Protests are a wakeup call for policy makers

"The protest and demonstrations from angry citizens in South Africa since 2008 about failures of delivery of electricity and water are good things. They needed to happen to serve as a wakeup call for policy makers and managers in government. There has been too much focus on policy development in national departments and not enough on implementation on the ground by local governments, which have been tasked by the South African Constitution to do this job. But shortage of skills at all levels is the biggest problem from which not only the water sector in South Africa is currently suffering."

This is how Abri Vermeulen, who in the last four years 2003-2007 of his 15 years at DWAF was the architect of the national water services policy, summarizes the situation with decentralisation and transfer of water services in South Africa. On the eve of the Second Africa Week in Johannesburg from 9 to 13 November 2009 IRC’s Dick de Jong talked to Mr. Vermeulen.

Like most of his colleagues at middle level management of between 35 and 50, he moved from his DWAF job to the private sector. Vermeulen went to the group PD Naidoo & Associates Consulting Engineers, where he is now Associate Director of the Water Division. “In the public sector one needs to do too many things at the same time and one is flooded by policy revisions which you always feel will make a difference at grass roots level”, he says.

“As engineer I don’t want to comment on a social grants policy. We are now helping some local municipalities to put systems of service delivery in place, which includes engineering, social and management components”.

High turnover of staff

But shortage of skills at all levels is the biggest problem from which not only the water sector in South Africa is currently suffering. “Eighty four of the 283 municipalities do not have a single civil engineer, technologist or technician, compared to the 134 when two cities merged into the metro Tshwane in 2001”. There is a high turnover of technical staff, away from the public sector to the private sector. Part of the challenge is that the internet generation (those born in the eighties and after) jumps jobs easily and is not as loyal to organisations as the earlier generations of staff. The private sector often fills the gaps in some municipalities and that leads too often to unequal partnerships and exploitation, Vermeulen notices.

Staff salaries depend on the budget of a municipality, which means that the richer metropolitan municipalities such as Johannesburg and Pretoria pay the highest salaries. Instead people who want to work in the rural municipalities should be given a bonus. “The Development Bank of Southern Africa is doing that through its Siyenza Manje initiative, but that is successful in addressing the immediate challenge, but still lacking on long term institutional capacity building, mainly because of lack of staff in municipalities that can be developed” , says Vermeulen. The very recently published State of Local Government report puts the average number of vacancies in municipalities at 34 percent.

No integrated planning

Looking back now Vermeulen realizes that the transition from the apartheid system through a lot of central investment in infrastructure delivery has not been linked in practice to operation and maintenance and integrated planning. And that is still happening today. He gives the example of Gauteng province where municipalities are blamed for waste spills from sewage works. This is often due to the provincial Department of Housing establishing new townships without proper coordination with the planning processes of the municipalities, where infrastructure such as bulk sewers and water systems were not yet in place, or not large enough to handle the higher load.

At the same time he points out that many of the municipalities are eight-year old ‘babies’ institutionally. And that their development takes time, as is demonstrated in other countries. The new president, Mr Zuma, is encouraging openness and honesty, people can now say the truth about corruption and malfunctioning services and the new government listens. Some mayors and senior officials have been sacked.

Generally the metros and similar municipalities with large economic bases are doing well (Johannesburg, Tshwane (Pretoria), Cape Town, Ekurhuleni (East Rand), eThekwini (Durban) and Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth)). Vermeulen also mentions Ugu District on the southern coastal strip of KwaZulu-Natal. It’s a well functioning municipality emerged out of its 70-year institutional history, which started as the south coast water corporation that had a history of sound organisation and service delivery. Chris Hani District is another municipality that has a sound approach to management and service delivery by using community-based service providers with appropriate support. “Let us learn from the good examples and put them in practice”, Vermeulen concludes.