Kagiso Trust Active Citizenry and Ageing Infrastructure Twitter Conversation Series: The importance of public infrastructure, what are our duties and responsibilities, and what should we do when things go wrong as citizens?
Panelist: Mankone Ntsaba ( Chairperson of Kagiso Trust), Dr Sam Koma (Director School of Economics and Management in the Faculty of Management and Law: University of Limpopo) and Dr Sithembele Mbete, International Relations and South African Politics Lecturer: University of Pretoria).
Kagiso Trust is one of South Africa’s leading development agencies, seeking to create a prosperous, peaceful, equitable, and just society. The trust seeks to alleviate poverty by designing and implementing scalable, replicable, and long-term development program models in education, institutional capacity building, socioeconomic development, and financial sustainability. It has invested over R2 billion in development over the last 35 years and implemented over 1,831 programs.
The Kagiso Trust has broadened its strategy over the past five years to include engagement in local governance, agricultural, and socio-economic development challenges. And it was at this point that they became aware of various weaknesses and difficulties in local governance, which led them to design a program that truly examines the requirements for local governance assistance in local government.
As there are many different components to municipal government, one of them that was discovered is public engagement, or citizen participation. There are challenges with tax collecting, infrastructure development, and all other services that towns offer. But underlying all these services, the success really lies in the participation of citizens.
“Services are actually on the brink of collapse. Actually, in many municipalities, these services have already collapsed, not on the brink of collapse. So we are saying, as citizens, what is the role of ourselves, each and every one of us?” Said Mankone Ntsaba, Chairperson of Kagiso Trust.
According to Dr Sithembele Mbete, sense of common ownership of public ownership of our public goods has declined. And so we have seen firstly government and government officials really being negligent in their duty to maintain infrastructure, but also to provide new infrastructure to areas that require it. And then we’ve also seen on the other side, citizens destroying infrastructure as a way of expressing their anger and their dissatisfaction with the country’s politics. And the combination of these two sort of forces has resulted in a massive deterioration in our infrastructure over the last few years.
The philosophy of development that was adopted by the democratic government in 1994 was flawed because government told citizens to sit back and wait for government to provide basic services like housing, water & sanitation, libraries etc.
“The Giyani water project that was built in 2010 at an estimated R 3 billion which was later left neglected is a prime example on citizens being excluded from decision making processes by the municipality” said Dr Sam Koma, Director School of Economics : University of Limpopo
He went onto further say that the IMF report revealed that if Eskom and Transnet were to be fixed economic growth would grow by 2% as public infrastructure drives economic growth.
Power dynamics in local governments have narrowed a wide gap between some residents who are unaware of their entitlement to participate in budget discussions and others who are financially unable to pay for transportation to those sessions. Residents who are not participating in the planning process are uninformed of the history of the infrastructure and feel compelled to assault as soon as difficulty arises. It’s crucial to involve them in infrastructure development so that you can build a relationship with them and perhaps even get them to feel like they own the assets, which would transform their perspective.
“We cannot paint all municipalities with the same paint brush but there is a worrying trend whereby some people who are employed at local government level are not able to deliver due to being unqualified for that position. Besides that citizen participation theres rage from money being spent but projects are not completed” said Mankone Nkoma.
Orange Grove community centre is another example of projects whereby money was spent but project was not completed due to the municipality not budgeting for people to staff and books.
Dr Mbete Said, The destruction of infrastructure is a rational response to our dysfunctional relationship with the government who are supposed to be responding to grievances of the citizens. The callousness from political leaders is what leads to citizens resorting to extreme measures to get a response. These people believe that the way forward is to use mechanisms that are already there.
Poor leaders who are elected to serve in communities often fail to recognize the problems that are actually occurring and are consequently unable to respond appropriately. Endemic problems are a result of this. This has given common people the impression that they are being disregarded, which causes discontent and protests. A solution towards fighting this issue begins with having the municipalities deploying the right people that are fit for purpose. “Demands and expectations of people have evolved since 1994, demographics have changed. The population is young and therefore demands have changed.” Said Dr Koma.
Dr Mbete believes that a lot of this comes down to having a professional civil service because so many people in our public services are unable to address the infrastructure issues and that is why the University of Pretoria has developed a programme that will be launched end of August 2023 which will focus on civil education that is aimed at teaching and providing information.
