Slow service delivery exasperates poor communities

Just over 50 years ago the historic Freedom Charter of the African National Congress (ANC) was adopted in Kliptown, Soweto. The irony of living in extreme poverty in modern-day South Africa, next to the spot where the charter was adopted, is not lost on Aletah Webster. While all around her the construction of the R436 million (US $68 million) Greater Kliptown Development Project is underway - including the construction of 8,000 homes as well as formal and informal trading areas - locals still lack the most basic amenities. The development project is intended to turn Kliptown into a South African heritage site and a premier tourist destination in Johannesburg, while also improving the quality of life of the community by making the area a residential and commercial hub. However, Webster, a single mother of two, is not sure that Kliptown's residents will be better off once the development, which began over two years ago, is finished. "The people need to be freed from poverty, they need basic amenities: we have no electricity, no running water nor a sewerage system. Although we have protested about this we just get told by the municipality officials they are still developing and the amenities will come," she said. "Most of the people see the new houses that are being built as out of their reach - they have no money to pay rent with," she maintained. The poorest of Kliptown's residents live in squalid conditions. Shallow trenches run between their shacks so that dirty water can be siphoned away from their homes; the 'bucket system', which involves the removal of human waste from portable toilets, is also still in use. The lack of electricity is the biggest concern among residents, said Webster, due to the dangers associated with using paraffin lamps and candles around makeshift homes that easily catch fire. "Last week there were two fires and we couldn't put them out because there are not enough taps to get water from - it's really dangerous. With people's homes so close together, when one catches fire they all do," she said, pointing to the remains of a burnt out shack in a squatter camp built in the shadow of Kliptown's Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication. The residents of Kliptown are not the only ones in South Africa who have been openly airing their grievances over the poor delivery of basic services by the local authorities. Across the country local residents have been staging demonstrations, calling on the ANC government to deliver on promises made when they came to power 11 years ago. The protests point to a new trend in community dissatisfaction and resultant activism. In October the police fired rubber bullets at residents from Delmas, a township 70 km east of Johannesburg, who began protesting after four locals died of typhoid from drinking contaminated water. In February the residents of Phomolong, a township near Welkom in Free State province, started looting local businesses and threatening to attack local officials they believed were corrupt. Around the same time the Free State township of Mmamahabane erupted in violence when residents trying to publicise their grievances about the local authorities blocked traffic on a main highway by erecting barricades. Similar shows of discontent over the poor delivery of services have occurred regularly across the Free State, Western Cape and other South African provinces over the past 12 months. Local government consultant and former special advisor to the minister for provincial and local government, Kevin Allan, insists the current problems over basic service delivery are linked to transforming the local government system that operated under apartheid. "Apartheid local government poisoned every aspect of local life and living conditions in the country. Addressing this required a radical reconceptualisation of local government: new boundaries to include all those who lived and worked in a locality; new structures for democratic representation and decision-making in a municipality," he wrote in South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper recently. While Allan maintains the new local government system has succeeded in its goal of radically overhauling the old structure, "in hindsight that was the easy part of the process". "Inadequate recognition of the capacity problems", along with "managerial purges associated with changes of political leadership" exacerbated the service delivery problem, he contended, and all municipalities "are significantly larger since the transformation, but still have to operate on the same tax base as before". "Although local government as a sphere raises two-thirds of revenue itself, the ability to raise revenue varies dramatically from one municipality to the next. Poorer municipalities are more dependent on national transfers than wealthier municipalities," he explained. Allan's view is shared by Dave Hemson, research director of South Africa's Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). "There is certainly a problem in funding versus capacity to deliver what is needed. The people at local government level are saying they can't plan properly because they don't know what they are getting from the government from one year to the next," said Hemson. "Over the last 10 years a lot of opportunities have been lost through the fluctuation of government subsidies, and the reason for this fluctuation is the budget deficit the government inherited from the old apartheid regime," noted the HSRC research director. However, Jacob Molapisi, provincial chairperson of the South African NGO Coalition, believes the problem is mostly due to a lack of local government personnel qualified to deliver the services. "The local authorities do not have the capacity to deliver because they don't have enough qualified personnel, like engineers, who can make it happen. They have the budgets; there is plenty of money going back to the government each year because it is not being spent," he noted. "They have the plans, there just aren't the personnel to execute them," Molapisi insisted. Whether the service delivery problem is down to a lack of qualified personnel to execute the plans or an inability to plan properly due to fluctuating financial resources, both Hemson and Molapisi agree the problems are not insurmountable. According to Hemson, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel recently promised the money needed for local municipalities to deliver basic services was now available, while Molapisi insisted that qualified personnel could be sourced from abroad. "The question of skills shouldn't be a problem - we should hire people from abroad on contract and then get them to train South Africans while carrying out their work," suggested Molapisi. In the short term Hemson believes that civil unrest is likely to continue, especially when poor township residents see councillors and mayors at local government levels paying themselves large salaries even though they are failing to deliver the services. "Municipalities get to decide what salaries a particular position gets. It is part of the devolution from government, but if you get power you have to take responsibility for it," said Hemson.