Frustration boils over in protests

Daily News (Durban)

Frustration boils over in protests
Community angered at snail pace service delivery

October 14, 2005

By Bheko Madlala

Fed up with the slow pace of service delivery at local government level,
disgruntled communities across the country are increasingly resorting to
using illegal methods to express their dissatisfaction with ineffective
municipalities.

This emerged in the national assembly in Cape Town this week when the
minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula, told MPs that there were
881 illegal protests in the South Africa during the past year, with 66
police officers being injured during occasionally violent demonstrations.

Nqakula told parliament most of these illegal protests (223) occurred in
Gauteng, followed by the Eastern Cape (153) and KwaZulu-Natal (132), with 51
such incidents in the Western Cape.

He was answering a parliamentary question from DA MP Roy Jankielsohn, who
had charged that the number of illegal protests illustrated the “countrywide
dissatisfaction with the ANC’s mismanagement of municipalities and its
inability to achieve meaningful service delivery”.

While noting that not all demonstrations were over a lack of service
delivery, Jankielsohn said the alarmingly high number of these protests
indicated that com-munities were rising up in spontaneous displays of anger
over the slow pace of service delivery.

With a few months left before the local government elections, political
analysts say it will be interesting to note whether the wave of protests
will have a bearing on voting patterns.

The manager of the centre for local government at the Institute for the
Democracy in South Africa, Siyabonga Memela, said the upcoming local
government elections would be the most important local government polls in
democratic South Africa.

“The elections are important because the attention has shifted to local
government from national and provincial governments. In order for people to
have service delivery, they need to influence the people who will make the
decisions – and those people are councillors,” he said.

Memela told the Daily News that there were many reasons why the country had
seen a groundswell of protests in the past few months.

“One of the reasons is that councillors are removed from ordinary citizens,
they do not understand the needs of the people they represent.

“The other reason is that most of the councillors have been imposed on the
communities because people do not vote for individuals, but for parties.

He said another reason was that ordinary people did not understand the
different roles of the provincial government and local government.

“Most of the protests have been around a lack of housing, which is a
provincial competence. Municipalities can only facilitate, but because they
are closest to the people, commu-nities tend to take their grievances about
lack of houses to local government authorities,” he said.

Memela said even though ANC supporters were not happy with the pace of
service delivery he did not see them voting for another party.