The state and local government
Yüklə 5,87 Mb.
|
| 809
Furthermore, as Trevor Ngwane notes: The ANC government discarded the vaguely social democratic Reconstruction and Development Programme in favour of the neoliberal GEAR strategy without even consulting its own party structures nor even its parliamentary representatives. At the heart of GEAR is privatisation, trade liberalisation, flexibility of labour, deregulation, removal of exchange controls and other stock in trade neoliberal policies. One economic consequence of GEAR has been the destruction of over a million jobs due to trade liberalisation, significantly pushing up the rate of unemployment in the country and no doubt adding to the misery and destitution of millions of people in the country. Another has been the privatisation of basic services such as water, electricity, education, health care and transport. Untold suffering has been caused as the government’s policy of cost-recovery has seen millions lose their access to water and electricity, some even losing their homes, because they are too poor to pay for these services which neoliberalism has suddenly discovered to be a lucrative source of profits. Privatisation of basic services has slowed down the rate of ‘roll out’ of infrastructure in South Africa as the concern for profitability overtakes the mandate for a better life for all upon which the ANC pinned its colours when it took power.810 Ngwane also pinpoints the contradiction between the bucket system of sanitation in many communities – opposition to which was one of the common threads in the uprisings that rocked the country in 2005 when people’s anger was often directed at their councillors – when South Africa ‘is busy bidding to host every conceivable bourgeois conference and public event in the world’.811 Moreover, he was writing before the last South African local government elections in March 2006 when the government thought the problem was primarily with local government as seen in its official response to the crisis in the form of ‘Project Consolidate’, a programme designed to shore up municipalities struggling with service delivery. This raises the question, to what extent are the problems of local government located within the broader problems of governance and political economy in South Africa? What are the roots of the problem of local government in South Africa? Can strengthening local government, as Project Consolidate suggests, or electing more accountable councillors, as some social commentators suggest, solve the problem?812 Ngwane’s answer is that: The failures of local government actually represent the failures of neoliberal macro and micro-economic policies in South Africa and of capitalist globalisation in the world. We question the dominant view of piling the blame on local government in a way which seeks to protect capital’s culpability for the evils that are visited upon ordinary people on a daily basis in South Africa and in other parts of the world. This protection and immunity of capital will be shown to be at the heart of the ‘miracle’ of the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid society. The use of local government as scapegoat to avoid considering solutions that go beyond this sphere of government is something progressive scholars and activists should be alert to. There are indeed serious problems and even crimes being committed by local government but the real source of the problems is to be found in the inequities of the capitalist system itself. A corrupt system can be expected to engender corruption.813 Following David Harvey he then further argues that: The capitalists’ hand was tremendously strengthened by the collapse of Soviet socialism….The first decade of the new millennium finds humanity faced by the consequences of the undisputable victory and unrivalled hegemony of the capitalists and their system over almost everyone and everything in the world. It is a hackneyed but no less valid truth that when the capitalists win, workers are the losers. Faced by a profitability crisis arising from specific circumstance and the contradictions of the system, namely, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the capitalists’ responded in typical fashion by seeking to make the working class of the world pay for their losses. A ruthless regimen of policies was developed and variously implemented in every part of the world where the capitalists had power and influence.814 In particular: Local government is a sphere of government where neoliberal microeconomic policy is being aggressively implemented in South Africa….Capital, which had been seen by the workers movement as the problem was now seen as the solution to unemployment, poverty and overcoming the social and economic legacy of apartheid. The attack on the powerful apartheid state was turned into a justification for a lean, mean state - a neoliberal state. The attack on apartheid housing policy in black working class townships was turned into the promotion of privatised housing and private property by the ANC government. Hatred of the capitalists was turned into hatred of white capitalists who don’t allow blacks – and in particular senior ANC leaders – to join their ranks. Socialism was declared a joke and an anachronism.815 Hence he concludes that: We need a vision of something really different. It was such a vision which gave millions the strength. We called it then by the name of socialism.816 South Africa has also not been immune to ‘strategic management’: which, as shown in Chapter 4, is central to the neoliberal ‘local governance’ project in Britain. For, as Greg Ruiters observes: Across the globe, since the late 1980’s sea changes have occurred in the philosophy and practice of public sector governance…involving a shift to a market-orientation in public services and what is termed ‘managerialism’. Managerialism has three key themes: first, an emphasis on cutting costs and increasing labour productivity and efficiency; second, the delegation of management responsibilities; and, third, the development of neo-Taylorian practices such as setting standards and targets, performance measurement and performance related pay designed to create incentives for better performance. Complementing