MIKE SILUMA | Morero may deny the crisis but Joburgers live it daily

Crisis? What crisis? So says Joburg mayor Dada Morero while his city’s finances sink deeper into the mire.

Not for the first time, finance minister Enoch Godongwana was moved this week to sound the alarm about the dire financial state of more than five dozen municipalities — with Joburg being by far the biggest and most economically consequential. The City of Gold was placed in the blessed company of the likes of the notoriously misgoverned Ditsobotla in North West, the under-provincial-intervention iMpendle in rural KwaZulu-Natal and far-flung Theewaterskloof in the Western Cape, as well as perennial problem child Emfuleni in Gauteng.

To arrest further deterioration, Godongwana announced that the National Treasury would temporarily withhold transfers to the affected municipalities. The intention, he said, was “to instil fiscal discipline and ensure that public money is properly managed”. He charged the entities with “persistent and serious noncompliance” with governing legislation “despite support provided by Treasury through guidance, engagement and formal or informal communication”.

And they had accumulated billions in fruitless and wasteful expenditure. More billions were chalked up in irregular expenditure.

Yet, when responding to Godongwana’s announcement, Morero, claiming a good relationship with the Treasury, insisted that feedback from that quarter “confirms that our financial management is OK and hasn’t reached a crisis point”. Recall that he had previously pooh-poohed Godongwana’s earlier warnings about Joburg’s perilous financial state, following its wage deal with the South African Municipal Workers’ Union.

Joburg, supposedly the richest city in the country, has become a poster child for local government failure

The two cannot both be right about Joburg’s financial health. The point is we would not be allowing Godongwana anywhere near the national kitty with a wobbly accounting grasp. But that aside, Morero is wrong to couch the city’s crisis in financial terms only. The finances are merely a bellwether of where the city as a whole is inexorably headed. As a place to live, work and do business in, Joburg has, incontrovertibly, become an altogether less pleasant town.

Residents live daily with crumbling infrastructure: potholes, water outages, electricity failures and the ever-present threat of crime.

This is a city whose problems have defied even the intervention of President Cyril Ramaphosa after he was left shocked by his hometown’s dilapidated state ahead of the G20 summit last year. Only this week, equipment from the city’s key service centre in Braamfontein was attached by the sheriff on account of unpaid debt, obviously causing much inconvenience to residents needing their matters to be resolved.

Joburg, supposedly the richest city in the country, has become a poster child for local government failure. It can hardly collect its rubbish or reliably supply water and electricity to residents and businesses — all the while insisting on charging even for services it fails to provide. Now it even battles to buy fuel for its maintenance fleet.

That is the crisis the mayor appears unwilling — or unable — to acknowledge.

It’s as if the city has had no leadership all along. In reality, the decline has been aided and abetted by political leaders in whose care the voters placed it. The advent of the era of coalitions and the reduction of the ANC’s historical majority certainly led many to think the city’s salvation was nigh, that its fortunes, and those of its citizens, would finally be restored. But there has been no such luck for the city in the five years since the local elections. Instead of inspiring Joburg’s rebirth, the politicians have, to their eternal shame, spent their time shifting the deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic.

Where failure persists despite free counsel, training and multiple warnings — what use is it to persist with an evidently unsuitable governance model, great in ambition but disastrous in outcomes?

Rather than using coalition government to co-operate in the public interest, councillors have too often treated office as a vehicle for patronage, rewarding friends and political allies through jobs and tenders.

In most parts of the country, local authorities have been denuded of much of their administrative, technical and financial capacity — a state of affairs the auditor-general has repeatedly complained about.

The picture painted by Godongwana should get us thinking about our local government model, whether it helps economic development and improves citizens’ quality of life or, even inadvertently, it has turned out to be an obstacle to progress and development for most citizens.

A refrain one hears when councils fail to meet their financial obligations, including to essential suppliers, is that they don’t have the capacity to pay due to their thin revenue base. The question then is whether we need so many local authorities. And should every village and hamlet have its own council, run like an autonomous fiefdom, even if they are economically and administratively unviable?

Indeed, there is a strong argument to “bring government closer to the people” in a democracy, and that local government is a way of achieving that. Again, based on Godongwana’s diagnosis — where failure persists despite free counsel, training and multiple warnings — what use is it to persist with an evidently unsuitable governance model, great in ambition but disastrous in outcomes? A model that, in many cases, exists mainly to serve job and tender patronage networks while suppressing citizens’ standard of living and dimming their life prospects.

For Joburg’s residents in this case, the proof of whether the city is in crisis or not lies in their lived experience, irrespective of the mayor’s protestations.