Despite the abuse regularly heaped upon local municipal councillors for incompetence, corruption and a general failure in service delivery, it is remarkable how often, following scrutiny, it is the various departments at provincial level which are found to have failed to pay the municipalities to deliver these services.
Despite the abuse regularly heaped upon local municipal councillors for incompetence, corruption and a general failure in service delivery, it is remarkable how often, following scrutiny, it is the various departments at provincial level which are found to have failed to pay the municipalities to deliver these services.
The province does, after all, have a statutory responsibility to fulfill its role. When the provincial departments, most notoriously Health and Housing, do not pay their agents timeously, the public is quick to blame the unfortunate councillors – the easiest targets for those enraged by unfulfilled promises.
The Eastern Cape Department of Health (ECDoH) is currently engaged in a process of provincialisation which will entail it taking over all the properties of the district and local councils and providing a comprehensive and equitable service to all.
That sounds quite desirable, if one happens to be living in a remote corner of Transkei – but what of the areas where there has been a fairly well run, if underfunded, Primary Health Care (PHC) service under a local municipality, such as Makana? Our buildings, equipment and relationships with the community have been built up over many decades, particularly since 1994.
It may be easy for the executive mayor of a post-2000 district like Cacadu district municipality to declare his willingness to donate all its clinics to the province – but that is not the case with Grahamstown, which houses most of the population of Makana, where municipal property is received from the past generation and held in trust by the present council for the benefit of the next generations and are a part of our historic capital. More important is the matter of accountability.
If a clinic sister makes a tragic mistake, the victim, if she survives, can make a short trip to City Hall, lodge a complaint, and have the resident reporting officer and employer act on it within hours, hold a disciplinary hearing within weeks if not days, with a final settlement completed within a month. There can then be closure, if not comfort.
Imagine a similar event under provincial management – if the sister opts for the Stalingrad option she can ensure delays and further appeals (if necessary with a bit of political assistance from a union or another political party) until files are lost and the victim gives up all hope – with the miscreant’s costs borne by the state and the victim’s by herself.
Provincialisation is doubtless based on equity – which sounds noble until one realises that it means ‘one size fits all’ with little incentive outside a battered conscience to improve performance – least of all through ‘performance management systems’ whereby officials meticulously scratch each other’s backs.
It is notable, perhaps, that the decisions about provincialisation are not being made by people who are subject to the state health system themselves, for every one of them is covered by a private medical aid scheme, for which their employer pays a substantial
contribution.
The Department of Sports, Recreation, Arts and Culture (DSRAC) has now come up with a similar scheme – the provincialisation of the Library Services another Provincial Competence.’
The current system, while inadequately funded, requires that the local municipality provides the staffing and fixed property for the libraries.
Capital improvements, such as internet connections and new buildings, are funded largely through the district from its provincial library grant (which enables it to exercise oversight over unnecessary or wasteful expenditure) and book stock is augmented from direct provincial supplies.
This has been somewhat cumbersome – the provincial supplies have been erratic and not very well managed; the districts have been tempted to hang on to their provincial grants for as long as possible in order to extract interest on their unspent balances, and some local municipalities have not given high priority to their library services.
An energetic Friends of the Library body in Makana has raised additional funds to provide books and other consumables for the libraries of Grahamstown, and encouraged imaginative initiatives by the librarians to promote reading, especially by
young people.
DSRAC’s proposal is that the municipal libraries be ‘provincialised’ and that the local municipal libraries become the property of the provincial department which will fund the expenses of the local municipalities directly (saving the involvement of the districts – which the local municipalities might find attractive) but itself employ the librarians on provincial terms of service.
Once more the issues of accountability rear their heads – if he who pays the piper calls the tune, then it will only be after the most tortuous of processes that serious personnel issues will be addressed.
The initial funding offer by DSRAC is substantially less than the current personnel costs of the libraries in Makana, and the value of the buildings and book stocks of the libraries runs into many millions of rands.
Cynics have suggested that provincialisation is a device invented by the province to justify its existence at a time when serious thought is being given in the upper echelons of Party and Government to the abolition of the provincial sphere – and maybe the district hemisphere too, leaving only the national and the local municipal spheres.
The provincialisation of the PHC service, following the earlier, and disastrous, provincialisation of the Roads administration, will eliminate most of the staff and major functions of the districts.
With Housing already effectively provincialised, such that the provincial department allocates the funds and vets the beneficiaries of RDP housing – leaving the local municipalities to find the land and monitor the construction processes – with PHC due to follow shortly, and the Library Service in its sights, the province will be able to claim both that it is acting according to its constitutional mandate and that it is equitable, handson and hence, indispensable.
The prospects look grim the local municipalities, and the ward councillors in particular, will continue to get the blame for service delivery failures over which they will have even less control than at present.
The provincial sphere of government, without doubt the least functional sphere (where political jockeying for power and perks take precedence over all else), will be even less accountable.
The slim future hope may lie in the Constitution which recommends, rather than requires, that the provision of all services should be performed by that competent level of government closest to the beneficiaries.
While many local municipalities may not be competent to deliver all the services which the state is pledged to provide, especially to the most needy, and require financial support from the National Treasury (which extracts income tax and VAT from the local economic bases), those which are competent to do so should be encouraged, rather than dragged down by the dead hand of provincialisation to the level of the worst in the
name of equity.
Michael Whisson serves on the Makana Municipal Council as a Democratic Alliance representative
