Loading ...You know it is a powerful front-page story when you can still, two years later, remember the time of day and what you had in your shopping basket when you saw the photograph. In the foreground a man was on his knees, weeping; in the background, black smoke billowed from a block of flats. It was a photograph that encapsulated the desperation and tragedy that is inextricable from the looming failure of participative local government …
A number of stories in the SA media have brought it to mind in the past few months. There is also the low level of continual protest over service delivery (or perhaps, the low level of coverage of continual protest) strikes and mounting xenophobic violence. Democracy, justice, patience — these are all wearing thin as the degradations of daily life in South Africa persist.
The last time there was widespread organised protest and violent state and civilian reprisals was in the 1980s and most protest took place at the level of local authorities and in the name of local level justice and equality. This is an aspect of the anti-apartheid struggle that is often downplayed in narratives that celebrate charismatic individuals and national parties.
In the 80s the Nat government couldn’t go into certain municipalities because its legitimacy was rejected by the communities it claimed to govern. In the 80s civics took over responsibility to the political life of communities and the organisation of basic urban metabolism. In the 80s there were different kinds of local government for different people — the responsive, well-resourced, competent kind for whites-only areas, and the poor, negligent, kind for blacks-only areas. Community leaders arose from churches, schools and street committees and they rejected local administrators as villains, though they themselves were the ones being jailed. Today, little has changed.
In the past two decades, local government has undergone dramatic restructuring and has, as a foundation, a set of progressive and comprehensive policies. However in practice local authorities are too often mired by corruption, hobbled by unfunded mandates and lack the political backing for serious reform. There is no serious attempt to make cities more equal or integrated or to start public debates on how this might be possible.
With the backing of a global shift to neo-liberal models of service delivery, which advocates privatisation as a panacea for poor governance and stresses hard-line cost recovery, local municipalities have disguised politically charged management strategies as common-sense accountancy.
This is evident in the case of water provision. Despite the fact that most of the arrears for water owed to the Cape Town City Council come from businesses and middle-class residents, municipalities have squeezed poor residents to pay their bills. If they are unable to they are placed on “drips”. These devices limit water to a trickle, such that filling a kettle can take many hours. Though in practice drips are imposed rather haphazardly, tens of thousands of Capetonians have been placed on them in the last decade. Across the country that number reaches millions.
At first some communities began to physically bar the council from entering their areas, whether to install drips, perform evictions or execute any other function. But then the council started hiring private security firms, more comfortable with professional violence, to do these jobs. Now the council is allowed to come and disconnect people. However, in response to this water cowboys flout the law and remove these devices, reconnecting their neighbours illegally. If caught, they are jailed. In effect those providing access to a non-negotiable resource for dignity, health and sustenance are criminalised. The distrust and resentment this causes on both sides is huge.
Distrust, resentment, violence, indignity — these are all characteristics of the interactions between state and society in other “service-delivery” news items over the past few weeks such as the brutal eviction of squatters in Tswhane reported by the LHR, and the Makhaza toilets crisis, as reported and discussed by the SJC and Writing Rights, and the persecution of Abahlali leaders.
The photograph on the front page of that Cape Town newspaper was of a man who had returned home from work to find that his brother had jumped to his death to escape the flames on the 8th floor of the building they lived in. Earlier that day the city of Pretoria had sent in a militia of private security guards to evict tenants. The tenants had militarily resisted, first with rocks and bricks, later with petrol bombs. Somehow in the melee, the building next door had caught alight and five people, neither evicting nor resisting, had died.
One anecdote does not make an argument, but for me that photograph brought many uncomfortable trends together: the outsourcing of security and enforcement in order to allow for more heavy-handed tactics; an inhumane and narrow-minded approach to urban management; the desperation of urban poverty that underpins criminal resistance to cost-recovery and the way that the escalating tensions at local levels can so easily catch even uninvolved citizens in the crossfire.
There is much discussion of the central government’s policies, personalities and strategies. But the greatest test of policy and proof of the commitment of political leaders is always going to be at the local level. And at the moment, the scant reporting of the actual dynamics of local politics seems to indicate that local government is failing to be participative, democratic or particularly good at governance. In the past that failing has lead to sustained social upheaval.
*I can’t find a link to the article or the photograph, but it was on the front page of a Cape Town daily.
*For research and coverage of service delivery privatisation and figures for the amount of South Africans who have had water disconnected see http://www.municipalservicesproject.org/publications/msp-publications (eg “SA heated debate on water cut-off statistics” )
Not sure why we liken the situation to our past and think that we are different. Perhaps we are no different to any other developing country in the world.
We are one of the few countries in the world where one can safely drink tap water.
After 1994 I expected to live in a third world country and so I am on occasion pleasantly surprised when first world things happen.
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