If the report issued last week by a Parliamentary committee regarding causes of social protest in South Africa is any indication, our political elites are not willing to take the steps required to address society’s deep divisions.

A year ago, the so-called Ad Hoc Committee on Coordinated Oversight on Service Delivery was given a mandate ‘to specifically investigate the underlying reasons for the often violent protests for services’. What they have produced is utterly inadequate. The MPs failed to notice most of the major protests even in high-profile sites like Durban where they came to gather testimony; they failed to apply their minds to information they gathered; and they accepted a biased explanation about the causes - mainly malgovernance - without digging up an even deeper root of the problem: money.

Dating to the time service delivery protests began in earnest, when Thabo Mbeki became president in 1999, the most seductive response for politicians is ‘policy denialism’. They avoid blaming the national executive (where policies are made) and the legislature (where they should be vetted and oversight provided). Instead, it’s easier to claim that provincial and municipal government officials simply refuse to properly implement the otherwise laudable policies, programmes and projects.

That’s what the committee concluded in explaining South Africa’s world-leading protest rate, ‘The interface of politics and administration, the quality and frequency of public participation, [and] responsiveness to citizens override all other factors.’ As a result, the ‘neoliberal’ (pro-market) orientation of the state is disguised and the conservative fiscal policy imposed by former finance ministerTrevor Manuel and maintained by his successor Pravin Gordhan goes unquestioned. That policy stresses ‘cost recovery’ and refuses to transfer adequate funding for infrastructure and services required by poor people.

The committee is not entirely wrong, because naturally, malgovernance accompanies neoliberalism. More precisely, crony capitalism - ‘Zuma-family Economic Empowerment’ (ZEE) at national scale, and locally, the patronage system of EThekwini Municipality city manager Mike Sutcliffe - replaced the social democracy promised by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme.

As the committee put it, in a remark that hits home in Durban, ‘The tender system in municipalities needs to be tightened to close gaps that allow corruption to flourish.’ However, the committee’s parachute tour allowed only an outlandishly positive top-down view of Durban management, which is allegedly ‘performing well in service delivery including housing, long-planning and building partnerships with the private sector to provide services and build catalysts for development [sic]’.

The masses beg to disagree, judging by the past decade’s worth of major protests. Chatsworth is the site most often named as the epicenter of post-apartheid mass democratic community unrest. Recall that Fatima Meer’s Concerned Citizens Forum arrived there to promote the ANC in the 2000 municipal elections. Soon realising that ANC officials worsened not lessened the socio-economic problems of both Indian and African ‘poors’, Meer switched sides to civil society and a new, critical way of relating to government was born.

Since then, Durban service delivery protests have regularly broken out against various state departments for a range of reasons. The 70 we documented over the past year and a half in the Centre for Civil Society’s ‘Social Protest Observatory’ (on our website, http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs) represent only a fraction of the anger, but are illustrative.

Noticing just one of these protests, in Wentworth over the Barracks housing project, the committee recorded how that ‘community was furious about the condition of the new housing development because there was clear poor workmanship which the Metro and residents should have resolved amicably by forcing the contractor to fix the defects. It was clear that the municipal leadership was not aware of the frustration and concerns of residents.’

Come off it, of course Sutcliffe and his colleagues were aware (surely they read The Mercury, where it was covered). Most of the problems raised in these protests could easily be fixed with a dollop of money untainted by corruption. To prove this, when Durban’s water department raised prices during the late 1990s and early 2000s (doubling the real water price within six years), the lowest-income third of Durban residents cut back their consumption by 30 per cent. Then, recognising that such neoliberal water policy caused debilitating protests and lawsuits in Johannesburg, Durban officials remedied their mistake in 2008 with a 50 per cent increase in the amount of free water, a 9kl per household monthly ‘lifeline’. That’s the right government response to service delivery protests: recognize genuine grievances and spend a bit more if that’s what’s required.

The visiting MPs never once recognise this obvious strategy, even when observing that Durban ‘opposition parties complain that senior administrators are pursuing their own agendas and deprive them of information’. But instead of honing in on the problem associated with so many services (affordability) and the solution (more subsidies), the committee only remarked upon the ‘need to strengthen communication between councillors and communities’. Ducking hard issues is why Parliament has a joke reputation and why no change in service delivery can be reasonably anticipated - until more intense protests certainly follow.

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* Patrick Bond is based at Centre for Civil Society within the University of KwaZulu-Natal's School of Development Studies.
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