AYABONGA CAWE: ‘Anxious’ interventions fail to confront the underlying issues

Residents of the eight Eastern Cape municipalities that have been placed under the “section 139" administration process will soon be familiar with what that means. They will discover that it is a fractitious, contested and long-winded business that complicates everything from buying a tea set to the award of critical projects linked to capital grants.

As a briefing note of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council suggested in October 2020, our intergovernmental relations system often functions in the form of “rescue missions” in terms of section 139 of the constitution, which while necessary “are often disruptive and entrench waves of contests and instability in local councils and administrations”.

This limits the successful execution of the turnaround strategies required to perform basic service functions. But what cannot be disputed is that a culture of impunity has been entrenched in many local administrations, enabled in many cases by fractious politics within parties and councils, and some such intervention is unavoidable. 

If we consider that the invocation of section 139 arises from a weakness of planning, financial and implementation systems, the reluctance — seemingly over multiple political cycles — for administrations to undertake the necessary reforms, or how contested these might be, shows how many councils have also failed to play oversight and set the political parameters for municipal administrations.

This weak political-administrative interface makes administration interventions a palliative rather than curative intervention. It relieves the pain of the dysfunction by assuring communities that there is now a presence by the upper tiers of government in the affairs of the local authority, without confronting the underlying political and institutional failures that mean fewer residents are with running water, electricity substations collapse, and the general social decline of many secondary towns administered by these municipalities continues as if unavoidable.

What may also follow this latest wave of administrative interventions is what we saw in one municipality, where the council took the administrator appointed by the provincial authorities to court for an interim relief order that reinstated the council and administration. What has seemingly happened is the personalisation of these section 139 actions, with some OR Tambo councillors suggesting that they had been ridiculed and had their images dented with the appointment of an administrator.

Rather than happening in collegial and harmonious fashion, intergovernmental interventions, and the authority of higher tiers of government to undertake them, occurs under antagonistic conditions. Resolving this requires political rather than technocratic solutions. The underlying operational issues are clear to see. Budgets for personnel and consultancy costs in some of these municipalities are nearly 10 times larger than bulk service purchases. Employee costs alone often exceed revenue from service charges, with the bulk of the revenue coming from intergovernmental transfers.

Implied in these interventions is an exercise of power and its disciplining character in action, by entities that give many of these struggling municipalities the bulk of their income in transfers and subsidies, which come from national and provincial government. We must ask about the utility and function of what geographer Gillian Hart refers to as “intensifying national efforts to surveil and control local government”, and whether, as Hart asks, these interventions render these municipal authorities “more fragile”.

What happens to patients when they leave palliative care, uncured of the ailment at the centre of why they were admitted in the first place? The reality is that we do not know. The effectiveness of what Hart calls these “anxious interventions” is reliant on many politico-economic variables, which suggests that while the interventions are notable in their urgency and decisiveness, they may incapacitate the patient who is charged with “delivering the goods”, sometimes irreparably.

This is in many ways a sign of a system that is a quasi-federal compromise captured in a negotiated outcome, rather than a system spawned solely from a spatially transformative vision. It seems in the Eastern Cape it is a system incessantly prone to periodic and tragic drama unfolding in council chambers, boardrooms and courtrooms.

• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.