The Developer Journal Issue 3 | Page 25

I N V E S T & 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.