NUMSA convenes a National Workshop on Local Government!
The NATIONAL UNION OF METALWORKERS OF SOUTH AFRICA (Numsa) will be convening a National Workshop focusing on local government tomorrow Thursday 10 February 2011, Vincent Mabuyakhulu Conference Centre, Newtown.
The National Workshop will be attended delegates drawn from Numsa Regions, Alliance partners and deployed cadres in the State. The Workshop will accord Numsa an opportunity to develop its own mobilisation strategy and demands for an overwhelming ANC-led Alliance local government elections victory.
The NUMSA Deputy General Secretary Cde KARL CLOETE will officially open the Workshop.
Currently, Numsa has made some decisive insights or observations pertaining to the struggle of making local government work and to deal with apartheid fault-lines in the interest of the working class and the poor.
The working class and the poor are directly in contact with government at the municipal level of the state. Thus all the inherited experience of unequal social and economic opportunities, inferior social and economic infrastructure, mass unemployment and poverty play themselves out within municipalities. Thus it is not by accident that "service delivery protests" are the order of the day in all our municipalities in the country.
A. What is wrong with our post 1994 municipalities?
Several key observations have been made not only by the government itself, but by many observers and workers of the evolving local government terrain, post 1994 in South Africa.
Key among these observations are the following:
1. There are insufficient Constitutional and legislative provisions to create, in the words of the South African Constitution (1996) a "Developmental Local Government". A major weakness in both the Constitution and local government legislation is the link between the people and local government administration, thus perpetuating the Apartheid legacy of the sharp demarcation between the residents of municipalities and the municipal political and official administration. This has lead to:
a) Weak democratic and popular control of municipal budget - officials generally write budgets and councillors merely endorse these.
b) Poor and inefficient, undemocratic control of social and economic development planning at municipal levels - residents are made to o through the rituals of the IDP processes even as these rituals do not truly feed into the real IDP and budgets of municipalities.
c) Municipalities are saddled with a myriad of unfunded mandates, including the need to attend to popular demands for housing, water, electricity, improved health and education services, security and safety, and cultural services such as libraries and parks.
d) All this has led to a situation where all our municipalities are literally overwhelmed by the massive social and economic backlogs on one hand, and the failure to popularly account for their performance.
e) Insufficient and poorly allocated national grants to municipalities have simply compounded the already inherited financial crisis of all our municipalities.
f) The procurement processes at municipal levels have not been decent work promoting friendly, are riddled with inefficient and corruption, and have not been structured to promote the social and economic development of the working class and the poor.
g) The ongoing global crisis of capitalism has eroded whatever little financial strength all our municipalities might have had to service and sustain the apartheid features of our municipalities, let alone break new ground.
2. In the conditions of extreme inequality, mass poverty, mass unemployment, insufficient democratic and popular controls of both the political and administrative spheres of the local state, the local state has become thus the most concentrated site of class warfare for private primitive accumulation:
a) Former apartheid municipal employees have migrated out of the municipalities and created "consultancies" which are selling the same services they were providing during the apartheid days at extremely inflated prices, as "consultants".
b) Lacking capacity, the new employees of municipalities are thus heavily dependent on these "consultants"; and a very corrupt nexus has now arisen between municipal officials and "consultants" - a symbiotic/parasitic relationship in which in order to get "jobs" and tenders, the "consultants" must bribe the officials (and councillors).
c) This insidious "privatisation" of the local state has exponentially shot up the cost of running our municipalities - in some cases we have evidence where the municipalities pays "consultants" to take minutes of regular meetings, pays "consultants" to carry out ordinary performance reviews of officials and all sorts of work which normally should cost municipalities little money.
d) Combined with the neoliberal post 1994 culture of privatising services, this has led to impossible costs for the provision of mass social services to the working class and the poor, in all our municipalities. Thus we are unable, 16 years down the line, to be anywhere near beginning to undo the social and economic injustices of the past in housing, water, electricity, roads, libraries, parks, and so on, for millions of the working class and the poor.
e) Faced with the realities of the impossibility of undoing the inherited inequalities and mass poverty and unemployment, is it any wonder that our poor councillors are failing to avoid being caught up the frenzy of primitive accumulation through tenders and outsourcing in our municipalities?
B. The reproduction of the apartheid geography, economy and society, post 1994
There is nowhere more than in our municipalities is the picture of the continuing apartheid geography, economy and society so pronounced as in our municipalities. This is why, as we have stated above, not a single municipality is immune to sporadic "service delivery protests" today.
1. Much of the post 1994 South African municipality is constructed on private land.
2. Africans continue to live in the poorest, least inhabitable, and overcrowded townships and shacks, far away from real economic activity places, in all our municipalities.
3. Thus the perception that Africans live only near towns in order to supply labour to the white economy and white farms is very prevalent today.
4. While there have been internal marginal improvements in the apartheid Indian, Coloured and African settlements, no real racial and economic integration is visible among the population and classes of South Africa in all our municipalities.
