Friedman,+Business+Day,+Delivery



=Clamour for ‘delivery’ obscures vital role of local democracy=


 * Steven Friedman, (Senior research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies) Business Day, April13, 2005**


 * //LOCAL democracy is too serious to be reduced to a bad morality play.//**

Conflicts about local government performance in smaller towns have prompted much media coverage — but little attempt to understand. In the main, the reports have echoed local residents in pinning the blame on the personalities who preside over local government. But there is more to the problem than greedy or incompetent mayors, councillors and officials (although they no doubt exist too).

Local councils suffer from a severe lack of resources — not only money, but people. The skills local government needs are in short supply, and those who have them gravitate to the major metropolitan councils or private employment. The “bloated” salaries of municipal managers may, therefore, be a sign not of greed and dishonesty but what is needed to hire someone likely to be able to run the municipality. It is contradictory for local businesspeople, who are often ready critics of municipalities, to demand that councils deliver — and that those who work for them get paid very little.

But this does not mean local government is in a happy state. Besides the often violent conflicts reported over the past few weeks, there are less dramatic examples of grassroots discontent with municipalities. Clearly, many of the people who most need effective local government, the poor, do not feel they are getting it.

The remedy, recognised in principle by Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi, is more local democracy. If councils face distinct limits to what they can do for residents, they surely need to forge closer links with citizens so people at the grassroots know the obstacles their municipality faces and can choose their local priorities within the limits of the possible. But more is needed than the minister’s call to strengthen local ward committees.

The committees are meant to keep councillors informed of what voters want and need. But they are selected by councillors and so the temptation to choose people who say what local representatives want to hear, not what they need to hear, is strong. Equally important, the poor are not organised, and so people who speak for them rarely serve on ward committees.

If local governments are to hear the voice of grassroots citizens before voters take to the streets, they may need to rely, not on expecting people to speak in the formal channels they create, but on hearing the people where they are and in ways which they, not government, choose.

Councillors need to go out and find their voters in the streets and meeting places, rather than waiting for them to join committees.

And citizens who want to be heard without attending official committees must be given a hearing. If local government’s link with the people is to be strengthened, a rethink of the way it has been seen for the past five years may also be needed.

Since 2000, when municipal boundaries were redrawn, local government has been seen as an agent of delivery, not as the voice of citizens.

Bigger municipalities have been created, a second level of councils in the big cities was scrapped, and local governments were encouraged to see themselves as implementers of national plans (as well as locally decided needs). This was meant to ensure co-ordinated municipalities that could benefit from economies of scale and “deliver” effectively. But it created councils further removed from voters and locked into a role as implementers, not representatives: councillors who attended a capacity-building course to help them represent voters insisted that they wanted, rather, to be taught how to deliver services.

The conflicts suggest both that we need stronger contact between councils and voters and that many councils, particularly those outside major cities, may be burdened with tasks that are beyond them. And the way out may be to free them to do what they can reasonably be expected to do, which is to hear and express their voters’ voices.

If bulk services were delivered by larger agencies — such as Eskom and water utilities — and the councils’ job was to ensure that what was provided was delivered at a quality and price that met the needs of voters, local capacities might not be taxed beyond realistic limits and councils might be better able to connect with their voters. They could also enjoy more latitude to decide which additional local services to offer because the essentials would be covered, so that people who live in smaller municipalities would not be deprived of the basics because of where they live.

Expecting resource-poor councils to provide a wide range of effective and affordable services, some of them devised in national plans, is unrealistic. Asking them to connect with their voters and represent them to the agencies that can deliver them is possible — and more likely to ensure that voters and councils talk to, rather than fight with, each other.