Last week Stephen Grootes wrote a piece for Daily Maverick in which he analysed the the prospects of the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the 2021 local government election. In essence he says that the DA’s message of service delivery won’t resonate with everyone, a point we readily concede.
He also argues, as many other commentators have done, that the DA’s rejection of race-based policy will undermine our message and limit our appeal. Our response, which the Daily Maverick declined to publish, is that the unfolding reality of municipal collapse vindicates the DA’s stand on policy and our offer to voters.
The DA’s message in this election is that we get things done. We are playing to our strengths, including a record of service delivery. We’re connecting what the DA has to offer with what we believe South Africa desperately needs. Grootes is quite correct that this message will not resonate with everyone, especially a commentariat of soft ANC supporters unable to let go of the party core ideology. We also don’t expect hard ANC supports to become DA overnight. That’s not the pattern of political change in SA.
What the DA is aiming for is a beachhead — a chance to show more and more people that everyone is better off with councillors, mayors and municipalities that work for non-racialism, a capable state, a social market economy, the rule of law and property rights. These are principles long abandoned or never held by the ANC. Our long-term bet is that as things get worse under a national ANC government, DA-led provinces and municipalities will be able to protect communities against some of the worst consequences of state failure.
Everyone complains about the perilous state of service delivery and municipal finances. But few realise how short the runway is for most municipalities, including a few metros. The repetitious old story of mismanagement and decay will have an ending, probably sometime in the next decade. And it’s not going to be pretty. The country’s most dysfunctional municipalities aren’t just running out of cash — the result of decades of corruption, cadre-deployment, and bad value BEE procurement. These municipalities are losing the ability to generate an income of their own.
The assets meant to yield an income for municipalities — in return for the delivery of what is called ‘trading services — have been neglected or destroyed. The prodigious amount of taxpayers’ money that local ANC bosses have blown on show projects or otherwise siphoned off is money that hasn’t been spent on replacing old water treatment plants, electricity substations, lines, pipes and other parts of the machine that deliver services at a tariff. A municipality can only charge tariffs for water, electricity and other services actually delivered. The moment those services stop, so do payments (and the cross-subsidy of services to the poor). Over time the interruptions add up.