Prepared text of speech by James Lorimer, MP, DA Shadow Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, in the debate on the President's State of the Nation Address, Parliament, February 16 2011:

Admit it - local government is in crisis

Five sentences. That's how much attention was paid in the State of the Nation speech to local government. Five sentences about the issue where South Africans most feel the failure of the state.

Those five sentences were designed to soothe, to placate, to obscure. Those five sentences indicate the presence of Q7 vision, that is, a view of the world from the tinted window of a 4x4 in a high-speed blue-light convoy.

Pictures with no sound. Or maybe, to be more accurate, sound with no pictures.

Let me give you some pictures that you will find if you go out there and see for yourself.

Let's start at the Vredefort Dome, a World Heritage Site. In the town, against the wall of the local abattoir, a rectangular municipal drain stands open. Bubbling up through this hole and washing into the surrounding ground is a tide of blood red water. Dipping its snout into that water and eating solid abattoir waste there is a large pig. The stench is indescribably bad and covers the whole lower half of the town. Twenty metres away from this drain, people are living in shacks. Is that a mere challenge? Or is that a crisis?

Go north from there and you will find untreated sewerage flowing from municipal works into the Vaal River system. Infrastructure spending has not kept pace with demand and skills have been chased out. Treatment works are breaking down and our rivers are becoming stinking sewers. A challenge? Or a crisis?

Go south-east to Kroonstad, where the council cleared a foul lake from a blocked sewer main by breaking a hole in the adjacent stormwater drain so the sewerage would drain away, ending up in the dam from which the town gets its water. Last year we had a thousand cases of diarrhoea because the municipality found it had to buy cars and snacks rather that chemicals to clean the drinking water. A challenge? Or a crisis?

We did hear in the State of the Nation speech that an additional 400 000 people were given water connections last year. That's great. But, how many of them are still connected?

Go east from Kroonstad and find Steynsrus. There was no water in the taps for a month last year. Or how about Mahenge near Port St Johns where, when I was there in December, the taps had not worked for six weeks, forcing people to walk an hour each way to fetch water.

Here's another picture. In Ngqamakhwe village near Butterworth, RDP houses on a hillside are each accompanied by an above ground plastic septic tank. People there use the tanks for storing drinking water because the taps are so often dry for long periods. Challenge? Or crisis?

I'd talk about more municipalities if I had more time. Don't just look at the official pretty figures. Q7 vision is not enough. Try face to face rather than just Facebook.

This happens because infrastructure projects are built by people with political connections rather than people with expertise. This can be summarised in three words: corruption, collusion and nepotism. That is the motto that should engrave the letterhead of any ANC-run municipality.

You don't need to take it from me. Take it from Martin Sebakwane, the convenor of an ANC provincial task team in North West. He says that state machinery is held hostage and captured by one group at provincial level and a competing faction at local government level.

He says: "State resources are directed to municipal wards which have councillors who are part of the same factions."  He says councillors who are not part of the powerful faction are not allocated service delivery projects in their wards.

A challenge? Or a crisis.

Government's typical answer to this question is delivered by the spokesperson for the Nkomazi municipality, Cyril Ripinga. After the Auditor General found almost R540 million worth of his municipality's assets could not be accounted for, he said the municipality was not in a financial crisis.

That's a response we hear all the time from this government. There is no crisis.

This is closely followed by the response conceding that ‘there may be a problem but we're fixing it.."

Here's a newsflash ... you're not. Let's look at the history.

Project Consolidate ran from October 2004 and covered half of the country's municipalities. It deployed staff and expertise to fix local government, in the words of the then ANC minister, "... in line with the 5-year strategic agenda for local government."

Some strategy, because almost exactly 5 years later, the ANC government had to institute the Local Government Turnaround Strategy. It's more of the same. Will it work if the political methodology of the ruling party is not addressed? I doubt it.

The poster child in this regard is Nokeng Tsa Taemane, a municipality that was run into the ground by the ANC.

The DA took it over in 2003 and got it out of financial trouble. The ANC government took it over again in 2006 and last year declared it so bankrupt and so broken that it could not be fixed. So here we're coming to the truth of it. It is only when the ANC runs it that it is unviable.

There's another plaintive excuse when this government is on the ropes about service delivery: "Don't let's politicise this".

So let's get this straight, when you made the law, it was political. When you appointed the officials it was political. When you allocated the budget, it was political. When you spent the money, it was political. Then it all went wrong and suddenly you don't think the local government crisis should be politicised.

Municipal failure is not an act of God. It is a direct result of failed ANC government policies.

The SONA speech declared that at least some municipalities are working well. And yes, DA-controlled Cape Town is working very well. From the days of capital starvation under the ANC the rate of housing opportunities has been tripled, spending on infrastructure has almost quadrupled. The city's streets are clean and so are its audits. 

Cape Town's IT system is internationally recognised. When poor South Africans leave the ANC-run Eastern Cape to find a better life, do they go to ANC-administered Port Elizabeth? They do not. They go to DA-administered Cape Town. Some failure, Comrade Turok.

Compare that to Johannesburg. Tens of thousands of ratepayers with good credit records being sent foolish utility bills and being cut off without warning. That's after a politically connected company gets the IT contract and fails to deliver.

Mayor Masondo, of course, says there's no crisis.

Of course the Q7 vision is politically necessary. The ruling party cannot admit the extent of its failure to run local government. Despite the excuses, these failures are not occasional or sporadic. They are devastating, they are systemic and they are everywhere.

Issued by the Democratic Alliance, February 16 2011

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter