With the eagerly awaited 2021 local government elections around the corner in South Africa, many will reflect on how political parties have fared on the service delivery scorecard for their constituencies in the past four years.
The last lap of the current local political administration has seen unusual and complex socioeconomic challenges, ranging from the need to integrate Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technology into the mainstream economy to the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, its service delivery performance is subject to public scrutiny like never before.
For the first time in the history of local government elections, these reflections will pay particular attention to how authorities have so far dealt with the unprecedented socioeconomic repercussions of Covid-19 and it’s newer more infectious version, resulting in more hospitalisations and fatalities.
The extent to which political parties are able to retain their voter base while luring prospective new voters could hinge on how they tactically design strategies to successfully balance lives and livelihoods around Covid-19.
Authorities charged with the responsibility of advancing economic growth and development will now be compelled to be less obsessive about short-term relief mechanisms and focus more on sustainable measures that are responsive to a constantly changing global economic arena.
In this new millennium, the relevance and responsiveness of party manifestos will also depend on how explicit their value-propositions are on policy direction pertaining to the administration of 4IR and the introduction of human-centred development as pillars for the millions of people prone to the seemingly neglected pandemic of acute poverty.
Any slight deviation from these compelling pillars will not only prove a local government that is complacent in perpetuating the current state of under-development mired with fiscal challenges, poor service delivery, high unemployment and absolute poverty, it will also project local government as an active accomplice in threatening the lives and the livelihoods of many citizens and, thereby, going against the prescripts of our constitution.
At the centre of these public participation misgivings lies a principle of inclusive democracy that discharges a promise of a bottom-up system of governance that bestows power to the citizens while the office-bearers become the elected and trusted servants of the masses.
This approach remains a feature upon which many historic democratic and inclusive government ideals are founded, such as “The People Shall Govern” and “Batho Pele”.
How these democratic ideologies have been and should be upheld still remains a highly contested argument with an evidently widening divide between citizens and government.
Even in an arguably democratic dispensation, the masses of disfranchised communities are of the firm view that principles like Batho Pele are a mere facade, and that active participation by communities in sociopolitics remains a pipe dream.
Notwithstanding the strides government has made in engaging with the public on all matters Covid-19, noticeable weaknesses in public participation experiences could be derived from how Covid-19 communication processes were generally administered.
These issues manifested in perceived insufficient consultation on some of the regulations imposed in response to the (seemingly generally poorly projected) socioeconomic challenges that Covid-19 has subjected our local communities to.
While many claim these Covid-19 regulations and directives were necessary to curb its deadly spread, others maintain the draconian character of these laws was counterproductive.
Either way, the scenario lays bare the fundamental significance of sound public participation, failure of which devastates the social compact.
A correlation can also be drawn between the public participation mishaps and the rate of service delivery protests that have punctuated public service in the past four years. The causes of these protests, I argue, can usually be traced to defective public participation.
While an evolution in public service is a widely accepted feature, most public participation challenges could be apportioned to the aloof nature of government-community engagements this evolution has introduced.
More often than not, communities perceive developmental decision-making processes that are devoid of inclusivity and ignore their voices.
This evolution of public service has witnessed a gradual dwindling of an active public participation culture in local government.
Active and meaningful public participation has been replaced by reactive tokenism from those charged with the responsibility to provide an interface between government and citizenry. This new culture is characterised mainly by reciprocity of attention and lip service between the government and its disfranchised citizens.
The undesired consequences of this tokenism renders participatory governance as a deceptive, abstract phenomenon which continues to widen already conspicuous mistrust between the government and the governed.
It is this continued widening mistrust and the failure to guide a sound public participation that gives an ordinary citizen the impression that their “stakeholder” titles in a “democratic” society are being used as pawns to achieve opposing developmental ends.
In a recent report assessing public participation practices in the public services, the Public Service Commission made several observations, key of which pointed to the uneven, ad hoc and sporadic nature of public participation processes.
Such flawed participation opens local government to public scrutiny of the fundamentals of its existence and the breaches of legislation it commits.
At the centre of this predicament the following legitimate questions arise:
* Is local government still relevant as a machinery to bring about sustainable livelihoods to the masses in disfranchised communities?
* Are local government functions still underpinned by a people-centred approach premised on the mantra “The People Shall Govern”?
It is against these founding pillars of democratic governance that local government should constantly gauge its public participation processes and outcomes.
There appears to be a huge gap between the current public participation approach and what these founding principles promise the masses.
This gap is characterised by perceived powerlessness and poorly democratised local government. Most citizens remain disempowered from participating in critical political and administrative decisions.
As a public participation and accountability gauge “The People Shall Govern” remains an elusive promise that most citizens hold on to in vain.
Notwithstanding the strides local government has made in public participation through traditional government-community interfaces, the concept of empowered communities remains an ideal deferred.
The legislative tools meant to ensure public participation and good governance appear to be in contradiction with the outcomes of the current approach.
This is depicted by nation-wide service delivery protests, most of which are arguably linked to defective public participation in key decision-making processes, rather than actual lack of service provision itself.
To this end, serious reflection and reimagination of more responsive public participation methodologies is a matter of urgency to bridge the evident divide between local government and communities.
More reforms are required to promote people-centred public participation in the political and administrative goings-on in local government.
Citizens must be empowered to participate meaningfully so that the current passive norm in public participation processes is eliminated.
The predominantly low literacy levels that continue to hamstring our socioeconomic body politic underline the fact that public participation outcomes can never be isolated from the process.
These low literacy levels in most rural communities in SA strike a direct correlation between the extent of meaningful participation and the participation outcomes.
The public’s understanding of local government processes can also be attributed to flawed public participation processes in local government. It is this very divide that compromises healthy interfacing between communities and local government in many rural localities.
An evolution in public participation at local government level is necessary if the people are to govern and Batho Pele ideals are to materialise in a manner that does not only empower citizens, but also respects communities as important public service roleplayers, not mere service recipients.
The expansion of public participation functions by local government to include public capacitation is necessary to bring about an evolution in local government.
Doing so would be in direct compliance with the White Paper on Transforming Public Service Delivery, which advocates prioritising information as the most powerful tool at communities’ disposal to exercise their democratic rights to service.
Taking a deliberate initiative to systematically give power back to the people is what our public service should aim for. If necessary, let’s bring back imbizos [gatherings] as the interface between the downtrodden masses and government services in an attempt to realise a bottom-up approach to public participation.
If it cannot be embedded in the day-to-day public service, public participation should precede service delivery if it is to be treated with a primary significance mandate, as legislation requires.
The current service delivery protests may not be linked with poor service delivery and other social ills, as is generally held. The elephant in the room could be the way the public participation function is served around these challenges.
Ayanda Sondara is a local economic development practitioner. He writes in his personal capacity.