Africa-Press – South-Africa. Coalition politics have had a devastating consequence for service delivery in Johannesburg, particularly for the nearly two million residents living in the city’s informal settlements, writes Chelsea Ndlovu-Nachamba.
Last Friday, the City of Johannesburg elected its fifth mayor only 20 months into the electoral term of five years.
Kabelo Gwamanda, from Al Jama’ah, will now lead the coalition government, which has yet to ensure that adequate and reliable services are provided in Africa’s most prosperous city.
While the coalition politics might be interesting to the neutral observer, it has devastating consequences for service delivery, particularly for the nearly two million (40%) residents living in Johannesburg’s informal settlements. In other words, one in six households are affected by inadequate service delivery.
Coalitions are not an anomaly because the electoral system of proportional representation currently used for local government is not designed to produce an outright winner, but it is a basis for consensus democracy. It has, however, been a challenging ride for the residents governed by coalition governments since they started featuring in Gauteng following the 2021 local government elections.
Unprecedented instability
While there was some hope that coalitions would provide better services, the inevitable formation of ‘hung councils’ after the 2021 local government elections plunged municipalities into unprecedented instability. Since then, in Gauteng, the City of Johannesburg has elected five mayors, while the City of Tshwane in Pretoria and Ekurhuleni in the east also experienced their own share of political wrangling.
The reshuffling of mayors has had a crippling impact on the City of Joburg’s administration, not least on the officials who have faced consistent and disruptive turnovers of political leadership. Besides the obvious political instability and wastage of taxpayer’s funds for every volatile council meeting, what has been most concerning is the visible result in the deterioration of service delivery to the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Data collected since the election of the first mayor of this administration paints a dire picture for the living experience of residents in informal settlements in Joburg. A comparison of data measured by Asivikelane’s service delivery index, which assessed the city’s performance in providing access to water, sanitation and refuse removal, shows that there has been a decline in service delivery from February 2022 to February 2023.
The index shows that in February of 2022, 67,3% of residents said that they had access to enough water, their toilets were cleaned and drained, and that their refuse was collected. A year later, in February 2023, only 58% of residents could answer yes to those questions.
The Asivikelane campaign is a nationwide initiative which aims to amplify the voices of informal settlement residents to alert the shortcomings of municipal services. The referenced data for Johannesburg is collected monthly by Planact, a Joburg-based non-profit organisation together with 1to1 Agent of Engagement. It is a real-time depiction of lived experiences of people who currently stand at the losing end of political warfare.
Unfortunately, service delivery setbacks are not unique to the City of Joburg alone. In the City of Ekurhuleni, residents who participate in Asivkelane have shared their frustrations of spending days without access to adequate water or their refuse being collected. In the City of Tshwane, rubbish dumps in Phomolong laid uncollected for months, posing a significant health hazard for children, particularly during the rainy season. In Tshwane, residents also, now have less access to water.
Without mayors, the executive decision-making structure, which is made up of members of the mayoral committee, cannot be formed and passed. This leadership vacuum defeats the developmental agenda of local government created to link government with its community. In essence, residents and non-profit organisations advocating for transparency and accountability cannot pin down the municipal council to respond to the 10% decline in service delivery as motions of no confidence have been more certain than the actual delivery of services.
All hands on deck approach needed
However, at municipal administration level, there have been constant progressive engagements on addressing service delivery concerns with officials under the Rudimentary Services Department in the City of Tshwane despite the political turmoil.
So, what should we do with coalitions which have become a fixture in SA’s political landscape to ensure service delivery continues? There are a few practical recommendations that have been made on managing coalition politics in the local government. We require an urgent all-hands-on-deck approach to transform good intentions into action by all partners that form the local sphere of government.
The first suggestion is to professionalise the public sector so that officials are less impacted by political disruptions. The initiative by the SA Local Government Association (SALGA) to professionalise municipalities in their processes should start to provide change, but this requires willing and committed stakeholders so that trust can be restored in a “capable and developmental local government”.
Moreover, residents should get more involved in municipal processes to influence budgets and ensure that a municipality truly prioritise what the people need. Organisations such as Planact advocate for participatory budgeting, where residents are actively involved in telling municipalities what they need to see prioritised in the budget. A practical example is where residents, under the Asivikelane campaign, mobilised and made submissions on the 2023/24 municipal budgets in all eight metros. In this regard, citizens can and should influence municipal planning and ensure that municipal budgets respond to community needs. Recent submissions by residents included requests to metros to allocate more money for access to water, sanitation and refuse removal.
Lastly, when residents build advocacy around a similar social justice issue and exert pressure on their municipalities, there is a greater likelihood of better results. For instance, Planact has partnered with approximately 58 informal settlement communities in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, who have formed clusters to exert pressure on municipalities for improved services Planact has documented positive responses on increased number of toilets and water tanks for residents. Johannesburg residents need to rise and demand that coalition parties put aside their squabbles and put the needs of community development ahead of politics.
– Chelsea Ndlovu-Nachamba is the Information and Resource Coordinator at Planact
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