Ask not what your municipality can do for you

Date: 23 September 2018 By: Jo Robinson

Local residents have been trying for years to get Vhembe Municipality to take their complaints about shoddy service and maintenance, especially when it comes to water delivery, seriously. As reports of widespread municipal dysfunction come to light, the whole country now must face the fact that years of mismanagement and corruption have created a countrywide system of chaos in local governance.

Over the past few months, dozens of readers approached the Zoutpansberger, complaining about leaking water pipes or other water-supply-related problems. A common thread has been fear of reprisals of some sort. Residents very often do not want their names mentioned because they are afraid that the municipality will somehow take revenge on them for reporting the fact that they are not doing their job.

DA ward councillor Brian du Plooy has recently commented that the way the municipality is currently operating is unsustainable. He questioned their honesty and transparency, after they refused to begin emergency work on the repair of an essential service because “no budget to pay workers overtime” was available.

Should people be afraid of confronting their local municipality? Former ANC MP Dr Makhosi Khoza, speaking at an event hosted by the Centre for Constitutional Rights in August this year, questioned why South Africans are where they are. “We have become so corrupt and there is so much political meddling that some no longer care about the law,” she said. “That leads to even municipalities violating the law and leadership not condemning it.” Khoza joined the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA), headed by CEO Wayne Duvenage, on 1 June 2018. She said that people’s quality of life suffered when their taxes were misused. “We should take responsibility to hold municipalities accountable.”

Khoza stated that municipalities were currently not solving problems, they were just shifting these to consumers by increasing rates. She encouraged ratepayers, local businesses and ratepayer associations not to be isolated from giving their input in municipal ward committees. “Ward councillors should be directly accountable to the community. Currently, ward committees are no longer an expression of a community. Ratepayers are paying for services for a municipality to be sustainable,” she said. “For that, you need ratepayers. Yet about 90% of ward committees are made up of indigent communities.”

The South African Constitution states that municipalities have the responsibility to make sure that all citizens are provided with services to satisfy their basic needs. People trust their local government (municipal) departments to ensure that they receive adequate water supply, sewage collection and disposal, refuse removal, electricity supply, health services, municipal roads, street lighting, municipal parks and recreation. It states that “poor services contribute to the creation of unhealthy and unsafe living environments and can also make it difficult to attract business or industry to an area and will limit job opportunities for residents.”

The local municipality is the portion of the government tasked with providing the services the population are entitled to. Municipalities can either supply these services themselves or outsource them for reasonable charges, but either way the responsibility is theirs to see that people get them, barring occasional and understandable problems. Regardless, the population generally expects steady, if sometimes slow, improvement from the people they elected to serve them in this capacity.

Taxpayers in Louis Trichardt have been complaining for years about not only the lack of regular supply of basic services, but of rudeness and the highhanded and often even intimidating behaviour of municipal officials when asked for assistance. People have been understanding of the problems as related to them by municipal workers, such as infrastructure problems as a result of age. This is reasonable to people as they are also aware of the fact that the infrastructure is very old. What they are only now beginning to ask is why, if it is so very old, it has not been replaced. Using a lack of funds as the reason for this holds no water when the budgeted-for money has been a matter of public record for the past few years.

A municipality in South Africa is an instrument of the people. The people who work there are public servants.  Public servants are those who receive their pay from the government. The government runs on money sourced from the public, mainly from taxes, so in the end, the people paying public servants’ wages are the public. Public servants include law-enforcement officers, mayors, SASSA employees, employees at public hospitals and clinics, and everyone behind the counters at the municipality.

“Municipalities must ensure services are delivered in a sustainable manner. That is very important. And they must be held accountable. Local service delivery should not be highly politicised. It is about survival and basic needs, not politics,” said Khoza.

Local municipalities are paid for by citizens’ tax money, and citizens are entitled to demand service for their payments or, at the very least, to be given explanations as to why their money is being used inappropriately.

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Jo Robinson

Jo joined the Zoutpansberger and Limpopo Mirror in 2018 pursuing a career in journalism after many years of writing fiction and non-fiction for other sectors.

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