If you go to the Emfuleni local municipality today, it will take you less than 30 minutes to find raw sewage running through some of its streets.
Nothing really works in Emfuleni, the municipality that includes the town of Vereeniging and the iconic townships of Sharpeville and Sebokeng. Not the water, which doesn’t run and led to Rand Water attaching the municipality’s bank accounts to force it to pay a R1.7bn debt. Not the roads, which are potholed and make you feel as if you are driving through a war zone. Not even the cemeteries, where the graves are dug by private contractors while municipal workers watch them and draw a salary. The municipality owes Eskom R8bn.
Emfuleni, which used to have wonderful riverside properties and amenities that drew hundreds of thousands of tourists to the Vaal River, is such a textbook failure it makes you wonder why the government has consistently neglected to fix it. Perhaps the ANC — whose mayor, Sipho Radebe, survived a motion of no confidence earlier this year — wants us to have an easy example of what municipal apocalypse looks like. Otherwise, the sloth, the irresponsibility, the cruelty of this municipality just do not make sense.
Things are so bad in Emfuleni that last week the local business organisation Vaal Business Co-operation asked Radebe and his mayoral committee to visit the neighbouring, DA-run Midvaal local municipality (consistently Gauteng’s best-performing municipality for 15 years) to observe “best practices” there.
What I am saying is that Emfuleni is a crisis that has been going on for nearly two decades. In any other country the national government would have invoked its powers to intervene, imposed a crack team of administrators on the municipality, and ensured that the rot stopped. Much as I would like to steer clear of such measures, I would venture that Emfuleni needs a state of emergency. Few other measures can draw it back from the precipice.
This brings me to the point that continues to worry me about our government and its lackadaisical responses to crises. The constitution gives the government powers and tools to intervene in collapsing entities where necessary.
Back in 2011, the National Treasury under Pravin Gordhan placed several collapsing and corrupt departments in Limpopo under administration to secure their deteriorating finances and install proper financial management. In July this year the Treasury withheld funds from the Vhembe district, Sekhukhune district, Mopani district and Letaba local municipalities because they owed money to water boards. We should be seeing more of these and other measures.
Instead of dealing decisively with crises, the culture that seems to have taken hold is one of talk shops, summits and commissions of inquiry. And it’s not just our No 1 citizen who behaves this way. The nation has followed suit.
Take the police union Popcru. This week the union convened a central executive committee meeting after the alarming increase in cases of police killings, allegations of corruption and the scandals emerging from the Madlanga commission. Popcru president Thulani Ngwenya said the union wants President Cyril Ramaphosa to convene a summit where police killings can be prioritised.
A summit. Words.
While the Madlanga commission is going on, a parallel structure, an ad hoc committee in parliament, is investigating police corruption. I understand that a judicial inquiry does not take the place of parliament holding the executive to account for their actions. Yet watching politicians from the MK Party (paragons of virtue, they are) hold forth on issues of ethics in those marathon meetings does make you wonder why our MPs could not wait for justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga’s team to first finish and then do the necessary work of holding the executive accountable if necessary.
We need leaders who react to crises as they should: with speed, with decisiveness, with dedication to ensure they are resolved swiftly. How can Emfuleni be in a crisis for 15 years? Eskom took more than 10 years to fix. Transnet is still being fixed, years after it was looted by the state capture lot. The National Prosecuting Authority has still not enrolled tens or even hundreds of state capture cases — and no-one is treating its failures as a crisis. We don’t have an ambassador in the US. Unemployment is rampant.
We are in a polycrisis. Let’s react in a manner that shows we realise how serious our situation is.
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