President Jacob Zuma apparently doesn’t have time to deal with the service delivery protests racking the country.
His spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, said Zuma had not visited strife-torn areas ‘due to scheduling constraints”.
But the president does want South Africans to know that he feels the pain of angry residents in townships and informal settlements, even if he can’t go out to witness it first hand.
‘He has sympathy for the plight of the protesters and a difficult time in accepting the slow pace of implementation,” Magwenya said.
He is not getting much help from his left-wing allies in calming the situation by remote control. ‘Why must we help solve it?” Malesela Maleka, the SACP spokesperson, said.
‘We’re not the gatekeepers of government. Our branches are not there to stop protests. If we have a community meeting and the people decide to march, the SACP leaders will organise it.
‘The political problem with local government is that it has been stripped of its capacity — that’s where the problem lies.”
The presidency and the ANC are trying to put another spin on Zuma’s hands-off approach.
Apparently it’s all about testing his new Cabinet and ensuring accountability on the part of line ministers and party leaders.
‘He also wants to allow his ministers space and room to do what they need to do to resolve problems. If he feels things are not progressing in the right direction, then he will step in,” Magwenya said.
Ministers are deployed by the ANC to Cabinet and have been repeatedly warned that they will be recalled if their work is not up to scratch.
However, a well-placed source in government said: ‘The bigger issue for the ANC to resolve is how you hold people accountable. How do you tell them: ‘You’ve been given a chance to deliver, but you didn’t, so you must go’?”
Magwenya said the protests had not come as a surprise to Zuma, who warned before the elections that ‘there will come a time when people will feel the consequences of non-delivery”.
He said Zuma is keeping a close watch on the work of the ministers in dealing with the protests, especially Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Sicelo Shiceka.
‘He is in daily contact with him [Shiceka] and other ministers. He has meetings with ministers where he gets briefed on the situation and gives guidance.”
Magwenya said the cornerstone of Zuma’s plan to deal with the protests is to improve communication between the people and political leaders, especially councillors.
‘The president expects government officials to go and interact with people on the ground and explain what is going on in terms of progress around the redesign of government for effective service delivery,” he said.
Sources said Zuma is concerned about the way the protests are tarnishing the image of South Africa outside the country, especially in the run-up to the World Cup.
Those around him say he is determined to ensure that the 2011 local government elections take place in the right political climate.
‘We can’t go to the elections if the streets are burning,” a Zuma confidant said.
He is also said to see the government’s new rural development push as a partial solution. It will relieve pressure on rural areas by enabling rural people to earn a living, so that ‘you don’t need to go to the city to work and feed your child”, the insider said.
Zuma’s allies in the SACP and union federation Cosatu are preparing resolutions on service delivery to be adopted at their respective conferences later this year.
Maleka said that these would emphasise the strengthening of local government, because the ANC had built its 2009 election campaign around local government issues.
‘The weakness lies in the neoliberal framework of government. We have all these laws like the MFMA [Municipal Finance Management Act], but what does it do? It disregards people. You only call meetings when you need to have auditing compliance, not to address real issues.”
Cosatu has taken a bipartisan approach to the protests, backing both government efforts and the demands of protesting communities. Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven said that although many Cosatu members were likely to be involved in the protests, the federation was ‘broadly pleased” with government’s way of dealing with them.
‘It’s good that government can admit to problems and we are very pleased with Shiceka, who is finding ways to solve the problems. Previously that was the problem — government would blame other people.
‘We are urging people to direct their anger into constructive forms of protest and work with government to achieve their goals.”
The federation was involved at a broad policy level in finding solutions, Craven said, but not in communities. ‘Communities have to get organised themselves; we have to allow local democracy to flourish.”