Democracy enshrines some wonderful principles, such as “government for the people by the people.”
However, if abused, it will lead to organised chaos and a failure to deliver services to the people. South Africa’s municipal system, sadly, is being abused by the ANC and the EFF.
A fundamental shift proposed by the National Planning Commission, in its National Development Plan (NDP), published in 2013, is for citizens to move from being passive to being active.
“Ordinary South Africans must take responsibility for our democracy, development and prosperity,” they said.
This is made possible through Section 74(b) of the Municipal Structures Act, 1998, which enables a council to delegate specific municipal duties and powers to a ward committee.
The role of a ward councillor is to serve as the chairperson of the ward committee and act as a liaison between the municipality and the community.
Ward committees are meant to encourage participation by the community. Their job is to make the municipal council aware of the needs and concerns of residents and to keep people informed of the activities of the municipal council.
Ward committees meet once a month, actually have no powers, and can only advise the ward councillor. For this, ward committee members are paid R1 000 per meeting.
At the moment we are in the process of electing members of our communities to ward committees.
This process involves the nomination of people to serve on different portfolios e.g.:
- Economic development
- City planning and infrastructure services
- Environmental development
- Community safety
- Women and children
- Faith-based organisations
Once nominations have been made and approved, a public meeting is held to elect ward committee members. Once elected, the ward committee gets on and does the job.
In principle, this is the perfect world, but, what is happening on the ground, is that anyone from anywhere can be elected a ward committee member.
Based on the actual election process in one ward, and to recount what actually happened, the political party elected in that specific ward, in this case the DA, held their ward committee election.
Other political parties, prior to the election, nominated candidates for that ward, even though they did not represent the majority of voters in the ward itself. These candidates came from wherever and were not from the ward.
The candidates, approved and supported by their political party, bused in people from wherever. The net result was that the party with the most people to vote won the vote and their nominee was elected.
One result, for example, was a toothless fellow, who was unable to read or write and had no clue about economics, being appointed as the ward committee representative for economic development.
The sad thing is that the system allows this to happen, and it will happen again with the coming ward committee elections.
The only way this can be prevented is for residents of a ward to attend the ward committee election en masse, and vote in competent people.
If not, incompetence will breed incompetence and the elected party will be severely undermined. In simplicity, this is sabotage, a shortcoming in the rules and an abuse of the democratic process.
Tony Stone
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