Comments on: Local government failure on the horizon?

By: X Cepting

X Cepting — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 15:00:28 +0000

Look at what the organisation avaaz did in Brazil this week for an example of what can be achieved with an educated population and affordable internet. Is it any wonder that the ANC is dragging their feet makling either possible?

By: X Cepting

X Cepting — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:03:15 +0000

@SamSam – Perhaps capacity building is not the right tool and good old training with less “specialists” and more experienced, accountable workers will do the trick?

@Simone – The thing that is truly forgotten in all this is the mundaneity of the average person’s needs. We don’t want much, just what we were promised in the Con
stitution and someone to call that will do something when it doesn’t happen.

By: Simone Haysom

Simone Haysom — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:12:20 +0000

@everyone An interesting corruption initiative (as in, against corruption, not a 419 scam) being set up by one Murray Hunter: http://corruption-sa.posterous.com/.
When doing research on flood management I came across a great, very simple sight which listed all the officials running for local government in Mumbai… then their criminal records and their service delivery track records. Having something like that for South Africa would be great – except I’d include how far they live from the area they ‘serve’, the car they drive, and what their campaign promises were.
@Xcepting It’s certainly true that national government is not setting the accountability bar high and that local government ultimately responds to their agenda. The problem is that the politics often gets lost in the mundaneity of the local level. Which is why the SJC is doing such a great job at drawing it out in the way they are covering and organising around the toilets saga.

By: SamSam

SamSam — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:16:10 +0000

I am busy doing a research on capacity development in local government. Believe it or not, there are capacity development units for local government (i.e departments or units that do some form of training etc for local government officials) in COGTA, Development Bank of SA, HSRC, IDASA, LGSETA, LOGOLA, PALAMA, SALGA and in most major universities. There are numerous independent consultants also doing similar capacity building work. In spite of all these efforts, the minister recently indicated that over 80% of the municipalities are unable to deliver on their mandate

By: Rory Short

Rory Short — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:59:07 +0000

What we have in South Africa is millions of people who have no real skills in communal governance but who do have and try to exercise that most basic of human skills and that is to ingratiate oneself with those who are currently wielding communal power. Not only that but the governed and the governors both being lacking in other skills they all think that this skill is the only one that really matters. The inevitable consequence of all this ignorance is appalling local government.

By: MLH

MLH — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:46:53 +0000

Not sure this is as low level as you seem to think. The country seethes with the injustices and it’s not just coming from those whose poverty precludes them paying. At all levels people are stricken that the powerful seem to have absolutely no conscience about those with none. I hear often from people of all races that change is on the boil. How it will occur? Beats me. But I won’t be toyi-toyi-ing in the streets and I simply can’t imagine some realising that a simple change of vote could provide some welcome relief from their hardships.

By: Simone Haysom

Simone Haysom — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:36:55 +0000

@owen I’m not sure I entirely understand your response. Are you saying our expectations of local government should be higher or lower?
There are ways in which the current adminstration has made huge gains at a local level, including extending access to electricity and piped water but these achievements are now a decade old and seem to have been the ‘low-hanging fruit’.
@Judith, Peter Joffe Such a sad situation, especially when there is so much demand for inner city accommodation. The inability or unwillingness to fire incompetent or corrupt officials seems to be one of the largest obstacles to functioning municipalities…and national ministries.

By: X Cepting

X Cepting — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:08:38 +0000

Simone – I had a kindly elderly neighbour explain the current state of affairs to me after my usual rant about the municipality being missing in action. It works like this: We have all those nice laws and services in theory. Anyone wanting to become involved in politics are wellcome to acquaint themself with all these wonderful notions like service delivery, waste removal, public service obligations, etc. Everyone else who lives in the real world and poor neighbourhoods should know by now that in reality those laws are just windowdressing, to the poor. Like a security blanket, it makes one feel secure without actually being secure, a placebo in place of the real thing. Which is why people in these neighbourhoods also tend to vote for the more entertaining politicians. (Something I did not know) If you are not rich enough to have the time and money to fight your municipality, don’t make waves.

I have not really given up hope of getting the municipality to actually do something constructive in my neighbourhood without making matters worse and from time to time email them when I need to get good and angry. The truth is, the rot starts at the top, so why should local government bother to deliver service when the rest are more profitably busy fixing tenders, looking after their own, on strike for a larger portion of the dwindling tax coffer?

By: tottie

tottie — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:57:32 +0000

Failures of a nation-state will always be reflected at a local level. The crisis is that of the nation-state as a configuration of the world, with its traditional role of wealth distribution and prosperity.
The trouble is that democracy allowed a ‘lost generation’ to entrust management of our country to blind mice, whose only claim to leadership is nostalgia about ideas that were grand only a hundred years ago. This is the very democracy that eradicated feudalism, subdued the rule of the church, and conquered the kings, without politics.
And now this nostalgia has opened room for these appalling creations of human dominance to creep into the void left by apartheid, under the pretext of ‘liberation’.
At a time when both space and time are being transformed by the information technology paradigm, and new social forms and processes, our fascination with the dinosaur dupes us into a false belief that we are ‘free’, only just because the apartheid policies have been scrapped.
Thabo Mbeki had a vague notion of the dreadful space and time that the world has entered into, and distance that apartheid isolation had created between us and the other parts of the globe. But his view was enfeebled by his loyal clutch to the dinosaurian party.

Launched in a timeless landscape where dominant values and interests are constructed without reference to the past, we are like an inanimate object caught up in a cyclone. The cyclone has
a destination,the dead object can land anywhere.

By: Howard Klaaste

Howard Klaaste — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:50:21 +0000

I can feel it, because it (local government failure) is already here!

It is more likely that the horizon could soon display a fireball as tensions flare up in the air.

Basic service delivery skills appear to be lacking. The inability to identify problems before they balloon is even a cause for greater concern:

How to you explain a mayor’s call for help from the public when residents who were allowed to built their shacks on a flood plain became the victims of a flood?!