Estate Living Magazine Develop - Issue 44 August 2019 | Page 25

I N V E S T
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d e v e l O P
To answer these questions, we need to dig a little deeper into
the mechanisms hard-wired in our constitutional democracy.
Our constitution creates three distinct tiers of government,
each with its unique responsibilities. These can be thought of as
a two-storey building where the ground floor is municipal, the
first floor is provincial, and the top floor is national government.
Structurally, the whole thing is held together by the pillars of
the ground floor, so we can think of municipalities as being the
foundation of our democracy in a functional sense. They are the
deliverers of basic services such as water, sanitation, electricity,
transport and recreation. If enough pillars fail, then the whole
house comes tumbling down.
But here is where the dilemma lies, because some of those
services are originally generated by national government, with
the municipal tier being but a channel of delivery. Think of
security that is provided by the SAPS, and water that is provided
by the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS). When
there is a mismatch between national and municipal levels
of government, such as we had in the Day Zero crisis of Cape
Town, then local authorities are woefully unprepared to provide
the service. They simply do not have the institutional capacity
to do the long-term strategic planning, and to then implement
those plans at the local level. That strategic planning imperative
is a national one, not a municipal one, but clearly each tier has an
input into that process.
Municipal planners must inform national planners what the
future trajectories are, decades before they manifest as a
reality, so that national planners can design bulk infrastructure
to meet those needs. It must be remembered that the planning
and execution of bulk infrastructure – such as water supply or
electricity generation – takes a long time from the initial request
being made to the final delivery of that service. In the case of
water and energy projects, this is typically two decades, so
clearly municipalities are ill equipped to do this, and only national
authorities can. This takes us back to the constitution, because
the devil is always in the detail. Our national constitution also
defines spheres of government. These are different to tiers of
government. To best understand this, we can think of a cake
made up of three layers. The lower is municipal, the middle is
provincial and the upper is national. Now we think of slices of that
cake, each cutting through the horizontal structures.
The net result of this is that about 20% of all municipalities are
now dysfunctional to the point at which they are simply unable
to deliver the most basic of services, but around 60% of all
municipalities are distressed in some form or other. This is where
N F
Therefore, we can safely say that our municipalities are falling
like dominoes, and one of the causes of that failure is the current
interpretation of responsibilities arising from the Cooperative
Governance Clause. There are other causes of failure too,
most notably the appointment of technically incompetent but
politically connected cadres, who are immune from any form of
prosecution and can thus never be held legally accountable for
their actions.
Each slice of that cake is a sphere of government and here is
where it becomes a nightmare. The constitution has a specific
provision known as the Cooperative Governance Clause, which
prevents one branch of government, ‘interfering’ with another
in the execution of its business. It is because of the existence of
this clause that national departments such as DWS are reluctant
to intervene in the affairs of a municipality. This was cited most
vociferously by Minister Nomvula Mokonyane during the build-
up to the last elections when she was asked why she had not
intervened in the growing sewage problem, which was at that
time not yet a full-blown national crisis. This logically means that
government departments are unable to execute their regulatory
role – to which we will return later.