Have municipal services improved, worsened or stayed the same over the four years since the last local government elections?
This is one of a number of questions Idasa’s Citizen Report Card aims to answer in coming weeks.
This article starts delving into the detail of the report by addressing the levels of citizen satisfaction about specific service delivery issues. First, do citizens know which key services are the responsibility of local government (the district or municipal council) and which are not?
Not knowing who is responsible for which services not only makes it difficult for citizens to claim such services from the right sphere of government, it also leads to blaming the wrong sphere for poor performance — as has happened often in the past with complaints about housing provision.
Between municipalities within provinces there were no big differences, indicating that this knowledge is more a provincial affair. Despite these differences, in all provinces improved information supply about the responsibilities of the local council is a prerequisite for improved communication between local government and citizens.
Second, knowing what citizens know in terms of government’s role, the next important question sought to identify general levels of satisfaction since 2006. When asked, however, only 20% (one in five respondents) were of the view that services from local government had improved since the last local government elections. The majority (50%) said the quality of services had more or less stayed the same; 29% felt services had deteriorated.
Compare these figures with the results of a similar exercise conducted by the Afrobarometer in January and February 2006, just before the last local government elections on March 1, and it can be seen that the overall level of satisfaction in council service delivery in the four provinces (North West, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and Limpopo) has decreased dramatically. The percentage of satisfied respondents dropped from 39,5% in 2006 to only 11% in 2010.
To find out why people were less satisfied with services provided by councils Idasa asked citizens who felt services had worsened why they thought that. Overall, the increase in corruption scored the highest, with 31%, followed by the “government is listening less to the people” (21%) and “councillors and ward committees are not functioning properly” (20%).
Urgent problems
To assess whether municipal councils have been able to address the most urgent problems identified by citizens over the past four years, we asked respondents first of all, according to them, what was the most urgent problem four years ago?
Water provision was mentioned by 53% of respondents as the most important problem in their ward, followed far behind by local roads (16%) and lack of jobs (10%).
We also asked respondents which government services (including services provided by provincial and national level institutions), if any, had improved since March 2006. None, said 31%. Of the remaining responses, electricity was mentioned most often (49%), followed by primary and secondary education (38% and 35%).
Remarkably, local roads were high on the problem list four years ago but score low on the list of services that have improved, indicating that according to residents councils did not address the issue adequately.
Next, we asked respondents what they had done themselves to address these problems. They spoke to their councillor about the problem, said 42%; 37% spoke to their community development worker, which shows that these are the main channels for citizens to express their concerns and to communicate with their municipal council.
On the other hand, 37% of respondents said they didn’t do anything to resolve the problem. This is a reflection of a high level of complacency, or people not expecting the council to do anything to improve the situation — but also their unwillingness or inability to tackle these problems themselves.
Present problems faced in wards are the same as they were four years ago: 84% of respondents said that the situation regarding the most important problem in their ward hadn’t changed, or had deteriorated.
There are large differences in opinion about whether council services have improved or not and, if so, why, but it is clear that respondents are linking their perception of the quality of service delivery to aspects of governance such as corruption, responsiveness and the functioning of consultation and oversight mechanisms such as councillors and ward committees.
It will be interesting to see whether this increase in dissatisfaction translates into different voting patterns in the forthcoming local government elections on May 18, or generate changes in voter turnout in general.
Marece Wenhold leads the Capacity Delivery for Local Government project in the Political Governance Programme at Idasa