Lack of municipal capacity and poor communication by government officials are key contributors to the surge of service delivery protests in the past few weeks.
Municipal IQ managing director Kevin Allen told the Mail & Guardian this week that unless the government accelerates service delivery, protests from poor communities are likely to escalate. Municipal IQ is a web-based data service that monitors the country’s 283 municipalities.
Twenty-four major protests have erupted across the country since the beginning of the year, with Gauteng, Mpumalanga and the Western Cape taking the most strain. Allen, once adviser to former local government minister Sydney Mufamadi, said that at the current rate protests this year would exceed those of 2007 and 2008.
Cooperative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka told the M&G this week that the government has recalled qualified professionals from retirement to “mentor and help train young graduates”, particularly in the fields of municipal technical and engineering services, water, sanitation and electrical infrastructure.
ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe admitted this week that there is not enough experience at local government level.
“Sixty-seven percent of our councillors are first-time councillors, 28% are second-term and only 5% are third-term.” He said the ANC would conduct an audit of service delivery in all municipalities.
But Allen said an audit was unlikely to address immediate service delivery challenges. “Auditing municipalities is not a small task … What is called for now is level heads and the opening of communication channels. Clearly communication structures within local government, especially in unwieldy, complex urban areas, need to be scrutinised to avoid the disastrous conflict of messages around relocation that sparked the Diepsloot protests in the past fortnight,” he said.
“But at a national level there must be political maturity and caution within party structures to avoid sparking the clearly rampant and growing dissatisfaction within the marginalised communities.”
Recent weeks have seen police use rubber bullets in Piet Retief in Mpumalanga, Thokoza and Diepsloot in Gauteng, Zeerust in the North West, as well as Milnerton and Khayelitsha in the Western Cape.
The ANC has condemned the violence of the protests, saying only some were genuine reactions to poor service delivery and others were expressions of discontent with local leadership and alleged municipal corruption.
But Shiceka said the country’s 283 municipalities were in a state of paralysis and dysfunctional. He told the M&G that his department is ready to invoke section 106 of the Municipal Act. This would involve scrutinising the daily running of municipalities and taking control of failing municipalities.
Shiceka has begun a countrywide assessment of municipalities to determine where they are struggling and how they can be assisted. He said initiatives, such as “an incentive scheme, talent management and training and development need to be introduced to create an environment that makes working for municipalities attractive and to retain skills in local government”.
Protesters have repeatedly claimed that service delivery failures derive from the deployment of ANC comrades to positions for which they are not qualified. Shiceka said he would provide an “informed answer” to this criticism once a full assessment of municipalities was completed at the end of the year.
He said government would provide training to enhance the skills levels of unqualified employees. “The plan is that they should be retrained and developed for a period under close supervision and if that does not help them they should give way to others who are qualified and capable.”
In the Eastern Cape, advocate Stanley Khanyile has been seconded as acting superintendent general in the local government department to help ailing municipalities in the province. A task team sent to Mpumalanga is headed by the national department of local government’s deputy director general, Tozi Faba.
Shiceka said similar interventions in other provinces should be concluded by the end of the year.