SHIRLEY DE VILLIERS: Mayors behaving badly

Nice job if you can get it. When Lerato Maloka stepped into the mayoral office in Sedibeng in 2021, she was handed the keys to a brand-new R700,000 Merc. Only, that wasn’t good enough. She demanded upgrades worth R29,300 for, among other items, having the car “vinyl-wrapped in gloss black”.

Only, the spruced-up Merc was then left gathering dust in the municipal lot. The reason? Apparently it didn’t meet the mayor’s exacting specs after all.

It must have been driven subsequently anyway, because it then broke down, apparently with sugar-like granules found in the engine. How on earth this could happen is anyone’s guess. Anyway, new car, here we come.

So, the cash-strapped municipality scrambled to extend its capital budget by R700,000 to buy Maloka another new Merc, according to a report in City Press. (In the wake of public backlash, it has since refused her request.)

Incidentally, this is the same mayor whose R465,000 mayoral chain disappeared into the ether after her state of the district address last June; it was only reported missing in November, the publication notes.

Maloka isn’t the only mayor behaving badly. In Mpumalanga’s Nkomazi local municipality, mayor Phindile Magagula told Ligwalagwala FM that one of the houses she owns is connected to the grid illegally, according to TimesLive — all OK, because she says the community in the settlement paid R40,000 for grid connection years ago. It’s caused a hoo-ha that she’s waved off as “politically motivated, because I was not the only one who uses the electricity … The electricity was connected from 2021. I was not even a mayor and I didn’t know I would be a mayor at the time,” she said. Well, that makes it all right then …

Then there’s the equally cash-strapped Amathole district municipality. It boasts a princely revenue collection rate of less than 30% against a National Treasury norm of 95%. There, the Daily Dispatch reports, mayor Anele Ntsangani has defended the decision to hike councillors’ salaries — a decision taken at the swanky Mpekweni Beach Resort, no less. It’s out of their hands, he says, as they are entitled to an incremental raise in terms of a gazette by the co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister — even as the EFF says it’s happy to forgo any increase, as councillors elsewhere have done before.

Don’t think the metros have been spared either. In Joburg, parched — and increasingly irate — ratepayers, who have been forced to endure days of water outages, have threatened a rates boycott. In a pleasant departure from the norm, this has actually elicited a response from puppet mayor Kabelo Gwamanda — only, he hasn’t gone much further than calling it “a politically motivated approach to undermine black leadership”, says TimesLive. Nothing to do with woeful governance and an utter lack of responsibility for service delivery failures.

Buffalo City mayor Princess Faku can’t honour a promise to take control of sports facilities that were built for millions, and would instead see them vandalised and falling to ruin. eThekwini mayor Mxolisi Kaunda has blamed the infrastructural decay of Durban on migrants from the Eastern Cape — despite evidence to the contrary — throwing in a dash of xenophobia for the hell of it. So much for responsive government.

If there was ever a sign of the scale of local government collapse it is this: all these stories were published in a single day — Friday March 8.

Failing democracy

In last year’s state of the nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa noted that 163 of 257 municipalities are “dysfunctional or in distress due to poor governance, ineffective and sometimes corrupt financial and administrative management and poor service delivery”. A circular argument if ever there was one.

But the stories cited above each tick at least one of these boxes. And they all have one thing in common: poor and self-serving political leadership. Oh, and the fact that these leaders face no sanction from the majority party in their municipalities — the ANC on all counts.

It is, depressingly, no new phenomenon. In a 2021 piece on The Conversation Africa website, Steven Friedman quotes deputy finance minister David Masondo as saying: “We can change rules and regulations but as long as we don’t tackle the issue of political leadership at a local government level we will continue to have many of these problems.”

And yet nothing changes. There’s no sanction for the wanton squandering of public funds and the utter indifference shown to the people the municipalities are supposed to serve. Political parties (particularly the ANC, it seems) keep putting in place leaders fundamentally — criminally — ill-suited to positions of power.

As the front line of delivery, local government is virtually the only place where the electorate can engage directly with the structures of government. It’s here that voters most directly feel the effect of their rates at work. Or not. A self-serving elite that fails to meet the needs of voters creates a trust deficit, which in itself can subvert the democratic ideal as voters disengage from what they see as little more than farce.

It’s no surprise that voter turnout in municipal elections is lower than in national polls.

Whether it’s (another) R700,000 Merc, flouting the law, venality, negligence or blame-gaming, it is absolute disrespect for the electorate. The cost could not be higher; it’s not only service delivery that’s on the line — democracy itself is under threat.