Election manifestos are, put simply, political marketing tools. They’re the vision that parties sell to voters to gain their support. They’re a litany of promises of exactly the things that voters want to hear — many of which never see the light of day.
This year, voters are watching those manifestos particularly keenly. The November 4 local government election takes place as many of South Africa’s municipalities are in a state of near collapse, in financial distress, unable to maintain existing infrastructure or build new infrastructure, and unable to regularly and reliably provide the most basic services, such as water and electricity.
It is against this backdrop that the country’s two biggest political parties launched their manifestos in the past two weeks.
In brief, the ANC wants to limit tenders and improve municipal services through insourcing; the DA envisions a greater role for the private sector in fixing the crisis in cities and towns.
The politicking game is on. ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has dismissed the DA’s offering as a “Thatcherite manifesto”, while DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis has shrugged off the ANC manifesto as “implausible”.
On the surface, the two manifestos may not look that different: change the tendering system; root out corruption; capacitate municipalities. But they differ markedly on how to “operationalise” their promises.
Central to the ANC’s plan, and a marked departure from before, is the move to insource municipal work to boost competence and reduce the reliance on tendering at the local level.
Take finances, says ANC head of policy and national executive committee member Fébé Potgieter. “We spend millions on consultants to do financial accounts every year … but it doesn’t result in better outcomes [for municipalities]. What you need to do is make sure you have competent people in your municipalities who, on a day-to-day basis, can do the books. So that’s an example of insourcing,” she says.
“What we said is that within the first 100 days [of taking power], we want a review of what kind of things should be insourced or what’s outsourced at the moment and should be part of the core functions of municipalities that could be insourced.”
In the party’s view, insourcing is not only about boosting municipal competence. It will also address the corruption associated with the tender process.
“Insourcing is the opposite of a tender system,” Potgieter tells the FM. “If you have people to cut the grass employed in the municipalities, you must manage them so that they cut the grass regularly. You don’t have to have a company to come and cut the grass, and then they don’t cut the grass, through a tender.”
It’s not “rocket science”, she says, as municipalities already have in-house capacity — it’s just that it’s currently underutilised as there’s more benefit for workers in the tendering process. Instead, that internal capacity should be boosting service delivery. By way of example, Potgieter refers to Limpopo’s “yellow fleet” — 105 vehicles, including dozers, graders and other equipment, procured by the provincial government to maintain roads and boost service delivery.
This is what the manifesto describes as the “remunicipalisation” of councils; it does not expressly do away with tenders, but focuses primarily on rebuilding internal capacity.
Punting the private sector
The DA has a different take on how capacity should be reconstituted: rope in the private sector to rebuild municipalities.
In this, the DA’s plan is not entirely new; private sector collaboration has been used to great success by the ANC itself — in Joburg in the early 2000s, for instance — and by various water authorities through the national department of water.
DA federal chair and head of elections Ashor Sarupen says the party put together the plan with one goal in mind: most municipalities are in a state of severe disrepair, and there is no money to fix infrastructure after years of neglect.
When you look at the scale of infrastructure backlogs, he tells the FM, there is no money available in the public sector. The national government doesn’t have a big bailout fund for municipalities.
“The only way you’re going to, for example, get water services fixed in many municipalities is if you go into a long-term concession … you let the private sector fix the equipment up front, make the big investments.”
For the first 10-odd years of the project, the concessionaires will simply be recouping their costs, he says; only for the last five years will it be profitable. “But after 15 years of a concession, you have functional infrastructure again.”
Like the ANC, the DA has identified that municipalities have internal capacity — it’s just that it’s often not utilised, so the service is put out to tender. The upshot is that municipalities are paying twice for services: they pay their employees, who sit idle, and they contract out the same work.
“The DA model says, basically, well, let’s just concession the service. You’ve got these employees staring at each other; we’re trapped in a procurement system that’s corrupt and inefficient. We say: what if we concession the service, and for five, 10, 15 years … you concession it out to the private sector,” says Sarupen.
“They [the private sector] manage the workers … they bring in the equipment, you take it out of the complicated Municipal Finance Management Act processes that are riddled with corruption and … you get value for money.”
The question of capture
Wits School of Governance professor Alex van den Heever sees the two parties’ manifestos quite differently.
“Both envisage substantial public-private engagement” he tells the FM. “The ANC’s approach is no different to what they have been doing across government until now, while the DA envisages a different quality of interaction … the difference between the two is instructive.”
Van den Heever speaks of how the ANC has transposed its “developmental state” language onto the local level: the “developmental municipality”. The upshot, he believes, is that when it turns to private sector outsourcing — something “it still very clearly intends to do” — the party will have “significant discretion” over how that will play at the political level.
It’s an approach that lends itself to state capture, as political parties are private organisations with unregulated exposure to special-interest penetration — which, in turn, leads to the abuse of power and tender manipulation. The ANC’s approach appears to retain party control without closing the integrity weaknesses in the procurement framework.
“The procurement system is riddled with problems because of the extent to which discretion can be exercised from the top through political appointments — or, as they have become, networks of extraction. That’s why we see consistent patterns of corruption across the country. The consistency implies that the problem is systematic. The governance model derives from the ANC’s national democratic revolution approach, which is where the ‘revolutionary’ party controls the state,” he says.
The approach is rooted in the idea of the party having operational control of the state. The inevitable overreach makes the party the first target for capture by bad actors — followed by the state and all its resources.
While the ANC isn’t offering anything new, he says the distinction between the manifestos is that “the DA is framing a completely different model of public-private interaction. It’s a more decentralised approach, with clear separation of party, government and the operations of the state. The emphasis is on capability subject to impartial accountability. The public-private interaction is decentralised, relying on greater agency from below subject to strategic goals.”
Of course, any manifesto in a coalition environment will be subject to negotiation. It’s an additional level of complexity. In Joburg, for example, Van den Heever says it is not just the ANC’s patronage network at play, but that of its coalition partners, the EFF and Patriotic Alliance, too.
In the end, which manifesto is eventually put to use will depend on which party emerges as the largest — and on its ability to pull together a workable coalition that is not based on the corrupt exploitation of public resources.
Marrian is a political analyst at the Bureau for Economic Research
