Justice Fund CEO Lorenzo Davids is speaking for a nation when he tells the FM: “Within 30 years [the government] not only deferred our dreams but also killed them — [it] switched off power and told us that dreaming is not allowed any more.”
Davids, a former government official and veteran of various nonprofits, says government officials make themselves visible every five years, handing out loaves of bread. “That’s all we are allowed to dream of — a loaf of bread every five years. That’s the tragic outcome of a government that makes promises that their officials have no intention to fulfil.”
This sense of decay — and the increasing desperation of the people bearing the brunt of it — are pervasive.
In the rural reaches of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), for example, uMngeni mayor Chris Pappas speaks of waning hope. “It’s becoming harder and harder for people to believe that the state of service delivery — whether at a local clinic or at a municipal level — is going to improve,” he tells the FM. “There is a loss of hope and belief in a functional system.”
Across the country’s provinces, the same record plays.
“The real state of the nation is one where life is getting harder for ordinary South Africans, while the government seems increasingly incapable of governing,” says Chris Hattingh of the Centre for Risk Analysis. “Some more upmarket suburbs might experience maintenance and ‘progress’, such as pothole repairs and traffic lines being painted, but not on a substantive scale for citizens who desperately need better services.”
In the Eastern Cape, Nelson Mandela Bay is on a precipice. It’s a city in decline, with service delivery taking a back seat to politics as parties vie for the mayoral chain. Water leaks are costing hundreds of millions of rand a year, buildings are falling to ruin, sewage spills are common and vandalism is taking a toll on infrastructure.
Speaking to the FM, mayor Retief Odendaal lays out a laundry list of issues, starting with the city’s dysfunctional supply chain process. “Water reticulation is crumbling, notwithstanding … the most intense drought on record. Our sewerage system is also on the brink of collapse with most sewerage pump stations and wastewater treatment plants not functioning optimally.”
In his view, this is a collapse by political design. He points to instability in top management: the city has had 37 municipal managers (acting and permanent) in 13 years. This has “largely led to a chaotic, dysfunctional administration that led to a collapse in service delivery but also created the right climate for looting”.
Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber CEO Denise van Huyssteen also points to the deleterious effects of politicking. Since 2016, she says, political instability has played out in a lack of investment in, and maintenance of, critical electricity, water and sanitation infrastructure, as well as an inability to bring out-of-control vandalism to heel.
Across the Great Fish River, the Buffalo City metro is in a similar state of despair.
The problems here are no different to elsewhere in South Africa, says Border-Kei Chamber of Business executive director Lizelle Maurice. On January 27, the chamber sent its proposals for fixing the city to President Cyril Ramaphosa, including deploying the army to fight crime, changing the education system to ensure pupils can secure jobs, and a bigger focus on renewable energy.
Sitting duck for natural disasters
In Limpopo, a sewerage crisis has plagued the Vhembe district areas of Makhado, Musina, Collins Chabane and Thohoyandou for two years. It’s the result, says the DA’s Risham Maharaj, of a consistent failure to maintain infrastructure and wastewater treatment works. According to the 2021 “Green Drop Report”, 13 of the district’s 14 wastewater treatment plants are in a critical state, he says.
KZN is struggling with its own collapse. There, the real state of the nation was thrown into sharp relief by the July 2021 unrest and April 2022 floods. “Years of neglect of basic municipal services and infrastructure mean unexpected natural disasters dispense more damage than would be the case where resources and taxes are geared towards the correct ends,” says Hattingh.
He refers, of course, to a lack of progress in repairing flood-damaged infrastructure, which has led to E. coli contaminating rivers and beaches. It meant that over the festive season, areas around top tourist beaches in Umhlanga were estimated to have lost R25m a day.
But Hattingh says the picture looks all the more bleak when you factor in load-shedding, the construction mafia and underperformance at the Richards Bay Coal Terminal.
With an election on the way, “political strife could become more pronounced, spilling over into civil society and day-to-day business activity”, says Hattingh. “The challenge represented to the ANC by the IFP might push yet more violent elements in the ANC to look for new avenues to retain control.”
Still, there are slivers of hope, says Pappas. “eThekwini municipality is largely a failing metro but it has units that are doing excellent work — that shine — such as its environmental health and municipal institute of learning,” he says. But “the real state of the nation, without being overly pessimistic, is that there is generally little movement forward”.
Nor is the Western Cape — often considered a beacon in the wasteland of service delivery — without its challenges. Premier Alan Winde tells the FM how people across the province are battling as a result of the collapse of infrastructure — the most stark example being the collapse of Eskom’s generation capacity.
As a result, his administration is working to free the province of the Eskom albatross. He points to a plan “to release more than R88m in emergency funding to the municipalities to help them secure their water infrastructure, which has been impacted by load-shedding”.
Cape Town recently announced the creation of a R120bn infrastructure portfolio. Over the next 10 years, it aims to upgrade wastewater works and sewers, deliver 300Ml a day from new water sources, end load-shedding and expand waste collection. Land and services for more affordable housing will be provided, and public transport will improve, with a new Khayelitsha-Claremont bus route.
“We want to deliver dignity to every person, particularly our poorest residents,” mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis tells the FM.
Prioritising delivery
The DA-led provincial and metro administrations are not without their critics, who point to service delivery protests and widespread homelessness.
ANC Western Cape leader Cameron Dugmore, for one, accuses the DA of following “a very deliberate strategy couched in a narrative about a well-performing province, but it is essentially about preserving privilege”.
Growing inequalities between the rich and the poor are creating conditions for social conflict, he adds, while the failure to adequately address “the serious pathology of gangsterism and its effects on many, many communities in the Western Cape is a ticking time bomb”.
Still, the DA-led administration is doing something. As Davids tells the FM, “both leaders of the province — the premier and the mayor — have shown a new face and attitude to service delivery. They get things done. Within acceptable time frames. And at high quality.”
To turn things around in KZN, Pappas believes the key focus should be on improving quality of life and the economy. Rapid infrastructure development of roads, sewerage and storm water drains, and social infrastructure such as libraries and Wi-Fi hotspots are urgently needed to keep pace with population growth. It’s essential, too, to create a “common vision and a way forward”, he says.
Of course, as Van Huyssteen and Maurice tell the FM, public-private collaboration should be encouraged to push along reform. There’s also the issue of public service appointments being made on merit.
As Pappas says: “At what point are we putting society backwards by voting in a municipal manager or a finance committee member who has never read a spreadsheet? We need to have a discussion about imposing minimum requirements.”
Alongside that, says Hattingh, should be an insistence that public procurement decisions are made “on the basis of value for money, and not transformation, localisation or feeding patronage networks. Underperforming civil servants must be held to account.”
Ultimately, though, he believes the “desire for yet more centralisation and top-down control should be resisted at every opportunity”.
That, after all, is what got South Africa into this hole in the first place.
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