It is becoming more apparent that we are rapidly heading towards a service delivery crisis. This can be seen on many levels and in many locations.
In the economic capital, Johannesburg, residents of Diepsloot have for years frequently spent weekends without water or electricity, and often both. This state of delivery decline, fuelled by incompetent, non-communicative staff and, of late, capricious coalitions, has recently reached the suburbs as well. To lay a complaint about bylaw infringement, one is told to email the Johannesburg metro police department, which may or may not respond.
Thousands of homeless people live in parks where wastepickers burn the plastic covers of stolen cables to get to the copper inside — unimpeded by any law enforcement. Many police vehicles simply drive past the scenes of those crimes without stopping.
Meanwhile, to the north, residents of capital city Tshwane go more than a week without water. Power outages last for days. Hammanskraal residents have paid for poor service delivery with their lives, after more than 20 died of cholera.
However, those who live in these two large metros are not worse off than the unfortunate residents of other smaller municipalities such as Maluti a Phofung (Free State: Harrismith, QwaQwa), Ditsobotla (North West: Lichtenburg, Koster) and Ugu (KwaZulu-Natal, south coast), many of whom go weeks without water. In QwaQwa, some residents have been without water for years. Not to mention Hammanskraal in Limpopo, tortured by water outages for years, with the community hit by a cholera outbreak earlier this year.
We must also realise it is up to us as citizens to drag us out of the hole of corruption, non-delivery and incompetence.
This service decline is not just apparent in municipalities, however.
Provincial departments are often little better. The Gauteng department of health often simply fails to pay suppliers of food to some of its largest hospitals, leaving weak and vulnerable patients without the nutrition they need to heal. In the Eastern Cape, children have recently died in pit latrines on the provincial education department’s watch.
Service delivery failures are also glaringly apparent at a national level too. The police, the Hawks and prosecuting authorities are failing to make sufficient inroads into prosecuting the corrupt and the money-launderers, which will leave us languishing on the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list for even longer.
As a nation, we must know that our government is largely an excellence-free zone.
We must also realise it is up to us as citizens to drag us out of the hole of corruption, non-delivery and incompetence. We need to do this using every tool at our disposal, from our local street groups and ward subcommittees to lobbying our MPLs and MPs.
It is incumbent on every one of us to guard our own corner — to make a noise, to continue to hold the feet of our civil servants and elected representatives to the fire, and to continually insist that they do better. We must be fractious, insistent and uncompromising.
We need to make our hard-fought democracy work for us and for the future of our children.
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