managerialism have been measures to break up public sector organisations into separate, self-contained units (ring-fenced) in order to create smaller, ‘product’-focused forms of organisation and reconfiguring services as commodities and citizens as customers. These changes provide the structural context for the development neoliberal forms of citizenship.817 ‘One indicator of the reshaping of public services’, as Ruiters further notes, ‘has been the shift by 2004 to Customer Charters’ in Britain, France, Italy, Australia Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands and the USA as well as in countries like Argentina, India, Malaysia and South Africa.818 Thus it is mandatory that all South African municipalities adopt customer charters (see section 95 and 108 of Municipal Systems Act and Batho Pele Guidelines). Batho Pele, driven by the Department of Public Services and Administration says ‘customers’ should be consulted about service levels and quality and be given a choice about services.819 Customers must receive full and accurate information about their services, should be treated with courtesy and should be entitled to an apology, explanation and remedial action if the promised standard of service is not delivered. The document goes on to suggest that ‘value for money means public services should be provided economically and efficiently’. Since 2002 at local level, customer-relations management has taken off. For example, in 2003 and as part of the Igoli programme, Johannesburg adopted customer charters for each of its utility companies. In 2005 there were several Batho Pele conferences, and multi-millioned rand customer satisfaction surveys by municipalities that were supported by the Treasury. The desire to measure, monitor and evaluate programmes and ‘customers’ through surveys has become a major part of state activities.820 ‘Customer focus has meant a change from services delivered by powerful professionals whom the public trusted to cost-driven commercialised services’.821 While Customer Charters are still in their ‘early stages in South Africa, and they are being exported to the rest of Africa’, as Ruiters concludes, ‘they play a major hegemonic role and have to a significant extent re-shaped citizen state-worker relationships in contradictory ways presenting a serious challenge to the Left’.822 Bond in 2008 also noted that ‘the trade unionists and Communists...intend fighting within the Zuma camp for post-neoliberal policies, and given their social weight, the future is indeed hard to predict’.823 For example, on 13 January 2010, the South African Municipal Workers Union – following an ANC statement on 8 January 2010 that municipal employees should not hold positions in political parties – warned that it would resist the ANC’s efforts to “de-politicise” the union. This, according to Karima Brown, was the latest example of how vexed the relationship between the ANC and its leftist allies has become: At issue in the alliance is the degree to which the ANC’s allies have a say in crucial issues such as Cabinet appointments, policy formulation, the appointment of key public servants to institutions such as the Reserve Bank, the mandate and future of state-owned enterprises and other strategic posts in the state…. Last weekend, Zuma derided notions of ‘co-governance’ with his leftist allies, saying only the ANC rules in the government. At last year’s alliance summit, the ANC also reasserted its leadership of the alliance, following disagreement over the National Planning Commission and control of economic policy in the Cabinet….However, while the fact that the ANC is the alliance leader is true on paper, in reality the alliance has become central not only to policy formulation but also to governance itself. The ruling party’s December 2007 Polokwane resolutions….However, while the fact that the ANC is the alliance leader is true on paper, in reality the alliance has become central not only to policy formulation but also to governance itself. The ruling party’s December 2007 Polokwane resolutions…. While reaffirming the independence of each of the components…binds the ANC to “united action” for a “joint programme”. Prior to last year’s elections , the 2008 alliance summit outcome put the alliance at the centre of power. The allies also agreed to formulate policy and monitor its implementation through joint policy committees and other mechanisms, which resulted in the formation of the Alliance Political Council. This is a new body comprising the national office bearers of all three allies. Transitional teams comprising the ANC, South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) were set up to drive the reconfiguration of the executive. But soon after Zuma appointed his Cabinet, with the inclusion of senior SACP and COSATU leaders, tensions began to resurface. That eroded the congenial spirit that had existed prior to the elections, suggesting that unhappiness over the extent of the left’s influence in government is tied directly to power in the state and patronage networks, particularly at provincial and local government level…. Going back to the days of Thabo Mbeki is not an option. Zuma, a polygamist, will know that unhappy wives can make for an unhappy home. As head of the alliance household he will have to do an egg dance to keep the family together.824 The liberal democratic commentator R. W. Johnson provides a trenchant critique of Pretoria’s new crony-capitalist elite. But, as Patrick Bond demonstrates, Johnson provides no adequate analysis of the ANC’s socio-economic failures because his ‘explanation for South Africa’s crony-capitalist path…is essentially a culturalist one…“the effortless evolution towards plutocracy” by former Marxist-Leninist liberation-struggle leaders in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe; now South Africa too’.825 Hence, as Bond argues: A serious comparative analysis of these developments is badly needed, but it would require a careful assessment of a range of factors and agents: legacies of colonial regimes, patterns of economic development, formation of anti-colonial leaderships, role of external interventions, and so forth. In the absence of this, Johnson’s account cannot explain why the worst