We Cannot Fix South Africa’s Municipalities Without Fixing South Africa - The Common Sense

Terence Corrigan

South Africa’s local-government crisis is invariably experienced as a failure of municipal responsibilities, illustrated by gaping potholes, crumbling roads, and dry taps. These are in turn typically explained through the dysfunction in municipal administrations, signified by unstable coalitions, politically compromised managers, inept and indifferent officialdom, and the corrupt handling of public money.

So – comes the response – we need to “fix” errant municipalities. Appoint managers fit for purpose. Collect revenue. Maintain infrastructure. Exercise control over supply chains. Take a hard line on corruption.

These things would be familiar to anyone who has read reports by the Auditor-General, or analyses by Treasury. And they are necessary.

But municipalities do not operate in isolation. They are shaped by the dynamics in the broader legal, regulatory, and political environment. Their failures reflect problems beyond the borders of municipalities, and these failures will demand action beyond what is strictly local.

An obvious example of this is the need for “professional” administration. There is no mystery to what a functioning local governance needs: financial managers, town planners, engineers capable of doing their jobs, guided by clear legislation, and rooted in an ethos of public service and political impartiality.

Yet political meddling and the abuse of administrative positions for patronage is a feature of the public sector as a whole and has been central to the political operations of the African National Congress (ANC) since the 1990s. Even as a nominal “professionalisation” strategy is being rolled out in the public sector (it speaks volumes that the official phrasing is of “professionalisation”, an awful indictment on the past three decades), the ANC has made it clear that it intends to retain this political hold.

Compromised

And where political affiliation is allowed to influence who gets appointed and promoted, strong and resilient institutions are inevitably compromised. Formal lines of authority are ruptured and distorted – and the deformed systems that result are ripe for criminal infiltration.

Corruption, meanwhile, brings audible public condemnation, and demands that municipalities act against it. But protracted tolerance of corruption along with weak systems has produced a situation in which corruption is as much characterised by politically linked organised crime as by individual opportunism. What began with the political capture of institutions (or “deployment”), has to a significant degree metastasised into tender mafias. It has also taken a lethal turn, as strings of assassinations of local politicians and officials illustrate.

No municipality can face down organised crime by itself, with only the existing administrative tools at its disposal. Doing so requires effective detective work, law enforcement, successful prosecution, and protection for officials and whistleblowers.

Without significant movement on rooting out the rot in the South African Police Service, particularly in its crime intelligence system, it’s hard to see how even well-intentioned administrations will be able to carry out the reform and house-cleaning that is required.

Broke

Meanwhile, the financial squeeze facing local government – the Auditor-General rates the finances of 35% as “unfavourable” and 40% as “concerning” – denotes several things. These include an inability or unwillingness to manage finances prudently, to collect debts, and above all to grow the economies on which all state revenues are ultimately dependent.

The breakdown of municipal finances in many jurisdictions reflects the general crises in the South African economy.

Some municipalities simply do not have sufficiently strong economic bases to sustain the responsibilities assigned to them. Others are actively damaging their own economic prospects through unreliable infrastructure, poor administration, and deteriorating public spaces. Virtually all are subject to the range of destructive policy choices made at national level: stifling labour legislation that disincentives hiring, extractive empowerment demands that disincentivise investment overall, and a cloying statist orientation that often rejects possible solutions to South Africa’s stalled economic progress because doing so might imply surrendering government control.

In effect, the 75% of municipalities struggling with their finances is in many ways the flip side of a national growth rate that struggles to exceed 1% a year, and both an expression and a cause of a fixed investment rate that hovers around 15% of GDP, half of what the country officially aspires to.

The failure of growth, and the curtailment of people’s opportunities along with the state of many municipalities, has contributed to the fracturing of South Africa’s social contract. This, in turn, is the “culture of non-payment”.

Dealing with all of this is not merely a technical matter, or an accounting problem, and not just at local level. It requires conscious political choice, across every level of government and across the totality of our politics.

Fundamental Reform

Decades of post-apartheid local government have demonstrated that the functionality of municipal institutions cannot be separated from either the national governance environment nor from South Africa’s broader political culture.

Reformed legislation – some of it under consideration – is necessary. Indeed, a fundamentally reformed system of local government will ultimately be needed. But no legislation can manufacture political integrity. As Professor Alex van den Heever puts it, “Experts cannot turn around a municipality where the source of the problem is not ignorance but perverted incentives.”

Nor will legislation, reform, or capacitation be decisive if the wider failures of South African governance and the economy remain unacknowledged or unaddressed.

The local government crisis is therefore also a national reform problem. We need action to fix councils, certainly. But we also need to fix the systems around and alongside them, the incentives that shape political and administrative behaviour, and the economic environment that constitute a necessary foundation for their success.

South Africa cannot fix its municipalities in isolation – either as individual municipalities or even as a system. They are part of the South African state and its entrenched pathologies. Fixing them therefore requires more than fixing councils; it requires fixing South Africa itself.

This article draws on a new study to be published by the Institute of Race Relations, entitled Local Government: Crises Decades in the Making and How to Deal with Them. It was produced with the generous support of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

Terence Corrigan is the Project and Publications Manager at the Institute of Race Relations, where he specialises in work on property rights, governance, as well as land and mining policy. A native of KwaZulu-Natal, he is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg). He has held various positions at the IRR, South African Institute of International Affairs, SBP (formerly the Small Business Project) and the Gauteng Legislature – as well as having taught English in Taiwan. He is a regular commentator in the South African media and his interests include African governance, land and agrarian issues, political culture and political thought, corporate governance, enterprise and business policy

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