Gordhan’s ‘back to basics’ campaign a wake-up call for municipalities by Steven Friedman, 24 September 2014, 06:56 THE national government has told municipalities what they need to do — now it needs to help citizens to force them to do it. Largely ignored by media determined not to cover anything that might make a difference to people’s lives, the national government last week hosted a local government summit. Often, official summits are an excuse for politicians to state the obvious. But this summit was important: it showed that Pravin Gordhan’s national ministry responsible for local government is serious about trying to fix municipalities and that the national government is backing it. As local government is often the lightning rod for citizen action and local elections are due in two years, fixing municipalities may have become the government’s key priority. The first sign that the government wants to fix the problem is that municipalities were told frankly that most are in trouble with citizens. Gordhan repeated a message he has been sending repeatedly: voters believe local governments do not listen to citizens or serve them well. They also, he has warned, have the power to do something about it with their vote. Never before has the local government ministry sent a clear public wake-up call to municipalities. The second sign was the summit’s core message — a back to basics campaign in which local governments will be urged to get their core functions right: providing services to the right quality and standard and ensuring good governance and effective administration. While this may seem obvious, it is a shift. Where the government has not been doing its job, it tends to assume that the solution lies in new policies, systems or laws. This usually confuses public servants and changes nothing: if people are not doing what they are meant to do, it rarely helps to get them to do something else. It also commonly sets ambitious targets for local government, usually cloaked in trendy jargon. Telling councils that they need world class systems when the problem is that the street lights don’t work has done huge damage to local government. The new approach rejects this: there will be no new laws or systems, simply a push to get municipalities to do better what they are meant to do. That is far more in sync with what citizens want and what local government needs: but it is also more difficult. Fancy policies don’t place any real pressure on municipal politicians and officials — they are required only to learn new phrases. As they don’t judge councils by whether the water and power reaches everyone or the garbage is collected, it is easy to pretend to implement them. The back to basics approach provides less room to hide and so it places pressure on councils. It also threatens the cosy networks which enable some councils and their private partners to leech off citizens. Gordhan’s ministry is likely to face resistance from politicians and officials who much prefer municipalities that function well for them but not for citizens. It has little power to force them to do what they would prefer not to do. This is why talking to councils is not enough — citizens are the only lever that can get municipalities to do what is now asked of them. If we want evidence that municipalities perform better when citizens push them, we need only look at the suburbs of our cities. While their residents do not vote for the governing party, they are organised and they know how to make themselves heard. They may sometimes be ignored by local government but they are heard far more often than people in townships, who don’t have the means to make demands. The more citizens can ensure that municipalities that don’t get back to basics are given a hard time, the more likely is it that councils will mend their ways. The government can start this by doing better something it already does — giving citizens the information they need to hold municipalities to account. For some time, the Treasury has been pressing local governments to provide financial and other information and then making this available to citizens. Treasury officials say they aim to enable citizens to hold local government to account. They add that local citizens’ groups do use the information to demand answers from municipalities. But only a few residents’ associations do this and those that do are almost exclusively based in suburbs: the information is available mainly online and this excludes many who need it most. Not enough has been done to tell citizens where they can find it. A service that sent the information down to the people who need it most in a form that would enable them to use it could become a powerful weapon in the hands of citizens who want to get local governments to do what they are meant to do. Obviously, this is not the only way the national government can make it more likely that municipalities are held to account. But it is one example of what might be possible if it recognises that citizens are its only sure ally if it wants to get municipalities to meet their responsibilities. • Friedman is director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 06:16:44 +0000