HERMAN MASHABA | Every party working with the DA finds the experience destructive

If Cilliers Brink were an ANC mayor, he would be regarded by the same people who defend him now as average by any objective measurement of the current state of the City of Tshwane. Do you doubt this? Then challenge yourself to read on.

To demonstrate my point, I am going to outline the factual situation in the City of Tshwane which manifests today after eight years of many DA mayors. Perhaps then you may understand why ActionSA’s continued involvement in this Tshwane government can no longer continue, and begin to question why so many are shrilly defending the indefensible state of Tshwane.

ActionSA does not do so with amnesia, in the sense that we have been part of this government. It is precisely because we have been part of mediocre governance that we have a duty to act in the interests of those who deserve better, all the residents of Tshwane.

However, with constitutional power vested in the mayor, the DA has run Tshwane since 2016, together with the all-important utilities portfolio which oversees water, electricity and sewage.

The City of Tshwane, as I write this article, is insolvent with a liquidity ratio of 0.6. Anyone with a financial background will tell you liquidity must be above 1. This means Tshwane cannot meet its short-term liabilities 18 months into Brink’s term as mayor.

The city’s debts to Eskom have ballooned to a staggering R6.83bn — over which the utility will be in court next month against the city, to seek full and final payment of more than R4bn of this debt.

The city has a rapidly growing contingent liability of R1bn owing to municipal workers due to nonpayment of legally binding wage increase agreements it concluded over many years. The city’s 89% capital expenditure figure is greatly exaggerated by the artificial moving of funds from underperforming projects to those in a position to receive more.

Invariably the projects defunded are those in the townships.

The auditor-general’s (AG) report found that 37% of capital project milestones were achieved in the fourth quarter of the recently published financial statements and, perhaps most damning, how R12bn of incomplete projects under construction should be written off. These are not just numbers on a spread sheet but a financial position that impacts on service delivery.

The city’s capital budget has decreased from more than R4bn at the start of this term of office to R2.1bn in this current financial year. This means the renewal of aged infrastructure of the city’s roads, water pipes, sewer lines and electricity infrastructure has been halved.

By way of comparison, the capital budget of Cape Town is R11bn, eThekwini is R8.1bn and Johannesburg is at R6.9bn.

The most recently published AG report gives the City of Tshwane a qualified audit opinion, placing it in the not so esteemed company of Buffalo City and Mangaung, saying nothing of an annual increase of R2.5bn in irregular expenditure and R1.3bn in fruitless and wasteful expenditure. The AG, in her findings, concluded that the city lacked proper controls when hundreds of ghost employees were discovered by the AG and that inadequate documentation existed to substantiate the city’s performance data.

When will people open their eyes to the reality that every party working with the DA finds the experience destructive, including the Freedom Front Plus, Patriotic Alliance and lately the ANC?

As you will see in a moment, that finding is frightening when you consider how bad the performance has become that the city cannot even verify. The Service Delivery Budget Implementation Plan (SDBIP), which is the performance management framework of the city, records that only 57% of the targets have been met. The modest improvement from 54% in the previous year appears to be attributed relaxing service delivery standards where, for example, the city changed the acceptable standard for a callout to a water or sewer complaint from 24 hours to 48 hours — and stopped tracking response times altogether for electricity outages.

It’s a bit like improving education by lowering the matric pass rate.

The city’s annual report concluded that a meagre 21% of pothole complaints, 45% of water complaints and 38% of electricity complaints are resolved within the standard municipal response time — when the city last used to track this KPI.

Perhaps the most damning evidence lies in how residents experience this government. In recently commissioned market research conducted as part of ActionSA’s review, only 36% of respondents felt the city was moving in the right direction over the past 18 months, with 54% believing the city had gotten worse. A further 10% indicated that no improvements had been experienced.

When one looks at the differences between suburban and township communities in Tshwane, the real problem emerges. In the suburbs 64% of respondents indicated an improvement in service delivery, while in townships this number was as low as 24%. In this shocking statistic lies the problem, that ActionSA found itself in a coalition at the mercy of a mayor from a party who has no discernible constituency in the townships of the city he governed.

This was the experience of the site visits conducted as part of ActionSA’s review. Irregular refuse collection has left the townships of Tshwane drowning in refuse illegally dumped in open spaces and community facilities. Soshanguve continues to experience daily electricity outages for years because it has taken until 2024 to fund the expansion of the city’s supply network. Large parts of Mamelodi have water on fewer days of the month than they don’t have water because of illegal connections into local reservoirs. Sewage is becoming a daily reality, as it spills into many streets in the Tshwane townships.

One thing is for sure: the DA would not tolerate their voters in suburban communities living for even one minute with the experience of the poor service delivery that is prevalent in the townships of Tshwane. Despite this fact, it is interesting to observe that nearly 40% of respondents in the suburbs have either experienced a decline in services or no changes over the past 18 months.

Others suggest that we should work out our differences with the DA like the skewed patterns of delivery are semantics that can be easily addressed. The reality is that working through the coalition has done little for ActionSA. The city has a speaker sponsored by the ANC and EFF because DA councillors spoilt their ballots rather than elect an ActionSA speaker — after ActionSA polygraphed its councillors to get Brink elected.

When will people open their eyes to the reality that every party working with the DA finds the experience destructive, including the Freedom Front Plus, Patriotic Alliance and lately the ANC?

Can the problem truly lie with everyone else other than the common denominator? As the mindless scream in defence of Brink, they do so based on some other consideration than the state of the City of Tshwane, its governance, its financial position, its performance or the DA’s track record in coalition. They do so despite the AG, the city’s own performance data or the experience of its residents. They also do so although the DA has openly confirmed talks with the ANC after the elections with a view to removing their current coalition partners in Tshwane.

It seems like loyalty is a one-way street for the DA and their supporters.

Perhaps even more insidiously, those in the DA camp project their prejudice onto ActionSA, believing that ActionSA should unconditionally support Brink’s misgovernance of the city — all to the detriment of our own constituency, who presumably do not enjoy the same entitlement to services.

And while these same folk deride failed municipal figures — like Mxolisi Kaunda from eThekwini or Kabelo Gwamanda from Joburg — the truth is both mayors left behind cities in a far better condition than Brink does in Tshwane. The facts speak for themselves.

I reiterate, despite the need to call out the DA by name, which I know irks many people who support it, at the heart of this matter is our concern for proper, transparent governance in the City of Tshwane, and about the plight of all its residents, irrespective of where in the city they reside.

• Mashaba is the president of ActionSA