The starkest effects of corruption and “cadre deployment”, where cronies are given jobs on the basis of loyalty rather than merit, are found in local government
AT TIMES IT can be hard to find the right metaphor for the dysfunction of the South African state. But then, on a recent morning, your correspondent found himself in the middle of a broken sewage works, knee-deep in excrement. Like the other six plants in the municipality of Maluti-a-Phofung, the one in the town of Harrismith is knackered. Nor is it the only sign of collapse. The 350,000 people in the municipality are regularly without clean tap water. Rubbish is rarely collected.
After apartheid ended in 1994, three areas merged to form Maluti-a-Phofung. The first, Harrismith, was a genteel town visited by Princess Elizabeth in 1947. The second was the farming area around the town of Kestell, named after a man who helped translate the Bible into Afrikaans. The third, and most populous, was the Sotho-speaking area of QwaQwa, one of ten ethnic “homelands” set up to divide and rule the black population.Running such a diverse area would be a challenge for any party.
As yet no one has been brought to book. In a sign of how the ANC‘s internal battles at the national level play out as local skirmishes, the government of the Free State dismissed the administrators in March 2020. It said they had finished their job. Leona Kleynhans of the opposition Democratic Alliance says it will mean a return to “industrial-scale looting”.
Ahead of local elections in October South Africans are fed up. Public satisfaction with big municipalities is at its lowest level since Consulta, a research firm, began polling in 2014. Though protests over poor services decreased in 2020 because of the pandemic, the numbers in 2018 and 2019 were the highest since 2004, when Municipal IQ, a data provider, started counting.
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