Every year the Auditor General's report on the mismanagement of municipalities is as predictable as Cape Town's rain in winter. It hangs like a Damocles Sword over the ANC, yet the Party has no idea how to solve the crisis.
No longer a surprise, we have come to expect these qualified audits and the reasons are clear - the lack of skills, managerial and financial incompetence, corruption, and cadre deployment, and more. These problems are but symptoms of a much deeper malaise.
The tumour is embedded in the heart of the ANC and needs radical excision. Public sector reform requires a more surgical procedure than just appointing competent people and putting new systems in place.
It needs a new language. But more than a decade into our new democracy, the ANC still clings to its Stalinist discourse of the national democratic revolution (NDR), while the president, the cabinet and deployed cadres sport the trappings of the high life, luxury imported cars, mansions and designer clothes.
Clem Sunter makes the point more wryly:
"What is it about you guys that makes you cloak everything in dead white Russian speak? I managed to wade through ‘The Second Transition' on the internet and the language used reminded me of stuff Lenin or Stalin would have used." ...Get real. This is 2012 not 1917 and we are in Africa, not the Soviet Union. Even the Russians have moved on now that they realise that most of their socialist yada yada was used to cover up their leaders putting fingers into the cookie jar."
The capture of the State; the class struggle; the control and ownership of the economy; the national democratic revolution; the expropriation of land and the nationalisation of the mines are concepts as out of sync with a global economy as typewriters are to telecommunications.
This totalising discourse of "all or nothing" is what will destroy us and it negates the fact that public sector reform at the local level needs to happen in manageable portions. Considered small beer compared to control of and ownership of the economy, local governance and citizen democracy have largely been ignored.
Expecting enduring loyalty in this whole equation, the cadres ignore the contributions citizens have made and make to their own liberation. Only now do they realise that power resides at the local level and if basics such as housing, education, clinics, water, sanitation, electricity and road infrastructure are not adequately provided for, people will rise up against those very comrades they elected into office.
So, is it too late for the ANC to have a change of heart? How does one dispose of rot that has seeped into the very marrow of the organisation? Milking local government tenders as a first step towards the accumulation of wealth, the ANC has made poor communities the casualties of this greed.
For them incompetence in local government merely means more loopholes exist for the primitive accumulation of public money through the rigging of tenders. And it is this incompetence that greases the palms of those who rule us. That is why public managers are cadres; that is why executive mayors are cadres; that is why mayoral committee members and councillors are cadres.
Fixing municipalities should be a technical, and not, a political pursuit. Equally important are the non-tangibles - such as harnessing the expertise of NGOs, the participation of citizens and building social cohesion. But then, the ANC has always found these things a nuisance.
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
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