A-Infos (en) southern africa, Anarchist Communist Front - ZACF - Zabalaza #13 - Municipalities, Service Delivery and Protest by Oliver Nathan

“It’s like living in the apartheid era. We don’t exist,” said Nonthunzi Nodliwa, 46. 
Nodliwe lives in Khayelitsha’s TR Section, where disillusionment with service delivery 
runs high [ from: http://antieviction.org.za ] ---- Introduction ---- South Africa is an 
extremely unequal society. The post-apartheid dispensation has seen the situation of the 
majority poor black working class worsening (characterised by increasing unemployment, a 
lack of adequate and affordable service delivery and exacerbated by rampant inflation). On 
the other side of the coin, a few elites have ‘made it’ in capitalism and through the 
state, often through the elitist forms of ‘Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE)’ 
and corruption. Inequality in South Africa is easily illustrated when one observes the 
massive disparities in development, service delivery and wealth between townships and 
rural areas on the one hand, and suburban areas on the other.

Nationally, South Africa faces a massive backlog in service delivery. Some 203 out of 284 
South African municipalities are unable to provide sanitation to 40% of their residents. 
This means that in 71% of municipal areas, most people do not have flush toilets. A 
staggering 887 329 people still use the bucket system and 5 million people, or 10.5% of 
the population, have no access to sanitation at all.[1] It is perfectly understandable, 
then, why working class and poor people take to the streets in protest against poor and 
costly service delivery; it is these same people that are impacted most by insufficient 
and costly service delivery, corruption and municipal mismanagement.

The post-apartheid state’s promise of an extensive roll out of service delivery in 1994 
has been severly undermined by its long standing neoliberal approach to the provision of 
services (discussed in the next section). While the state has made some headway in rolling 
out services since 1994, thousands of communities living in rural areas and townships 
continue to receive inadequate services.  Moreover, the private sector approach has meant 
that where services have been provided, the costs have generally been transferred to  poor 
communities who often cannot afford them.

The ability and willingness of the South African state to provide adequate service 
delivery to all is not simply a question of having the ‘right’ political party or 
sufficiently skilled people in power. Nor is it simply a question of having good policies, 
or the adequate administrative means or technical capacity to implement it.

Should massive disparities in service delivery between wealthy and poor neighbourhoods be 
put down to corruption, mismanagement, administrative incapacity and a lack of 
consultation? Or is there something in how the state is structured and the way in which it 
rules which means that it can never give the majority of people what they need?

Neo-liberalism and Privatisation in South Africa: RDP and Gear

Privatisation, at its most basic, refers to the state selling off public enterprises to 
capitalists. The theory behind this neo-liberal approach is that that once privatised; 
service delivery will become more efficient, cost effective and far-reaching. The 
privatisation of electricity provision through the installation of prepaid electricity 
meters in township homes is a case in point. Electricity privatisation through pre-paid 
meters ensured that the price of electricity shot up dramatically – up to 20 per cent in 
some cases.[2]

Between 1993 and early 1994 the ANC, in conjunction with its alliance partners, the 
Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party 
(SACP), created the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The RDP could be seen 
as the election manifesto of the ANC in 1994, maintaining elements of the 1955 freedom 
charter and promising and end to the social and economic inequalities generated under 
apartheid.

The RDP election manifesto was put into effect in 1994 with the adoption of  the RDP white 
paper. The RDP overall contained a set of ‘Keynesian’ macroeconomic measures, which 
stipulated that the state ought to take the lead in delivering services, housing and 
infrastructure to the majority poor, mostly black popular classes. However, the RDP 
election manifesto also, and this is less well known, already contained some neoliberal 
elements alongside Keynesianism. The White Paper brought neoliberalism to the fore, firmly 
establishing it as the basic framework. This means that the ANC didn’t just step into a 
neoliberal state and take its programme on board: it actively endorsed and adopted the 
neoliberal framework, evident in its very first general policy document.[3]

The RDP was soon replaced by the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) 
macroeconomic framework in 1996. GEAR essentially promoted a far more aggressively 
neoliberal approach to the state and the market, firmly consolidating the ANC’s neoliberal 
orientation. Very broadly, GEAR promoted the privatisation of ‘non strategic’ state assets 
and services, liberalised trade and promoted “flexiblily” in the labour market.

Despite claims that neoliberalism represents a weakening of the state, in fact it merely 
designates it a different role: maintaining law and protecting private property, while 
creating a suitable environment for the functioning of the market (including 
infrastructure provision for the benefit of business), The role of the state in 
intervening directly in markets is what is undermined in neoliberalism, not the state itself.