offender, Mugabe, was never a man of the left, while Mbeki, Stalinist to the core, was ousted without a drop of blood being spilt: first removed as head of the ANC in December 2007, and then from state power in September 2008.826 Moreover, as Bond also notes, a large group of loyalists departed with Mebeki including Trade Minister Alec Erwin, the brothers Essop and Aziz Pahad (close confidants and hatchet men of Mbeki in exile), Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi, Public Service Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi and her husband, Deputy Finance Minister Jabu Moleketi. The new Mbeki-ite electoral machine, Congress of the People (COPE), is led by former Defence Minister and ANC Chairman Terror Lekota, former COSATU General Secretary Mbhazima Shilowa, Mbeki’s former Chief of Staff Smuts Ngonyama, former anti-apartheid church leader Alan Boesak, former NEPAD827 head Wiseman Nkhulu, former SACP treasurer Phillip Dexter and former COSATU President Willie Madisha.828 The South African Communist Party’s analysis Meanwhile, as its September 2008 National Policy Conference pointed out, the SACP: Over several years…has developed an analysis of the post-1994 South African transition. We have argued that, notwithstanding important advances, monopoly capital in our country has succeeded in asserting a relative hegemony over the broad direction of our post-apartheid state and society. This hegemony was secured, in part, thanks to a leadership collective around…Mbeki…that attempted to drive a neo-liberal restructuring programme that required the marginalisation of the SACP and COSATU, the demobilisation of the ANC, the suppression of popular struggle, and the forging of a close alliance between monopoly capital, senior state leadership and an emerging BEE faction of capital closely linked to our movement.829 The political and organisational defeat of the leading cadre behind this “1996 class project”, as Building Working Class Hegemony on the Terrain of a National Democratic Struggle) – issued by the SACP for internal discussion in preparation for its 2nd Special National Congress held 10-13 December 2009 – notes: does not detract from the truly massive “delivery” that has actually happened on many fronts since 1994 referred to above. However, as the SACP also emphasises at best, this massive ‘delivery’ has ameliorated but not transformed the key structural realities that continue to reproduce crisis-levels of underdevelopment in SA. What presents itself as a ‘service delivery’ or ‘capacity’ problem in a township, for instance, typically has much more profound systemic capitalist accumulation path underpinnings. Most…[such P.L.] problems manifest themselves in vast dormitory townships and informal settlements miles away from major public amenities, work, and leisure opportunities. These localities are typically bursting at the seams, with tens of thousands of rural newcomers, and thousands more economic refugees from throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Unemployment levels are often at crisis point (60 per cent and more), scarce resources are often controlled by shack-lords, taxi warlords, etc. Many of these localities are bearing the brunt of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Popular energies are often consumed in atomised competition to get onto a housing queue, to monopolise the spaza shop trading opportunities in a small neighbourhood, to control a taxi rank, or to be friends with someone who has a hand-to-mouth SMME tender for some minor sub-contracted municipal service. Municipal budgets are under-resourced, and key planning decisions are often taken far-away by other spheres of government. In the face of all of these challenges, many township-based ward councillors feel completely disempowered.830 And
the strategic agendas of many…metro councils have, for instance been dominated by a neo-liberal focus on being ‘world class cities’ (i.e. on behalf of the ‘world class’ of multi-national globetrotters) – each with its own international convention centre, wealthy enclaves, and exclusive shopping malls ‘twinned’ to their global counterparts, while cut loose from and in denial about their own working class satellite townships and rural hinterlands. FW De Klerk and the apartheid-era architects of the defeated Black Local Authority scheme must be smiling. Their dream of allowing urban Africans to play at democracy within their dormitory townships, while getting under-resourced ‘elected’ BLA councillors to bear the brunt of popular pressure, is being re-enacted, despite our best intentions.831 ‘The spatial reproduction of racialised (and class and gendered) underdevelopment and inequality’, moreover, is ‘perpetuated’ by
The SACP therefore proposes to:
And the SACP sees the strategic tasks it confronts in Gramscian terms when it concludes that it is important…we are clear that working class HEGEMONY doesn’t mean working class exclusivity (still less party chauvinism). Working class hegemony means the ability of the working class to provide a consistent strategic leadership (politically, economically, socially, organisationally, morally – even culturally) to the widest range of social forces – in particular, to the wider working class itself, to the broader mass of urban and rural poor, to a wide range of middle strata, and in South African conditions, to many sectors of non-monopoly capital. Where it is not possible to win over individuals on the narrow basis of class interest, it can still be possible to win influence on the basis of intellectual and moral integrity (compare, for instance, our consistent ability, particularly as the Party, to mobilise over many decades a small minority of whites during the struggle against white minority rule)….It is a question of advancing a strategic, radical programme of transformation that increasingly makes sense and inspires the widest range of social forces in our society….In short, the struggle for working class hegemony is not an alternative to the multiclass character of our national democratic struggle - on the contrary, it is the precondition for its successful advance, consolidation and defence. Yüklə 5,87 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|