Time for a new step-aside rule for councils that don’t deliver

The last few weeks have been exhausting; with all the opinions I’ve written on the collapse of the country’s once glorious infrastructures. Today I was reading about how SA Airlink has acquired shares in a neighbouring airline all through private funding while our national airline is struggling to coast despite years of free money.

I thought there’s just got to be a better way to run a country and then it dawned on me; how does anything get done in South Africa anymore? We don’t go by means of any sense of morals. We simply follow whatever rules we have to. I mean, how many municipalities fail audits? Bet you can’t tell me what the political results for such failures were.

There seems to be this sense of immortality – no matter how badly an entity does, as long as they keep being voted in, they’re legitimate and that’s because, well currently, they are. We can debate at length as to whether exclusively democratic election results are enough legitimacy to govern but in the true spirit of South African political debate, let’s just not do it. I mean, it’s not like our last four presidents have ever had a presidential debate.

It’s all good and well for a government to be elected democratically and take up office. Nobody is arguing with that. What we need to discuss though is that at some point, some work actually needs to get done. That’s not a foreign concept and in fact, if anybody ever bothered to read a party manifesto, you’d see a lot of promises to do this and that. In theory, that’s partly what parties are elected on.

ALSO READ: New Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero apologises and promises to fix mistakes

So what happens when a party does not deliver on its promises? Simple. It sets out some new promises next time and hopes that nobody notices. The same dude who is now saying that Eskom will remain a major energy producer once told us that load shedding will be a thing of the past five years ago and yet he’s still allowed to occupy the top seat?

Sure, people get things wrong sometimes. But, if they get a lot of things wrong a lot of the time, regardless of the reasons, do we still want them to lead us? I don’t think so.

So how do we measure it? Why would we have to?

Meet targets or step aside

Let’s just make the parties set out 100 measurable goals and if they don’t match a high percentage of them, then they have to step aside and can’t contest the jurisdiction in the next cycle. It’s nifty but simple.

Sure, one will argue that when there’s no tar so you can’t expect them to build a road and that’s why we can’t expect them to meet 100% of their targets. Yet we cannot continue to use a system that excuses failure of self-generated mandates.

The best part is then we, as voters, can compare actual measurable plans and not just airy fairy things like “economic growth” promises. Tell me how many kilometres of pipeline you’re going to lay, how many houses you’ll be building or what percentage of job growth you’re going to get. That’s what works in South Africa, right? Numbers that can compete. If you don’t get it, you don’t get to run again next time.

ALSO READ: PODCAST: Poor service delivery- ‘We have a leadership environment which encourages and rewards incompetence’

I honestly shouldn’t be caring about internal battles and factions within the ruling party because as far as what I’m presented with as a voter, I don’t get to pick the individuals anyway so I need to leave it to them to sort their house out.

What I’m presented with is a body as a whole and be it the current ruling party or anyone to replace it…be it a metro or national government, if they fail at their own promises, they should make room for the next body to give it a shot.

That’s the kind of step-aside rule that will actually incentivise delivery to the country.