GEAR promoted privatisation, according to its own justifications, as a means to attaining 
efficient and far-reaching service delivery – by placing it in the hands of the supposedly 
more efficient private sector. Neoliberal theory is based on the assumption that 
unfettered competition in the free market will deliver the greatest good to the greatest 
number of people. It argues that state intervention into markets, such as the state owning 
and operating enterprises which it itself subsidises, leads to uncompetitiveness (higher 
prices for consumers) and inefficiency in service delivery.  Privatisation has been 
deployed, according to the state, to make the delivery of services more efficient, and to 
help municipalities in particular to save money so that they can provide services better. 
Although selling off ‘non-strategic’ SOEs can allow the state to commit less capital and 
administrative capacity, it can also allow the state to raise capital for other projects 
from the proceeds of selling the asset to a private sector buyer.

Crucially, the post-apartheid neoliberal state sought to justify the imposition of 
neoliberal restructuring by appropriating Keynesian and developmental language and 
rhetoric from aspects of the RDP and by arguing that GEAR was the means to which goals of 
the RDP could be achieved. Behind the rhetoric however, GEAR represented the ultimate and 
final consolidation of ANC neoliberalism and its abandonment of even a paper commitment to 
Keynesian policies.

State Logic

There are three structural characteristics of the state that are common to all states. 
Firstly, all states are fundamentally undemocratic and largely unaccountable to the 
citizenry; secondly, all states are hierarchically organised, with those at the top 
unaccountable to those at the bottom; and thirdly, all states have a bias in favour of 
serving the long-term interests of the ruling classes. The South African state, at all 
levels, is no exception. It’s character has implications for how services are delivered 
and how we understand corruption. Analysing it helps us to assess the prospects for 
popular class interests to be leveraged and maintained through the state.

Firstly, the local state in South Africa is fundamentally undemocratic because state 
managers are not accountable to their constituents; people can only vote for new state 
managers once every five years and have no control over them in the interim period. 
Secondly, because of the hierarchical structure of the local state, high level managers 
are not accountable to subordinate workers in the state. Therefore, upper management can 
exercise managerial prerogative (authoritarian decision-making) to promote their own 
interests ahead of those of subordinates and ahead of the class interests of the popular 
classes. Thirdly, by virtue of the local state’s undemocratic and hierarchical structure, 
it can be, and indeed is used by the ruling classes to secure the interests of the ruling 
class (the state managers and capitalists) at the expense of the popular classes (the 
workers and the poor).

Several factors combine to help explain why services are not delivered to the poor: the 
statist structure of municipalities (regardless of the party in power), privatisation of 
basic services, pervasive corruption and mismanagement including the under-spending of 
budgets and the over-spending on state managers’ salaries. This is compounded by the fact 
that the poor themselves have little say in determining how services ought to be delivered.

Understanding Municipalities in South Africa

Municipalities, otherwise known as local states are the level of state that operates at 
the level of wards. Wards are geographical areas set up that divide provinces into smaller 
chunks. Municipal governments then govern a grouping of wards, which are known as a region 
or jurisdiction. Municipality leadership consists of a mayoral council, headed up by a 
mayor, a municipal manager and executive councillors, who lead the various local 
governments’ departments (e.g. Local Economic Development, Social Development, Health, and 
Education.) District Municipalities, such as the City of Johannesburg Municipality and the 
Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality have executive, legislative and judicial functions 
too. This means that they have an executive that rule over wards, a legislature to 
formulate by-laws and have magistrate’s courts and a police force to enforce the laws.

Under this layer of executive leadership are the ward councillors, who ought to represent 
the interests of communities to the executive council and mayor. Ward councillors should 
hold regular council meetings in which ordinary people can bring their grievances to the 
councillor who then passes them onto the executive council of the municipality for 
resolution. Municipalities are taken to be democratic and participatory spaces where 
ordinary people can participate in the decisions taken, and elect new officials should the 
current officials not be seen to be representing the people’s interests. However, the 
local state is still highly undemocratic.

The ward system in particular is highly undemocratic in that ward committees often 
hand-pick the members they would like to participate in decision making.[4] Over and above 
this, most officials at the municipal level are actually unelected. While the mayor or a 
councillor might be elected, the city managers and other officials are appointed by the 
party in power.  These people often maintain their office regardless of the mayor who gets 
voted in.

Why is Municipal government relevant?

