Why SA’s municipal decay is a followership crisis

Increasingly, across South Africa, local governance has become synonymous with failed service delivery, irregular expenditure and municipal decay, including in the form of crumbling infrastructure, power failures, sewage spills and poor water quality.

Popular explanations for these failures have pointed to leadership as the root cause. Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse CEO Wayne Duvenage cites “unprofessional and mediocre municipal leadership”. Listing turnaround strategies, Sol Plaatje University researchers Ramos Mabugu and Eddie Rakabe write: “None of this can be achieved without competent and prescient local government leadership.” David Mohale of the Durban University of Technology argues that the primary source of problems in municipalities is “a combination of ineptitude and unethical political leadership”.

Research reveals that only 53% of South Africa’s senior municipal managers and 52% of its municipal chief financial officers meet with the necessary competency levels, while studies conducted by the Institute for Security Studies show that “local government corruption is highly organised, and will further undermine the delivery of essential services and democratic governance”.

Government efforts to address local governance challenges

The state of municipalities in South Africa speaks to the poor quality and impact of leadership in local government.

It also provides context for the national government’s drive behind initiatives aimed at enhancing leadership performance in the public sector, apparent, among other things, in the National Framework Towards the Professionalisation of the Public Sector, the Public Service Amendment Act and the Draft White Paper on Local Government.

Government investment in public sector leadership development is good and necessary. However, investing in leadership development with the intention of turning around incumbent leadership that is failing, potentially criminal and that wasn’t qualified for its responsibilities in the first place, is reactive, and following this approach without due regard for other variables (among them systemic design flaws), risks at least two things.

First, wasting resources, and second, an exclusively top-down approach that fails to consider how inappropriately qualified and/or ethically compromised individuals came to occupy positions of authority in the first place.

An article citing Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa states the obvious: “The key to fixing South Africa’s troubled municipalities is to appoint officials who are capable and know their job.”

Municipal councils appoint key municipal officials, which is one reason the South African Human Rights Commission has recommended that “minimum education qualifications for public office holders such as mayors and councillors should be reviewed to ensure capable and qualified people in these positions”. More importantly, voters elect their preferred political leaders onto municipal councils.

Enter followership

A crucial leadership variable that hasn’t received sufficient, if any, attention in the discourse about addressing local governance failures and countering municipal decay in South Africa, is followership.

While leadership retains its significance and remains consequential across contexts, it’s also true that leadership depends on, and cannot exist without, followers. This dependence gives followers power – the power to encourage or dissuade leadership from certain decisions and actions or to change leadership entirely.

Whether followers are willing to exercise this power will depend on an awareness of the power they have relative to leadership and a willingness to risk the potential consequences of holding leadership accountable under the prevailing circumstances.

Courageous followership

The willingness among followers to accept the risks that accompany leadership accountability underpins Ira Chaleff’s concept of courageous followership that has helped popularise the broader concept of followership.

Chaleff defines courageous followership as consisting of six related dimensions: the courage to assume responsibility, the courage to serve, the courage to challenge, the courage to participate in transformation, the courage to take moral action and the courage to speak to the hierarchy.

The kind of followership that Chaleff describes is courageous because it involves the risk of those aligned with and in support of leadership, irrespective of leadership performance, and/or leadership itself, inflicting harm on followers.

Courageous followership in a democracy

Broadly speaking, in the civil governance context, the leaders hold public office (be it political or administrative) and citizens are followers.

By default, citizens are followers because they are subject to government authority and are therefore expected to abide by government laws and obey the government agents that enforce them, irrespective of whether they are satisfied with those in government and/or the laws they make.

The number and nature of the risks, real or perceived, associated with exercising courageous followership and holding political leadership accountable will depend on variables including historical and cultural context, and the governance system in place.

In a dictatorship, for example, the risks associated with courageous followership could be as extreme as violent human rights violations.

In a democratic context, a constitution founded on the notion of human dignity moderates the risks that accompany courageous followership and leadership accountability, including by institutionalising free and fair elections.

Voting as an act of courageous followership

In an electoral democracy citizens have political freedom and are encouraged, in Chaleff’s words, to assume responsibility, serve, challenge, participate in transformation, take moral action and speak to the hierarchy, by casting a vote for their preferred political leadership.

However, the freedom to exercise courageous followership and hold incumbents accountable by electing new political leadership that is competent and ethical doesn’t automatically equate with the willingness and ability among followers to do so.

The 2021 local government elections had the lowest voter turnout in post-1994 South Africa, with less than a third of eligible voters participating. Furthermore, in the same elections the political leadership primarily responsible for municipal decay across most of post-1994 South Africa retained control over 161 of South Africa’s 278 municipalities.

Investing in followership

Therefore, rather than the failures of incumbent municipal leadership, the deeper, more pressing matter confronting local governance in South Africa, and that any predominantly top-down approach to fixing municipal leadership fails to consider, is the apparent lack of willingness and/or ability among South Africa’s citizen followers to vote competent and ethical leadership into power.

Efforts aimed at fixing local governance and countering municipal decay must include an emphasis on developing citizens and, by implication, followers, so they have an appropriate understanding of the local governance landscape and the ability to navigate it effectively, with the collective interest in mind.

As I and others have written before (see here, here and here, for example), this work begins with a properly designed and executed civic education programme – something that requires more widespread and effective roll-out in South Africa, and the involvement of stakeholders outside government, including from business and civil society.

In a world where resources are finite, investing in public sector leadership development initiatives where the recipients are incumbent leaders who are not qualified for their roles, potentially detracts from the important work of developing courageous followers. DM