Understanding service delivery – good governance or gifts?

Conventional wisdom would have it that the stability of South Africa's relatively new democracy hinges on the success of this delivery process. Service protests are often cited as evidence that "delivery" has failed in the affected areas and thus that formal institutionalised politics has become unviable. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that this is too limited an understanding to be useful, writes David Christianson.

The dust has now settled on this year's local government elections, allowing time to reflect on some of the deeper implications for municipal and, indeed, national governance in South Africa. One central theme is obvious. The election was overwhelmingly centred on service delivery with the two main contenders (the ANC and the DA) issuing claim and counterclaim over who delivers best. The Monty Python-esque focus on latrines notwithstanding, the matter is clearly a serious one in South African politics. But it has to be suggested that the term "delivery" and, perhaps more importantly, its systemic implications, have generally not been adequately explored.

Delivery means municipalities. Since the restructuring of local government in 1999, the huge reduction in the number of municipalities, and the passing of  a battery of legislation prescribing structures, procedures and financial matters over the next couple of years, South Africa has a system of what is officially referred to as "developmental" local government. In practice, "development" means delivery of services - water reticulation, electricity, sanitation, municipal roads and refuse removal. What is notable is that while these services are administered locally, they are funded primarily by central government grants, to the value of some R50bn (in 2009/10).

Conventional wisdom would have it that the stability of South Africa's relatively new democracy hinges on the success of this delivery process. Service protests are often cited as evidence that "delivery" has failed in the affected areas and thus that formal institutionalised politics has become unviable. But it is becoming increasingly  apparent that this is too limited an understanding to be useful. What seems more likely is that it is service delivery protests that have become institutionalised. It is no coincidence that most of the 107 major protest incidents recorded by Municipal IQ in 2010, took place in Gauteng and the Western Cape, the provinces with the best record in service delivery.

It must be acknowledged that while much of local government looks somewhat tatty and that in certain localities, perhaps 30 or so, it has failed utterly, in the rest, service delivery is in fact happening. Official aggregate figures, from half a dozen reliable sources, for water reticulation, sanitation, electrification, new roads and refuse collection has steadily improved over the past half-decade. Over one million more households received free water and sanitation in 2009 than did in 2006 (totalling 11 million). The proportion of households living in a formal dwelling has increased by 4,2 million (73%) since 1996.

It has thus become apparent that service delivery protests are driven by relative, not absolute deprivation. Moreover, it is precisely where conditions are improving that the relatively deprived attempt to move forward in the queue by marching, waving banners, even burning tyres and sometimes throwing stones. The argument here is that this is not an aberration. It is instead the way demands for delivery are brought to the attention of those who control the purse. Nor is it ineffective, from the perspective of the protesters for it often produces the goods. But from an overall perspective it has troubling implications.

The term that describes this system is clientelist; new delivery in South Africa happens overwhelmingly through clientelist relationships. Clientelism was once understood as a system in which "patrons" or local "big men" appropriated public goods for "their" local constituency in return for political support. This original definition revolved around the relationships between large-scale land-owners and peasants in Latin America. Over the last 30 years, it has been extended to cover situations where the land-owner is effectively replaced by a political party. In modern democratic systems typical of developing countries, the ruling party has effectively become the "patron" and those who vote for it the "clients".

This is indeed the way the ANC tends to operate at a local level. But is this not the way all politics works? Do individuals not, in all systems, vote for political parties who ensure a constant flow of public goods, financed by the ta payer, to loyal constituents? Perhaps, at a certain level. But what distinguishes clientelism is its ad-hoc nature and relative disempowerment of voters. Clientelism may seem viable - some public goods get delivered - but it is in fact a severely dysfunctional way of achieving this end. It tends to exclude all the rational aspects of a more programmatic system. Future maintenance (funding) and system viability are subordinated to short-term delivery. It is also implicitly party partisan in its outputs; only by voting for the "patron party" can individuals access the zone of delivery.

In a clientelist system, delivery and protest are not incompatible but elements of the same system. Protest is seen as the premier means of accessing public goods. In fact where delivery is seen to be occurring, that fact in itself is incentive for those excluded or on the margins to stand up and protest in the hopes of advancing their claims. The point is clear if we consider the alternative to clientelism; a legal, rational and programmatic delivery system. In such a system the delivery of public goods is planned, trade-offs are taken into account, maintenance is factored in and ever-pressing demands of the poor managed through a representative, democratic and transparent political system.

From the perspective of poorer voters, clientelism seems to work; but for the overall system, its longer term implications are baleful.

Clientelism sacrifices full citizenship by simply buying off protest. It is no coincidence that development in response to popular protest was the policy of the late apartheid regime during the era of the Tricameral constitution. Black Local Authorities, Regional Services Councils and Administration Boards poured resources into townships in the 1980s in a vain attempt to satisfy demands for political rights with material benefits.  It has to be suggested that while current protests occur in a context of political rights, the prevalence of clientelism suggests that those rights are more formal than substantive.

This limitation is more fully illustrated by a second point. Where delivery is clientelist, a more virtuous form of politics is unable to develop. Politics, in this sense is about give-and-take, binding agreements to restraint in both behaviour and demands, and the pursuit of policies that enhance the common good in the locality. Virtuous politics can only develop in tandem with the development of full citizenship in local as well as national government. If the systems of virtuous politics do not develop and become, over time, "the way things are done", service delivery will remain short term, ad hoc and prone to violent disruption.  And, as the Latin American adage has it "clients can never be citizens".

The perspective articulated here goes some way towards explaining the differences between the "delivery claims" of the ANC and the DA around the 2011 municipal election. The ANC offers delivery which, by default, will usually be clientelist, with all the limitations of such a system. The DA, on the other hand believes it can put at least as much "delivery" on the ground. But, according to its literature, it wants to do so through legal-rational and programmatic governance - which will not only be more efficient, but will also incidentally reduce waste and opportunities for corruption.

But such a commitment may cost the DA short-term political support in local government for, as we have seen in SA over the past five years, clientelism does deliver public goods, albeit fewer and less sustainably than the programmatic alternative. The ANC on the other hand can bolster its position by opening the national fiscal tap. It is essentially a clash between the idea of good government, on the one hand, and the provision of gifts to silence mass protest, on the other.

(This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (FNF). The views presented in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FNF.)

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