The municipalities are thus understood by the national state as the most appropriate level 
of governance to carry out the objectives of service delivery and local economic 
development. This is justified for three reasons [5]:

The national state argues that municipalities are better positioned to know what people 
need, as municipalities are allegedly institutionally closer to communities.
Because the national state argues that municipalities institutionally closer to 
communities, decision making can allegedly be more participatory through the council system.
The national state, in light of the above, argues that policies can be applied more 
effectively at the municipal level than at the national level.
However, as was mentioned earlier, a strong case can be made that the interests and 
imperatives of government officials at the national, provincial and municipal levels of 
the state are diametrically opposed to those of the poor and the working class. The 
interests of capitalists and elites in government are taken by the state, at all levels, 
to be the interests of all.  A few officials in the state may have genuinely emancipatory 
or egalitarian aspirations with regards to the popular classes. However well intentioned, 
these aspirations are never articulated in meaningful, coherent and sustained ways because 
of the authoritarian and hierarchical organisation of the state. Moreover, state actions 
that might seem to serve the interests of the popular classes, no matter how well 
intentioned, are always stymied by the ruling-class bias of the state. That is, the 
interests of the ruling classes will always trump those of the popular classes because the 
state exists solely to protect ruling class interests.

Given the inherent class bias in the state, there cannot be a genuine unitary ‘national 
interest’ that is cultivated by the ruling class through the state that is ever fully 
accepted by the popular classes.  This is reflected in policies which are created by 
elites who do not live in poverty or misery, are not oppressed, and have little 
understanding or appreciation of the day-to-day struggles poor communities face. The 
hierarchical structure of the state also means that policy-making cannot be democratic, 
and that ordinary people cannot properly participate in its structures. The implication is 
that the state can never give the masses what they really want.

Specifically, the claims of the democratic nature of local government should be 
interrogated. Most municipal officials are in fact unelected. The municipal manager, for 
example, remains in power regardless of the party of the incumbent mayor. All of the 
senior members of the municipal management are in fact part of the ruling class and have 
used their positions for personal gain or to push forward the agenda of their own class 
(for example through so called ‘tenderpreneurship’). Thus, the very structure of local 
government means that it cannot be democratic, nor can it be participatory.

Corruption

Almost all municipalities have experienced corruption at one time or another. In South 
Africa, this predates the democratic transition – despite some common perceptions that 
this is somehow a new phenomenon. Because of the hierarchical character of the state and 
the related lack of accountability of high level officials to their subordinates and the 
general public, ‘shady’ tender deals with private firms and outright theft of state funds 
and property is the norm.

The existence of such brazen forms of  corruption is often put down to a lack of effective 
anti-corruption policies, laws and ‘checks and balances’ that fail to make officials more 
accountable to the national state or the public at large. However, because of its 
hierarchical and undemocratic structure, the state affords state managers opportunity to 
steal money and resources from the municipal almost unchecked. Even officials with the 
best intentions going into local government are unable to meaningfully make an impact. 
This is because rather that changing the local state; the local state changes them.[6] 
Ordinary people have no control over corruption because they are never given information 
or control over how the money in municipalities is spent.

Municipal under-spending, lack of delivery and protest

National treasury reported that municipalities had under spent their budgets by R18,9bn in 
the 2009/2010 year. In the 2008/09 year aggregate net under spending was recorded at 
R16,6-billion, or 9,1%.[7] In addition, despite a stipulation that no more than 30% of 
provincial budget allocations should be spent on salaries, the reality is that in many 
cases salaries absorb up to 60 percent of the budget. Local government salaries rose by 
53% between 2006/2007 and 2009/2010 while municipal employment levels rose by just 4% in 
the same period.[8]  The City of Cape Town Municipality’s top earner was  Mayor Helen 
Zille, who earned R858 260 (which includes a vehicle allowance of R214 564 [9]), while 
councillors received only 7 percent of the budget in 2008 and an average of 5,75 percent 
in 2007. In 2009 Zille’s salary will be almost R200 000 more than when she took office in 
March 2006, at which point her salary was R669 214.

In 2009, in contrast, over 150,000 municipal workers in South Africa struck  over paltry 
pay offers in the face of massive inflation. In an overwhelming display of unity, over 
150,000 workers employed by municipalities and belonging to both South African Municipal 
Workers’ Union (SAMWU) and Independent Municipal and Allied Trade Union (IMATU) across the 
country rejected a wage offer of the employer body, South African Local Government 
Association (SALGA).

On 27 July 2009 SAMWU and IMATU embarked on strike action in all municipalities in every 
province of the country.[10] In Johannesburg 10,000 workers marched to Mary Fitzgerald 
Square, rejecting SALGA’s offer and reaffirming SAMWU’s demand for a 15% increase and a 
housing subsidy based on a R200 000 house. In Cape Town 3,000 workers marched to the SALGA 
provincial offices to hand over a memorandum reasserting the union’s key demands of a 
living wage of R4000, as well as the filling of the 25% vacant posts in the sector, and 
the improvement of the housing benefit. In Durban 5,000 workers marched and picketed in 
workplaces to ensure that no scabs performed the work of the strikers.

