Local government, more than any other sphere of government, has the immense responsibility of delivering basic services to the millions living in South Africa’s impoverished and underdeveloped communities. Nowhere is the delivery of these services more urgent than in our sprawling informal settlements.
Despite radical changes in government policy since 1994, many residents continue to feel that local government does not exist for them. Residents have long accepted that when sewage flows through their homes or criminals attack their families the state will do little to assist, but rather treat them with unabashed contempt. They are increasingly finding a local government that is primarily concerned with political opportunism instead of the advancement of the community’s interests.
The Social Justice Coalition (SJC) — a Khayelitsha-based community movement with members living in informal settlements — has for the past year focused on building channels of dialogue between communities and local government. The SJC was established to address the scourge of crime in informal settlements but our primary campaign has focused on access to safe and clean sanitation.
Although the link between safety and sanitation may seem tenuous to those with a toilet and running water in their homes, our members feel that they are most at risk when needing to relieve themselves. People are frequently assaulted, robbed, raped and murdered on the way to and from toilets that are far from their homes and often dysfunctional. The Water Services Act explicitly states that the delivery and monitoring of these services are local government functions and much of our campaigning is thus concentrated on the City of Cape Town and the governing Democratic Alliance (DA).
‘Hobson’s choice’
The SJC, partner organisations and local community structures are firmly committed to engaging positively with the city, but this has not been reciprocated. Mayor Dan Plato has accused the SJC’s actions of being “politically motivated” and “dubious”. When the SJC lodged an application in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act for the release of a secret internal investigation into the Makhaza toilet saga, arguing that it was relevant to sanitation policy more broadly — and by extension very much in the public interest — acting city manager Mike Richardson said the application was “not about toilets, but about politics”.
The report, when later released, showed that the city itself had found that insufficient consultation had taken place before Makhaza’s “loos with views” were constructed, that resident’s were given “Hobson’s choice”, and that the regulations in the Water Services Act “were not complied with”. Despite these findings the city claimed the report had vindicated them and continues to hold that it did no wrong. This is an example of the growing trend of denial in response to criticism.
When 600 SJC members queued outside a Sea Point toilet on Human Rights Day last year to draw attention to the hundreds of thousands of Capetonians without access to basic sanitation, the city responded by claiming that there “is access to toilets in [the city’s] townships”. Moreover, it claimed that the protest “ignores the fact that Cape Town is performing better than other metros”.
The mayor shared this approach declaring in a closed meeting that the SJC should go “research and campaign in other areas”. This is another frequently employed tactic, best described by Northern Ireland’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate John Hume as whataboutery — the attempt to divert attention from uncomfortable questions about one’s own performance to that of another’s — has become the standard rebuttal of spin doctors, as if this excuses the municipality from meeting its legal obligations and being held to account.
With local elections looming, the politician’s whataboutery knows no bounds. For the DA the claim is that areas where it governs outperform ANC-run areas, primarily using Cape Town and the Western Cape as examples. This limits critical analysis of local service delivery problems and leads to erroneous conclusions being drawn for political ends. Last year the DA widely claimed that crime in one of the city’s most dangerous areas — Khayelitsha — had dropped by 70% over five years.
DA vs ANC
Accompanying the announcement was a fact sheet comparing Khayelitsha with KwaMashu in KwaZulu-Natal in a “DA vs ANC” match-up. It later emerged that the figure was in fact 24% (now only 17%), because it had failed to incorporate two of Khayelitsha’s three police stations into the calculation. The SJC asked the DA to issue a formal retraction in the form of a press statement. It refused. To this day, the heading of the press release on its website claims that crime has dropped by 70%.
DA leaders and elected officials have frequently cited the Universal Household Access to Basic Services report compiled by the department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs as evidence that Cape Town and the Western Cape are the best-run municipality and province in the country. DA national spokesperson Lindiwe Mazibuko went so far as to say that this shows that the “DA’s performance stands head and shoulders over that of the ANC”.
But the report uses household surveys conducted between 2001 and 2007 and the DA came to power in the City of Cape Town only in 2006 and in the Western Cape in 2009. It is possible that such patterns continued during the DA’s term, but this particular data set cannot be used to confirm it.
The job of governing is not an easy one, particularly at municipal level. It cannot be done alone, not in the City of Cape Town or indeed in any of South Africa’s municipalities. Communities and civil society organisations in Cape Town are ready to work alongside government. Government in turn must realise that to deny that challenges exist, to fail to appropriately acknowledge errors or apologise when mistakes have been made, to insinuate that people are lucky to have the little they have because things are worse elsewhere and to treat people as collateral in a broader political battle for power is insensitive to the daily suffering of people and evasive of the legal obligations of local government.
Gavin Silber is the coordinator of the Social Justice Coalition.