Opinion| As the saying goes, “things have to be worse before they get better”
Does it mean we have to be deliberately negligent and make things worse before they get better? What if they get entrenched and worse than we thought? What if they get to a point where we are no longer able to fix them? What if our negligence causes us to perish?
I want us to honestly look at the institutions we “inherited” from the apartheid system; how they were run, their management and sustainability over those years and compare that with how we have managed them since 1994, the changes we introduced and the benefits thereof. I wish to ONLY refer to the top management of our municipalities and with the specific reference to their “MAYORDOMS”.
I don’t remember the existence of anything like an Executive Mayor during the apartheid days. The most powerful position was that of a Town Clerk. The position of a mayor was just ceremonial those days if my memory serves me well. The Town Clerks were and looked just like any ordinary citizen, without the bells and frills.
Notwithstanding the fact that those cities and towns were controlled and managed for the benefit of a few, they looked clean, services were delivered, even in the Black Townships, even though it was not in the interest of the ruling party of the time, apartheid!
Despite the fact that we were involved in our political struggles ostensibly to improve and change the manner in which services delivered to the entire population, the 1994 negotiated settlement brought the opposite effect in many ways.
What has significantly changed is the top structure of management of those institutions without changing, (for the better) the way services are rendered to all irrespective communities.
The introduction of positions such as Executive Mayors and Executive Directors with the concomitant high wage bills and their accompanying security structure at prohibitive cost implications. The result of those changes are the reduction and gradually absence of deserved services to the ratepayers.
I have, in my past life, met and observed how many municipalities were run in the and I had NEVER seen a Mayor accompanied or shielded by a motorcade and armed guards as I’m witnessing today. This is despite that their lives were more at risk because because of the liberation struggle waged right in the country, and by many of us, whom they didn’t even know or suspect to be “terrorists”!
Does it mean that the then “MAYORDOMS” was less corrupt or cared less about their safety than the ones we have in this democracy! Can someone tell me how effective are these newly adopted, and supposedly “revolutionary and transformative” positions in comparison to their previous counterpart?.
There are some things that are so obvious and yet so difficult to understand, and why they can’t be gotten right today. A simple example would be the rapid way in which our road markings are fading and how quickly our potholes re-emerge soon after they are attended to, for instance.
This conversation has to be part of the agenda item of re-looking at our “no so wonderful” constitution after these very “dramatic to be” elections.
(Pule Monama is commentator on local and national issues)