Though the actions around the country were conducted in a peaceful and disciplined manner 
by SAMWU members the union expressed “outrage” at reports of police action against its 
members in Polokwane, where workers have been shot at and arrested.[11]

In 2011, Andries Tatane was murdered by the police while engaging in protest against the 
lack of service delivery in Ficksburg, Free State province. This, after his community 
after had “repeatedly written to the mayor and local government of Ficksburg pleading for 
these necessities”.[12]

Tatane’s murder shows how municipalities are willing to deploy the police in order to 
crush any resistance to people demanding their right to service delivery.

Municipal Elections

The most recent municipal elections, held in May of 2011, promised changes to the way in 
which services are delivered to the poor. All of the political parties that campaigned 
promised heaven and earth to communities. However, nothing so far has really changed 
(except that some houses and toilets were built in a rush to secure votes for parties).

Soon after new councillors were voted in, people unhappy with the selections were involved 
in the burning down of certain councillors’ houses. Many people understand the prolem to 
lie with ‘bad apples’ – corrupt and inefficient candidates in local government. It is 
believed that voting for a new trustworthy councillor or manager will bring about 
improvements in service delivery. But this almost never happens. This is because few 
criticisms are ever raised by protesters towards municipalities as structures 
fundamentally unable to deliver.

Conclusion: South Africa’s National Question and Municipalities

In this paper, I argued that three characteristics of states in general, and the local 
state in post-apartheid South Africa in particular, prevent the poor and working class 
from attaining suitable services from the state. These arguments were the following: 
firstly, that states are fundamentally undemocratic and largely unaccountable to the 
citizenry; secondly, that all states are hierarchically organised, with those at the top 
unaccountable to those at the bottom (which allows for corruption and mismanagement); and 
thirdly, that all states have a bias in favour of serving the long-term interests of the 
ruling classes (as expressed through neoliberal forms of privatisation in service delivery).

This explains why protests have become the principle means for expressing the frustrations 
of poor and working class communities over the provision and cost of service delivery. 
Protests by municipal workers are also an expression of the unwillingness of 
municipalities to provide better wages and working conditions for these workers. The local 
state in some cases is simply unable to provide adequate service delivery for poor and 
working class communities or decent wages for its workers. But more importantly, the local 
state is in fact unwilling to provide adequate service delivery and living wages because 
the interests of the local state are the same as the interests of the ruling class. 
Furthermore, the state exists to protect those interests, directly against the interests 
of the popular classes.

According to Van der Walt (2011), South Africa’s transition to ‘democracy’ was a massive 
victory against national oppression, which was won from below. It is therefore incorrect 
to speak of the post apartheid situation as a continuation of “white supremacy”. There 
have been huge gains in legal and social rights; many routine apartheid practices are 
illegal, while affirmative action etc. is mandatory; yet the national liberation struggle 
was left incomplete.[13]

The ANC cannot bring about the completion of the national liberation struggle, and neither 
could any political party using the state for national liberation. While a political 
revolution may have occurred (the transition from apartheid to a national capitalist 
democracy) an economic revolution has not occurred. The poor are still poor, workers still 
exploited and only a few black people have become rich through BEE and other means. While 
the roll out of extensive service delivery was a key thrust of the ANC’s election 
manifesto, so far municipalities have not been able to carry out service delivery in a 
democratic fashion in a sustained an equal way. Rather, municipalities have been used by 
officials to enrich themselves.

Footnotes:

1. http://www.da.org.za/docs/633/5%20worst%20munnicipalities_document.pdf
2. City of Johannesburg,(2003), downloaded from: www.coj.gov.za.
3. Fighting against privatisation in South Africa
4. Oldfield, S. (2008), “Participatory Mechanisms and Community Building Projects: 
Building Consensus and Conflict”. In M.van Donk, et al (eds), Consolidating Developmental 
Local Government: Lessons from the South African Experience. Cape Town: UCT press.
5. http://www.dplg.gov.za/subwebsites/publications/type_muni/muni_ward.htm
6. Rudin, J. (2011) “Municipal Dysfunction can be Cured”. In Mail & Guardian, 7-13 
October, 2011.
7. ibid
8. Donelly, L. (2011) “Municipal Salary Bill Rockets while Staff Levels Stagnate” in Mail 
& Guardian, 16-22 September, 2011.
9. Dentlinger, L (2009) “Council Salaries Go Up”, 
http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/council-salaries-to-go-up-.429975
10. http://libcom.org/news/municipal-workers-strike-across-south-africa-28072009
11. ibid
12. Hattingh, S (2011), “Andries Tatane: Murdered by the Ruling Class”. In Zabalaza: A 
Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism. No. 12
13. Bekker, I and Van der Walt, L (2011) “Build a Better Worker’s Movement”. In Zabalaza: 
A Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism. No. 12

This entry was posted on February 10, 2013 by griffin36. It was filed under Zabalaza 13, 
Zabalaza Journal .
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://ainfos.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en