I’m always amazed at how easily our government falls into lying and bamboozlement as a routine way of communicating. Everything is always absolutely fine. I was stunned at the ANC’s January 8 statement last week, faithfully read out to the crowd gathered for him in Limpopo by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
This annual statement is, formally, the work of the ANC’s national executive committee and, typically, this one was a mess. Fortunately for Ramaphosa it was so unmemorable, and so overwhelmed by Lindiwe Sisulu’s attack on the judiciary and on the ANC itself, that it may soon be forgotten, if it is not already.
I remember two things sounding like human nails scratching a blackboard. The first of five priorities for the year ahead (the ANC has never figured what a “priority” means; by inventing five where there should be just one, it guarantees fiasco), read the president, was to “build a social compact to decisively address unemployment and poverty”.
The problem is he did that already. He got a compact in 2019 and then he broke it when he turned his back on business on the arrival of Covid-19. He tried to stick it together again in the winter of 2020 but never had the stomach to stand by it. It won’t come easy again unless business leaders are fools.
The other thing that made my head hurt was the way the speech, as Ramaphosa’s often do, turned to a thing called the district development model or, more recently, the presidential district development model. The woman he beat to the ANC leadership in 2017, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, is supposedly its birthmother and Ramaphosa never lets slip an opportunity to mention it in front of her. Virtually no-one pays the model heed, but it is his way of flattering a rival.
The idea is to make all three levels of government responsible for helping out small broken municipalities. The district consists of a district council and the various small municipalities in its boundaries. Chapter three of the constitution requires the involvement of all levels of the state and the Intergovernmental Relations Framework Act of 2005 long ago made it possible and, quietly, may give the co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister wide powers to bend municipalities to her will.
“Through the district development model,” Ramaphosa told his crowd in Limpopo, “we are aligning the work of national, provincial and local government to ensure that budgeting and planning, including spatial planning to manage high rates of urbanisation, is properly co-ordinated and service delivery is improved.”
Just a year ago Dlamini-Zuma told parliament the three district development model (DDM) pilot districts — OR Tambo (Mthatha), eThekwini (Durban) and Waterberg (Modimolle, formerly Nylstroom) — were doing brilliantly. “Through aligning long outstanding and new projects the DDM is recording real and tangible progress in the pilot sites,” she said.
I don’t know enough about the Waterberg. But my neighbours went off to visit family in Durban over the holidays and all of them ended up ill after swimming off Durban’s beaches. One had to go to hospital. As we now know, the eThekwini district cannot operate water pumps, all three layers of government notwithstanding, and human effluent has been flowing directly into the areas where tourists and locals are supposed to swim. It is another nail in Durban’s dwindling economic coffin after the violence of last year.
Mthatha, meanwhile, is my backyard and I know the minister was talking rubbish in the state of the nation debate last year. “With regards to the allocations for MIG (municipal infrastructure grants) in OR Tambo we have allocated R2.9bn in the (medium-term budget) period,” she said. Already in OR Tambo there were, she said, 19 water projects, 12 sanitation projects and 47 road projects.
These will be complemented by 12 community implemented projects, to the value of R173m, which include the secondary bulk water in Mqanduli and various other water treatment works, bio pipelines and the ferrying of water closer to vulnerable households.”
I doubt even half of that was true. Later last year the National Treasury stopped all transfers to the OR Tambo district council because, well, it was dissolved in the wake of a series of scandals and right now does not actually exist. Work on most contracts has ground to a halt, and many contractors will not be back.
As for the Mqanduli project, work on that began a decade ago. As the crow flies, Mqanduli would be about 40km from Mthatha so this is a huge pipeline. It takes water from the dam near the Mthatha airport and drives it to the top of a hill outside Mthatha where the FM mast is, and also the ministerial housing that once gave refuge to the late Chris Hani. From there it is gravity-fed to Viedgesville along the N2 and then on to Mqanduli and other smaller villages.
But there’s no water in the pipeline. Never has been. One contractor didn’t do its job properly and there’s a gap that can’t be filled until “due process”, whatever that may involve, is complete. It could take years. There are 20-million litres of water waiting in a reservoir at Viedgesville for Mqanduli. Good luck to them.
“It is imperative that we build on the successes of the district development model to drive the revitalisation and stabilisation of local government,” Ramaphosa told his January 8 crowd. He must think people are fools. Either that or he doesn’t care what he says.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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