If a recent North West High Court judgment giving the ratepayers' association of Kgetlengrivier control of the water and sewage works is read in the context of a general decline in the provision of services around the country, it could be an invitation to South Africans to discuss new ways of electing representatives, writes Mpumelelo Mkhabela.
A new way of governing the country could be in the making. It goes like this. Every five years, thousands of politicians around the country convince millions of voters to put them into power on the undertaking that they will deliver top-quality services in various municipalities.
Before the five-year term is out, it becomes apparent that the only thing the successful politicians and the bureaucrats they employ know is to secure positions of power for themselves. Once in power, the politicians who sweet-talked their way into council chambers are only happy to get salaries and additional benefits that come with controlling the purse strings of municipalities.
Through this power, they distribute patronage in the form of jobs and tenders for friends, family members and political allies. In practice, stuffing their pockets with ratepayers' money and diverting some of it to pay for their next round of campaigns to return to power is their vicious raison d'être. Put simply, they exist only for that purpose, nothing else.
The politicians don't add value to resident and business ratepayers who sweat to earn an income, only to have it diverted for the self-serving political ends of incompetent politicians. Not only does service delivery become poorer or stop as a consequence; it literally regresses as unmaintained infrastructure falls apart.
But because South Africa is not (yet) Zimbabwe, where the ruling party has successfully beaten almost the entire population into silence and forced millions out of the country, a few residents organise themselves into civil society groups. They call themselves the ratepayers' association.
Push for a functioning system
They are usually not interested in party politics, but they want to see the rates they pay ploughed back into their residential homes and businesses in the form of streets without potholes, functioning sewage systems and an adequate supply of clean drinking water. Upon realising that the democratically elected politicians are good at convincing unsuspecting voters to put them into power but are useless at performing basic tasks prescribed in law, the ratepayers' association lodges complaints to the court and asks for remedies.
The court gives the municipality concerned time to fix the problem, failing which the functions they are meant to perform under the control of the sweet-talking politicians, are ceded to the ratepayers' association.
A recent case study is that of the ANC-controlled Kgetlengrivier Local Municipality in North West. For years, the municipality has failed to manage sewage and water systems. Sewage flows liberally into the streets and streams causing environmental harm.
The municipality has dismally failed to provide clean water and other basic services – the very things for which a municipality exists. Last month, the Kgetlengrivier Ratepayers' Association officially took over control of water and sewage provision from the municipality after the North West High Court ruled in its favour in a precedent-setting judgment in December 2020.
The court ruled that the association has a right to procure the services of experts to fix sanitation and water provision. However, the municipality will foot the bills.
The ruling raises practical and theoretical questions about democracy. What it really means is that electoral outcomes that put lives at risk can be put aside in favour of a judicially sanctioned option that can improve lives. Now, suddenly a huge component of the task of democratically elected officials has been ceded to a non-elected association by a court in an endeavour to secure the rights of all residents to have access to water and be free from sewage hazards.
Although it remains to be seen, there is a real possibility that the association might competently execute the functions given to it by the court. If this were to happen, the elected politicians would have proven themselves incompetent compared to the technocratically driven ratepayers' association, who wants to see value in the rates it is paying.
Voters' dilemma
In theory, democracy is meant to enhance public legitimacy of decision making and it provides voters with the dignity of having a say on who governs them and how. Textbook democratic theory assumes that regular elections provide a platform for citizens to change parties or public representatives who fail in their task. It is expected that citizens would accordingly change incompetent representatives.
But there is no answer to the dilemma of the continuous retention of incapable governments in municipalities at every election. Could it be that residents or the majority of them are entitled to their democratic right to be robbed of basic services by the politicians they admire?
Even if it's accepted that this is the case, what about the minority who do not want to be part of such a perverse arrangement between the majority and the incapable, but democratically elected politicians? Representatives of the North West government, the local municipality and the ANC-aligned South African Municipal Workers' Union (Samwu) have criticised the judgment, citing the democratic right to govern.
The association, on the other hand, wants services which those that have a democratic right to govern are failing to provide. Yet, those services are an entitlement in terms of the Bill of Rights.
If it is read in the context of a general decline in the provision of services around the country, the North West High Court judgment could be an invitation to South Africans to discuss new ways of electing representatives. A system that balances democratic rule and technical ability of the individuals we elect into positions of power. Call it a technocracy or some other name.
- Mpumelelo Mkhabela is a former parliamentary correspondent, editor of The Sowetan and a political analyst.
*Friday Briefing on 19 February 2020 will take the reader to Koster and Swartruggens in the North West to give an in-depth view of what the ratepayers association has achieved since the court ruling. There will also be expert analysis on whether we need government in light of the court judgment.
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