South Africans do not trust their government – and this is a bad thing

In 2021, the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) published a report reflecting on the levels of trust in government and other state institutions.

The results – unsurprisingly – showed that the loss of faith in the state was a real phenomenon.

In the local context, the various factors cited as contributing to the declining faith included the persistence of inequality, corruption, violence and crime. These challenges, which affect citizens of all persuasions, play a critical role in shaping the relationships among citizens and between citizens and the state itself.

Tensions

During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, where the process of managing the pandemic was a mixture of faith, and later science, the relationship between the state and citizens exhibited tensions where the lines between implementing rules for the public good and interfering with individual autonomy were blurred across different dimensions.

This led to some of the directives being condemned as arbitrary and bearing little connection to the intended purpose of helping us all live through an unprecedented event.

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In a well-functioning society, citizens should have the comfort that the state will execute its public functions in a manner that promotes efficient use of public resources and treats citizens fairly and equally.

Unfortunately for South Africa, far too many incidences of inconsistencies in the provision of public services and public accountability exist.

Local government

The local government sphere, where many citizens have primary and regular interactions with the state, was cited in the DPME report as the one sphere of government with the lowest levels of public confidence (34%) compared to provincial (36%) and national government (42%).

Coincidentally, it is at the local government level where the state functionaries do themselves no favours by continuously failing to deliver services and mismanaging public resources.

The audit reports of the Auditor-General, which indicate a picture of inefficiencies across the ecosystem, serve as the most acute reminder of the scale of underperformance at local government level.

The idea of local government is itself noble in intent as it is premised on the idea of proximity between the unit of government and its citizens who, by virtue of various local contexts and conditions, require solutions responsive to the needs of the immediate community.

A problem that has emerged over the past two decades, however, is the lack of uniform capacity across the different local government structures.

The Auditor-General reports naturally reflect the poor custody of financial resources which are influenced, if not driven, by a lack of requisite financial expertise within municipalities, for example.

Read: Failed, broken municipalities with R79bn debt pile paint Treasury into a corner

More crucially, the performance information also indicates that there is a lack of technical and management capacity.

The importance of performance information is that governments are social rather than profit-oriented structures.

This means that running public services within the parameters of resources that have been provided is the primary goal rather than preserving cash.

Two problems

A twin set of problems has emerged that undermine this mission – underspending and diversion of spending away from critical services like public infrastructure.

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Given the fact that no municipality can argue that it has provided all the public services its citizens require, it is always problematic to hear of budgets being sent back to the national fiscus due to the inability of local government structures to spend them as planned.

In the planning and budgeting phase, one assumes that the political leaders undertake a detailed analysis of what the citizens need and then allocate resources accordingly. Failure to execute on the planned projects then creates long-term problems when public infrastructure is not maintained or upgraded in line with the needs of the community.

When funds meant for longer-term public infrastructure investment are diverted to alleviate short-term pressures like personnel costs, the infrastructure management gap widens even further.

The difficult questions the country needs to eventually tackle, is whether in light of the significant skills gaps and the consequences to governance, it is still tenable to maintain the current configuration of local government.

It may well turn out that in spite of our hopes, the country does not have enough individuals with the skills, competence, passion and willingness to work in the corners of the country where the gaps are the widest.

In that case, a support mechanism that enables municipalities to still function optimally, even if the presence of skills on the ground remains a challenge, is a necessity. The current trend is for municipalities to rely on consultants to provide some services, which unfortunately has not yielded better results.

Worrying revelation

Recently, the South African Local Government Association (Salga) reported that hundreds of councillors in KwaZulu-Natal do not possess any meaningful reading and writing skills.

Listen: Alarming literacy levels among local government councillors spark concern

The concern about this revelation is that the nature of the jobs they have requires them to have a working knowledge of matters of managing public resources and forward planning.

This in turn – a comprehensive understanding by the councillors of what actually needs to be done – makes the process of holding the bureaucrats responsible for actual implementation much easier.

In the absence of this linearity between the competence of councillors and the execution by bureaucrats, the challenges will persist.

Addressing this conundrum requires some tradeoffs.

Tradeoffs

The election of public officials in a democracy is a matter of political preference rather than academic competence or expertise.

Abolishing that would mean that well-meaning public servants who lack formal education would be excluded from public governance altogether, which creates problems of legitimacy for whoever then ends up in office.

At local government level, this legitimacy is important as citizens have more direct interactions with elected office bearers.

At the bureaucratic level, the existence of academic and technical requirements does not solve the problem if the accountability structures remain under-capacitated. Even the finest municipal managers may find their best-laid plans frustrated at the altar of governance if there is a poor understanding of what needs to be done.

The middle ground would seem to be more coordinated and compulsory training for public servants on what it means to be a custodian of public resources. This may sound like pain to be inflicted on those who have won electoral support – but it may well be the appropriate price to be paid in order to elevate the governance capacity in the country.