutcliffe is charismatic and hard working but doesn’t really give a shit what other people think about him. Or think in general.
If caught on the defensive his natural inclination is to attack — leading to sometimes bewildering broadsides. When Blue Flags were lowered on several Durban beaches earlier this year because of poor water quality he claimed ”Eurocentrism” on the part of the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa, the programme’s local governing body, and launched a prolonged character assassination on its national coordinator Alison Kelly.
Des D’Sa of the South Durban Committee Environmental Alliance, which is fighting for cleaner air for communities living in Durban’s heavily industrialised South Basin, says Sutcliffe’s arrogance has made him less consultative than previous city managers.
D’Sa feels a preoccupation with the grand plan has left Sutcliffe more dislocated from civil society and the ordinary ratepayer’s concerns and needs. ”His style is to play the man rather than the ball. He would rather attack us and go with his own theories than come in and speak to the communities and pay attention to the tests and reports we compile about the atrocities here,” says D’ Sa.
Of Irish extraction and the third of seven children, Sutcliffe grew up in the dozy, white working-class suburb of Amanzimtoti on Durban’s South Coast.
He says his politicisation took off only while studying at Ohio with his wife, Felicity. There, he picked up Gramsci and other writers banned in South Africa and ”realised that the country was doing what [Hendrik] Verwoed said must be done.”
Prior to that, he remained largely apolitical at the University of Natal and he remains cynical about student politics: ”The Irish Catholics would give one child in their family to the church each year and it was almost like that with the rich white folks of Durban giving one child to Nusas [the National Union of South African Students] while the parents continued to exploit the very workers these kids were supposed to liberate.”
Sutcliffe returned from the United States a year before the United Democratic Front was formed in South Africa. According to a former comrade who spoke on condition of anonymity, Sutcliffe was a ”runner” in the hierarchy, which composed of organisers at the top, and activists in the middle.
”He had a kombi for transporting people, his house was used for meetings and his role at a white university ensured we had resources, banned books could be brought in and young activists could be sorted with bursaries,” said the comrade.
Sutcliffe says he worked closely with people like South African Revenue Services boss Pravin Gordhan and set up fronts for the ANC like the Built Environment Support Group. Later in the Eighties he worked on policy formulation geared towards a post-apartheid South Africa.
Sitting at Sutcliffe’s over-the-top Zulu shield desk and remembering the litany of sartorial atrocities he’s committed over the years in Madiba-type shirts, the words of a struggle comrade resonate: ”Mike has always tried to overcompensate. Maybe because some part of him will always be that white, leftie runner in the struggle.”
And perhaps another hint about this year’s Sutcliffe version comes from an earlier time in academia: ”I think there is more politics in academia than people would admit. So it allows you to see it and understand it a bit more because academics are quite brutal actually. They will kill one another over whether a definite article should be included in a sentence let alone around the ideology,” he says.
An academic grounding appears to have come with lessons gleaned, as have years as an activist. Yet, perhaps one lesson that continues to elude eThekwini’s municipal manager is that party tricks and balancing acts are perhaps best performed sober, or at least not when drunk on power.