GGA’s aim is to provide credible and fact-based information about the state of Africa. In the run-up to the South African local elections we commissioned marketing and strategic research company Markdata to include a number of questions focusing on the perceived quality of local government in the country on our behalf as part of their 2015 national survey. We were left feeling so unsettled by the findings that we had KPMG check the numbers for us in relation to our report. They all tally up.
The results are revealing, to say the least. They confirm an urgent need for South Africa’s government to significantly improve the quality of its administration, as well as economic and social development and service delivery to communities at the local level.
Popular dissatisfaction with local government is growing, with social grants and pensions practically the only successes. Citizens at grassroots level consistently express strongly negative sentiments regarding the absence of accountability, as well as about pervasive incompetence and corruption in our local governments. They identify the ruling party’s failure to take responsibility for the economy and unemployment as another source of dissatisfaction. South African citizens are also disillusioned with regard to law and order, education and health services, and sceptical regarding their democratic freedoms.
In short, the majority of people interviewed have lost hope in the capacity of the government to hear and respond to them. Yet we live in a land whose aspiration is for the people to govern. It would appear that we still have a long walk to achieve true democratic freedom.
Our in-house study has provided us with rich data for analysis, on the basis of which we have devised league tables at both provincial and national level that have enabled us to rank levels of municipal performance in South Africa. Our rankings are based on 15 indicators, encompassing administrative, economic development and service delivery related variables. The results are startling in some respects, yet not unexpected in others.
Out of the top 20 municipalities, 15 are located in the Western Cape, with three in the Northern Cape and two in the Free State. Some 60% of the bottom 20 are in the Eastern Cape, 30% in KwaZulu-Natal and one each in Limpopo and the North-West provinces respectively. A coalition headed by the Democratic Alliance (DA) runs the top municipality of Swellendam. The African National Congress (ANC) is in power in 40% of the top 20 municipalities. The DA is the sole administrator of 45% of the top 20, while it is in coalitions with other parties in 20% of the others.
On the flipside, the ruling ANC controls the bottom 20 municipalities, with Mbizana in the Eastern Cape at the bottom of the rankings. However, the ANC controls some 200 of the 234 municipalities surveyed and its performance is scattered between top-end and bottom-end rankings at a provincial level.
The GGA report isolates some of the factors at play in determining the positioning of the various municipalities and makes certain key recommendations to enhance governance. Finally, we have shared Markdata’s analysis on local ward councillors. In the main, it demonstrates that the vast majority of people neither know their ward councillor, nor how to access them, and that they have not experienced any gains from the work of their councillors in the last year. The overall ranking of councillors is poor, averaging less than 4/10 across the sample. The general feeling is summed by one indicative comment that “we will see them when it is election time”.
This leaves us with a conundrum: if governance in a democratic sense is, as we would like to believe, “of the people, by the people, for the people”, then how can we reconcile this with a situation in which the people largely do not feel represented, are frustrated, dissatisfied and in some instances radically disillusioned—independent of age, colour, gender, language, province or socio-economic group?
How can we speak of people governing when they don’t even know—or know how to access—their local councillors at the grassroots level?
Tragically, it is the poorest people, that is those in the lowest Living Standards Measure, who show the least satisfaction with the local governors, while simultaneously demonstrating a profound dependency on social grants and pensions to stay alive. Surely this is not, and could never be, the desired state of affairs for any government concerned with the well-being of its people?
At Good Governance Africa we strive precisely to promote what our name suggests; we celebrate examples of good governance and expose the bad, in our endeavour to be transformative. To this end, Lukhona Mnguni opens our dialogue on South Africa with insightful analysis that not only diagnoses the ills plaguing the nation’s local governance, but which also provides some helpful proposals on taking remedial and restorative action. It is critical engagement such as this that we are delighted to encourage.
We hope that our information and analysis will be useful in making a meaningful contribution to well-founded, evidence-based critique and decision-making that will enable local government entities, proactive citizens and civil society groups to work to the general good. As the people of South Africa, therefore, let us remain bold and brave in asserting our very own democratic mantra, Amandla awethu, the power is ours!
