By Ed Herbst*
“Then, the other day, Joburg Water workers came back to work on it for a while more, but the hole remains, the pipe remains broken, and the water continues to stream down the road, only now it is also delivering a gooey mud – as the water is now mixed with the newly excavated earth.”
J Brooks Spector Middle class angst – a tale of service delivery in suburbia
Daily Maverick 17/7/2014
Shortly after the above-mentioned article was published, friends who live in Claremont, one of Cape Town’s older suburbs, became aware about 10 pm that there had been a subterranean water pipe burst in the street outside their house.
They phoned the relevant department at the Cape Town municipality and, shortly after midnight, they were awakened by the sound of activity in the street outside. At daybreak they found a newly-laid patch of tar where a few hours before there had been a rapidly-growing pothole.
This took me back to the two years – 2007 to 2009 – when I worked as a consultant in the media department of the City of Cape Town, one of the happiest periods of a five-decade working life.
Initially I accepted the post with reluctance but I was desperate because I had been unemployed for a year after leaving the SABC where working in an ANC-controlled newsroom had become untenable.
I knew what to expect – a typical civil service environment – late to work and early to leave, but I could not have been more wrong.
The building hummed with committed, qualified people, ethical people to whom the concept of service delivery was a belief system, not an empty political slogan and where it was common cause that the money that came from ratepayers was sacrosanct and should be utilised with circumspection.
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At that time the municipality was just emerging from three dark years of ANC control. This had been a period of wanton snouting, of R2 billion in tender fraud which was predicated on the retrenchment of more than a hundred white senior managers because they would have been gatekeepers against this looting.
Helen Zille, as the new mayor, was determined to heal the institution, to make it a meritocracy again and sought, with some success, to persuade the people with institutional knowledge and corporate expertise, who had left once the ANC took control in 2003, to return to the Cape Town Civic Centre again.
Off-peak demand
Most pipe bursts occur at night during off-peak demand when people are asleep and the pipes fill with static water which increases pressure and quickly exposes weaknesses.
In ANC-controlled municipalities the deployed cadres splurge millions of rands on vitally-needed things like music concerts which never happen.
It is different in Cape Town.
In 2008 I issued the following press release from the media department:
The City of Cape Town opened a R9 million water pressure management system in Mandalay, Mitchells Plain. The system, which ranks as the third largest in the world, will mitigate damage to household plumbing appliances and pipes created by excessively high water pressures in pipes supplying consumers.
Since then, more investment like that saw the COCT lauded by national government recently with a “No Drop score of 95% in the National Department of Water and Sanitation’s 2014 First Order Assessment.”
This was preceded, in December last year with the municipality’s Water Conservation and Water Demand Management Programme (WCWDM) being announced as the winner in the Adaptation Implementation Category in the 2015 C40 Cities Awards in Paris.
In many ANC-controlled municipalities there is little concern about potholes, as Spector’s article indicates, but in May the Cape Town municipality’s women-only road repair teams won a national construction award.
Moody’s holds the COCT’s fiscal prudence in high regard but, in East London (the Buffalo City Municipality), the ANC’s deployed snouters chowed some R6m – all in the name of Madiba.
Toilet scam
Last year the Daily Dispatch pulled the chain on a half-billion rand toilet building scam in the ANC-controlled Amathole District Municipality. As always, millions of rands were paid in advance, the Lamborghinis and riverside mansions were purchased, but the few toilets that were built have fallen over.
I have to acknowledge though that my favourites in the ANC’s Domesday Book of Snouting are not necessarily chosen on merit and that sentimental favourites rank high in my estimation.
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Polokwane is near the top of my list as there is a suburb there, filled with ostentatious mansions, which is called “Tender City”. In the commodity boom days of miracle and wonder “Tender City” millionaires and billionaires would, on Saturday mornings, park their Range Rover Evoques, Porsche Panameras and Yengeni 4 X 4s outside the local laundry business in serried ranks, slap down half a dozen Armani suits and waddle out again leaving behind a R250 tip. Those days are gone and, if you don’t believe me, ask Des van Rooyen – he’ll tell you.
Top ten municipalities
At the beginning of the year a new index compiled by Good Governance Africa revealed that nine of our top ten municipalities are run by the Democratic Alliance with, according to the report, all 17 of the party’s municipalities appearing in the top 40.
“The bottom 10 municipalities are all ANC-run, with a showing from one IFP and one NFP-run municipality.”
In a few days’ time the voters in Cape Town will have a decision to make.
Do they want it for the next few years to be run like the Buffalo City Municipality or do they want it to be run as it is being run now?
If an article by an analyst, Dawie Scholtz, now studying at Yale University is correct, most have already made that choice – and Marius Fransman does not figure in the equation.
- Ed Herbst is a pensioner and former reporter who writes in his own capacity.
