Andrew Siddle
A surprising change brought about by President Jacob Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle was the shifting of former minister of finance Pravin Gordhan to Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA).
This department is responsible for oversight at national level of the local sphere of government. This newspaper pronounced it “the clearest sign yet of the ANC’s determination to bring an end to the rash of service delivery protests”.
But CoGTA may be a poisoned chalice, and the move could just as easily be seen as a sign that Gordhan has hit the political skids and is on the way out. Is Gordhan the right person to take on a department that, for all the wrong reasons, has been so much in the news? To answer that, we need to look first at the environment which Gordhan is about to enter.
A number of municipalities acquit themselves reasonably well, and some – particularly in the Western Cape – even very well. But as a general proposition, local government is in a state of some crisis. It is tempting to blame municipalities themselves for this situation. Venality and incompetence at local level have certainly had disastrous consequences.
But local government presents a highly complex environment; the causes for the malaise are many, and not all of them should be blamed on local actors. To do so would fail to recognise the crucial roles that senior governments should play.
It is a paradox of decentralisation that although its purpose is to shift powers and resources from central to lower governments, central governments retain a crucial role in supporting them. The greater and more rapid the transfer of such powers, the greater the need for a central government to ramp up its own capacity to provide support.
This requires political will and capacity to drive the process and entrench it. Section 154 of the Constitution was enacted to deal with this very problem. It requires that “the national government and provincial governments… must strengthen and support the capacity of municipalities to manage their own affairs, to exercise their powers and to perform their functions.”
And this is where CoGTA has fallen very short. Before Gordhan’s appointment, the department had no fewer than five ministers since 2008. The negative consequences for sound administration of such a turnover are obvious. Most ministers were in any case unmitigated disasters in office. During this period, the department was not able to achieve one clean audit report.
It was frequently embroiled in irregular expenditure scandals. In 2009, it produced its Local Government Turnaround Strategy,which turned out to be a damp squib, and achieved nothing of lasting value – as did Outcome 9, the local government component of the presidential co-ordinating committee’s project for key focuses of work. It is evident from the minutes of various parliamentary committees dealing with CoGTA that it is at a loss as to how to address the problems besetting local government.
It is into this environment that Gordhan has been elevated – or dumped. It will be a difficult transition for him. The cultures, roles and practices of his old and new departments are very different.
The National Treasury has a reputation for being meritocratic, and a home for the best and brightest that the civil service has to offer. It is a “government within a government”, which has extraordinary powers in relation to other organs of state. In his old job, Gordhan would have relished discussing the finer points of economic theory in international forums.
CoGTA, on the other hand, is the epitome of a bureaucracy gone wrong; a moribund institution that has run out of ideas and has been allowed to drift aimlessly for years. His new job will involve practising retail politics of the most basic and unedifying kind, in the dust of South Africa.
Here the interest of the actors in economics is likely to be limited to the dispensing of patronage in order to secure their positions. Vested interests will present a serious stumbling block. The contrast between old and new will hit Gordhan like a sledgehammer when he walks into his new office for the first time. Is he equipped to deal with his new challenge? In his favour, he is highly articulate and has an obvious administrative talent that was put to good use at both the SA Revenue Service (SARS) and the National Treasury.
He is also not totally unfamiliar with the local government environment, with his old department playing a critical role in municipal finances, and he knows about the fiscal and governance shenanigans of municipalities.
He also understands the importance of enhancing capacity and appointing the right people to do the job. Most importantly – and here he is almost unique within the cabinet – he understands the interrelationship between good governance, accountability, government effectiveness and service delivery. Unlike most of his cabinet colleagues, he knows that in the absence of the first two, the last two will just not happen.
On the other hand, Gordhan is saddled with baggage that will make his job more difficult. However important his new role, Gordhan’s move cannot be seen as anything but a demotion; a sign that his political star is waning. In consequence, his ability to wield influence will be limited. This is particularly disadvantageous when he has to deal with those with vested interests in keeping things in local government the way they are.
Given that the course of government in South Africa today is determined at least as much by the need for actors to align themselves with factions (and keep those factions satisfied) as it is by considerations of good governance and sound policy, the first time he treads on important toes he could find himself seriously marginalised.
Second, Gordhan has to rely on sectoral departments and provincial governments to implement whatever plans he has to revive local government. This means getting the ministers of water and sanitation, energy and human settlements, among others, on board, and having to get the co-operation of often dysfunctional provincial departments of local government (the Western Cape and perhaps KwaZulu-Natal being exceptions). Whether he has the clout to do so is open to question.
Third, being a product of the National Treasury, Gordhan will likely promote technocratic solutions to political problems. When responding to problems of incapacity or non-compliance in the local government finance context, National Treasury’s instinct has usually been to throw even more complex regulations at them, thereby further burdening institutions already struggling to comply. This instinct will probably also lead Gordhan to rely on fashionable but largely ineffective management mechanisms such as performance management systems and, heaven forbid, monitoring and evaluation processes.
Fourth, one has to wonder whether Gordhan always has the courage to do the right thing. As minister of finance, he had extraordinary powers under section 216 of the Constitution to impose disciplinary financial measures on errant municipalities, but he seldom used them despite there being a crying need to do so.
Finally, Gordhan faces a problem of having to meet unrealistic expectations. He enters a difficult environment and even with the best intentions, things will go wrong. He is clearly under enormous pressure from the ANC to produce results before the 2016 elections. In addition, commentators (this newspaper included) did him no favours by suggesting that he was the answer to all local government’s problems.
What should Gordhan do to revive local government? First, he should surround himself in CoGTA with the best people available, regardless of political persuasion. Second, he should conduct a skills audit of all municipalities and ensure that inadequacies are addressed. Third, he should ensure that there are consequences for those who persist in thumbing their noses at the dictates of good governance. Fourth, he should set about designing a less complex framework that is realistic with regards to the functions of local government and its capacity to perform those functions.
Gordhan is certainly not the answer to all of local government’s problems, but he is probably the best prospect we have had in a long, long time.
l Dr Siddle consults independently on public governance and democratic decentralisation. He is co-author with Professor Tom Koelble of The Failure of Decentralisation in South African Local Government: Complexity and Unanticipated Consequences (UCT Press 2012).