5. To the contrary, we have seen the redlining, and abandonment of the CBDs for gated affluent white settlements and the mushrooming of affluent communities complete with their own shopping malls and service centres, completely barricaded from the working class and the poor.
6. The most productive and economically viable land is still largely in private male white hands - be it in urban or rural municipalities.
7. Working class public transport in all our municipalities is extremely backwards, extremely expensive (compared to the average wage of a worker and mass unemployment and the distance between working class settlements and work places).
8. In the meantime, we have seen the massive investments in modern road and transport infrastructure for the well to do, at the expanse of modernising, making safe and accessible, cheap reliable transport for the working class and the poor.
C. The Alliance and Local government
1. We are convinced that apart from producing a local government manifesto, deploying cadres into local government, and campaigning to win local government elections, the Alliance needs to do more to confront the glaring Constitutional, legislative, political, administrative and service delivery crises of our emerging local government system.
2. We are satisfied that at the rate we are going, we will not, in a million years, create "developmental local government" as the post 1996 South African Constitution charges at to do.
3. We are convinced that the primitive accumulation and corruption at the local levels of the state are a direct product of the neoliberal post 1994 social and economic policies, among other drivers, which privileged private personal material accumulation at the expense of undoing our inherited mass poverty, inequality and mass unemployment.
4. The Alliance has, since 1996, not produced a coherent post local government election plan to supervise the development of a truly developmental local government system that would play its meaningful role in undoing the historic injustice.
5. Time, we believe, has come, in the light of the ongoing global crisis of capitalism, to confront the challenges of local government.
D. Numsa minimum demands for the next local government elections
As Numsa, we are of the view that the following must constitute the minimum demands, COSATU must place before the Alliance for the 2011 elections:
1. In the next term of local government, the Alliance must revisit the Constitution and local government legislation with a view to firming up popular democratic control of budgets and social and economic development planning.
2. The privatisation of local government is unconstitutional as it negates the constitutional provision for a developmental local government. This must stop.
3. Labour broking, outsource of developmental functions of local government must come to an end.
4. The procurement processes must be in line with the strategic objectives of the Polokwane Resolutions: to grow decent jobs.
5. Primitive accumulation at the local level of the state is not a moral issue; it is a class and economic issue. As long as the local state remains the most lucrative and accessible site for primitive accumulation in the absence of a radical developmental programme for the working class and the poor, we will never root out corruption and primitive accumulation at local government level. Thus the Manifesto for the 2011 local government elections must clearly spell out what our new social and economic development goals for the next five years will be.
6. The local state must promote local content in all manufacturing processes within their municipalities.
7. A radical public transport development programme must be part of our developmental goals for the next term of office of councils. Such a programme must aim to modernise public transport for the poor and the working class, be related to creating decent and sustainable integrated human settlements close to economic activities.
8. Massive investments in housing, road, and school and health infrastructure must underpin our struggle to undo the gross inequalities in the racial, gender and class distribution and access to these infrastructures.
9. It is unacceptable that 16 years after 1994, there is no perceptible, visible movement towards real racial, gender, age and class integration of our communities. African women, African youth and African disabled people continue to be confined to the rural hinterlands, margins of our cities and in shacks, and bear the brunt of expensive distances to economic and social opportunities. The ANC Local Government Manifesto must clearly spell out how in the next term of our councils we will deal with this situation.
10. A special infrastructure fund to be established to deal with social and economic infrastructure backlogs in rural municipalities and poor urban municipalities.
11. An urgent need exists to arrest the mushrooming of illegal gated "local governments" for the rich. This amounts to Apartheid by other means, even if sprinklings of black people live in these places. Land use planning processes at the municipality level, provincial and national, must prohibit the growth of gated communities.
12.The insulation of the rich from the mass poverty they have created must be abolished. Municipalities, through their social and economic planning processes must promote racial, gender and class integration.
13.Municipalities through the use of rates and other taxes, must influence rentals to enable the working class to live close to their work places.
14.Within the Alliance, the deployment processes must take full account of the class, gender, age and capacity to perform, in the cadres we choose as councillors.
15. No New Growth Path will be complete without embedding roads, transport, housing, health, cultural and other working class and poor people's infrastructures at the municipal levels.
16.Special measures must be announced in the Manifesto on the development and support of rural enterprises.
17. The rural populations must find clear expression to their development needs in the Local Government Manifesto, and programmes after the elections. The tendency has been to underplay rural municipalities development needs.
18.Relationship between the Wold Cup and cashflow problems in municipalities must be addressed.
19.There is need to explore the possibilities between giving more power to the ward committees if we are to improve democratic participation and control of budgets and socio-economic development planning.
20. We need to promote decentralised, participatory democratic planning.
21.Resourcing of municipalities need to be related to their development needs. The Manifesto must pronounce on this matter.
Statement issued by Karl Cloete, NUMSA Deputy General Secretary, February 9 2011
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