Governing Gauteng: What is needed? What is likely?

Wits University invites interested members of the public to attend a colloquium on the 12^th of August at the Wits Theatre focused on local government in Gauteng. Assembling experts, analysts, and researchers, it seeks to explain the current state of local government and what may lay ahead. Rather than a platform for empty campaign promises, it examines what has been done, and where priorities should be after the November vote.

We start with larger ideas about public service, public services, and citizenship and call upon them to hold up a mirror to local governance in practice, with a specific focus on the nuts and bolts of budgets and finances, service delivery and infrastructure, and policy and planning. Blending aspiration and pragmatism, we ask a cast of leading scholars and practitioners both what is needed and what is likely.

Voters across Gauteng will go to the polls in November amidst struggles for basic services. Housing has not kept up with demand. Nor have schools or clinics. Many homes lack water and electricity. Some get it sporadically. Bureaucrats, politicians and police who are mandated to serve the public have been captured by private interests. Stand-over tactics associated with construction mafias and taxi associations have migrated to many economic sectors.

Even the provision of law and order – the foundational attribute of any government – is increasingly contested at the level of both practice and legitimacy. Communities who no longer trust local government to provide have taken matters into their own hands in different ways.

Coalition governments have become the norm, particularly at a local level, but the price of partnership is often measured in personal payoffs, rather than substantive progress. Fragile and churning coalitions also make long-term planning difficult. The constantly changing face of Johannesburg’s mayor raises questions about the financial and political viability of the country’s largest city. Everyone running for political office agrees that reforms are urgent, but translating rhetoric into practice remains the test of progress.

The 1998 White Paper on Local Government committed, ‘to working with citizens, groups and communities to create sustainable human settlements which provide for a decent quality of life and meet the social, economic and material needs of communities in a holistic way.’ Converting these aspirations into policy and practice remains our most urgent challenge nearly three decades later. Our local representative are once again being tested, with fierce competition for votes in a context where the ANC has declined and there is now genuine uncertainty about who might govern locally and what comes next. DM

To register for the colloquium please click here.