Speaker, five sentences, that is how much attention was paid to local government in the state of nation speech. There were five sentences about the problem where most South Africans most feel the failure of the state. Those five sentences were designed to soothe, to placate and to obscure.
Those five sentences indicate the presence of Q7-vision. That is a view of the world through the tinted window of a 4x4 driving at a high speed in blue light convoy. It is pictures with no sound, or more accurately perhaps, sound with no pictures. Now let me give you some of those pictures that you will find if you go out there and you see for yourself.
Let us start at the Vredefort Dome. It is a World Heritage Site. In the town, against the wall of the local abattoir, a rectangular municipal drain stands open. Bubbling up through this hole and washing onto the surrounding ground is a tide of blood-red water. Dipping its snout into that water and eating whatever it can find that comes out of the abattoir, is a large pig. Just 20 metres behind that there are shacks where people are living. Now tell me, is that merely a challenge, or is that a crisis?
Go north from there and you will find untreated sewage flowing from municipal works into the Vaal River system. Infrastructure spending has not kept pace with demand and skills have been chased out. Treatment works are breaking down and our rivers are becoming stinking sewers. Is that a challenge, or is that a crisis?
Go south-east to Kroonstad, where the council cleared a foul lake formed by a blocked sewer main by breaking a hole in the adjacent storm water drain so the sewage would drain away - ending up in the dam from which the town gets its water. Last year we had a thousand cases of diarrhoea because the municipality found it had to buy cars and meals rather than chemicals to clean the drinking water. I ask again: Is that a challenge, or is that a crisis?
We heard in the state of the nation address about an additional 400 000 people who were given water connections last year. That's great, but how many of them are still connected?
Go east from Kroonstad and you will find Steynsrus, where there was no water in the taps for a month last year. Or how about Mahenge, near Port St Johns where, when I was there in December, the taps had not worked for six weeks, forcing people to walk an hour each day to fetch water from the town dam.
Here is another picture: In Ngqamakhwe village near Butterworth, RDP houses on a hillside are each accompanied by an above-ground plastic septic tank. People there use the tanks for storing drinking water, because the taps are nonoperational for so long. Is that a challenge or a crisis?
I would talk about more municipalities if I had more time. Do not just look at the official pretty figures; Q7-vision is not enough. Try more face-to- face rather than Facebook, Mr President. All this happens because infrastructure projects are built by people with political connections rather than people with expertise. This can be summarised in three words - corruption, collusion and nepotism. That is the motto that should be engraved on the letterhead of every ANC municipality. [Interjections.]
You do not need to take it from me; take it from Martin Sebakwane, the convenor of an ANC provincial task team in North West. He says state machinery is held hostage and captured by one group at provincial level, and a competing faction at local government level. He says that state resources are directed to municipal wards which have councillors who are part of the same faction. He says that councillors who are not part of the powerful faction are not allocated service delivery projects in their wards. Is this a challenge or a crisis?
The response that we hear all the time from this government is that there is no crisis. This is closely followed often by the response conceding that there may be a problem, but they are fixing it. Well, here is a news flash - it's not being fixed.
Let's look at the history. Project Consolidate ran from October 2004 and covered half of the country's municipalities. It deployed staff and expertise to fix local government in the words of the then ANC Minister "in line with the five-year strategic agenda for local government". Some strategy! Five years later, the ANC government had to institute the Local Government Turnaround Strategy. It's more of the same. Will it work if the political methodology of the ruling party is not addressed? I doubt it. The poster child in this regard is Nokeng Tsa Taemane, a municipality that was run into the ground by the ANC. The DA took it over in 2003 and got it out of financial trouble and delivered massively. The ANC took it over again in 2006 and last year declared it so bankrupt and so broken that it could not be fixed. So here we are coming to the truth of it. It is only when the ANC runs things that they become unviable.
There's another plaintive excuse when this government is on the ropes about service delivery - "Don't let us politicise this". So let us get it straight: When the law is made, it is political; when the officials are appointed, it is political; when the budgets are allocated, it is political. Then it all goes wrong and suddenly nobody wants to talk about politics anymore! Municipal failure is not an act of God. It is the direct result of failed ANC government policies.
The state of the nation address declared that at least some municipalities are working well. And, yes, DA-controlled Cape Town is working very well. From the days of capital starvation under the ANC, the rate of housing opportunities has been tripled, spending on infrastructure has almost quadrupled, the city's streets are clean and so are its audits. Cape Town's IT system is internationally recognised. When poor South Africans leave the ANC-run Eastern Cape to find a better life, do they go to ANC-administered Port Elizabeth? They do not. They go to DA-administered Cape Town. Some failure, Comrade Turok!
Compare that to Johannesburg, where tens of thousands of ratepayers with good credit records are being sent foolishly high utility bills and being cut off without warning. That's after a politically connected company gets the IT contract and fails to deliver. Mayor Masondo, of course, says there is no crisis.
Of course the Q7-vision is a political necessity. The ruling party cannot admit the extent of its failure to run local government. Despite the excuses, these failures are neither occasional, nor are they sporadic. They are devastating and systemic and they are everywhere. Thank you. [Applause.]