The post-apartheid South African state placed local government at the centre of basic service provision for all, which it understood as a transformative function. However, more than two decades later, local government has become a site of dysfunction. The financial and infrastructural state of municipalities is deeply troubling. According to South Africa's Auditor General, in June 2021, over 25% of municipalities were at risk of complete collapse; and the majority had invested minimally in infrastructural repair and maintenance and were faced with irrecoverable debt (Ndlovu, 2021).

This crisis has been attributed to governance failure, capacity constraints, and corruption. Whilst these factors have undoubtedly contributed, my argument – developed in a recent paper (Scheba, 2022) - is that we must acknowledge the role of an inherently flawed post-apartheid municipal operating model to understand this crisis. A foundational assumption of the municipal operating model is the view that local governments can simultaneously offer affordable services and generate their own revenue through service tariffs and property taxes, to remain financially viable.

However, the consequence of this assumption has been that municipalities have increasingly come to prioritise fiscal prudence over equitable service provision. That is, financial considerations overshadow equity commitments, as cost recovery for basic service provision is prioritised in the interest of revenue collection (Dugard, 2016; Millington and Scheba, 2021). Alongside cost recovery, property tax is equally illustrative of this dynamic of revenue prioritisation. Contributing almost one-quarter of municipal revenue in a city like Cape Town, it incentivises political efforts to maintain and grow property market values in wealthier parts of the city (Cirolia and Robbins, 2021: 413). The consequence is the emergence of a "real estate state" (Stein, 2019), which, through prioritising state finances, simultaneously rewards wealthy, largely white, ratepayers, thereby perpetuating neo-apartheid geographies.

The consequence for South African water governance is a contested relationship between neoliberal and human right to water orientations (Yates and Harris, 2018). This contestation, and related efforts to mitigate the tension, plays out in the Free Basic Water (FBW) policy and associated mechanisms as these ostensibly progressive tools result in regressive outcomes.

In 2001, following growing criticism and a severe cholera epidemic in KwaZulu-Natal, that there was a shift toward the introduction of the FBW policy. In terms of the policy, poor households should be allocated a free basic quantity of potable water, identified as 6000 litres (6kl) per household per month. Presented as pro-poor, in truth, the FBW policy is both a lifeline and a technology of control. Loftus (2005) refers to this as the paradox of FBW, where an intended universal minimal quantity of water has become the maximum accessed by many of the poor. The determination of access is managed and restricted through the deployment of means-tested indigency policies. This is despite widespread problems with the implementation of such policies, including an ad hoc definition of poverty and significant variation among municipalities in determining beneficiaries (Tissington, 2013). Ultimately, in providing FBW, "municipalities have made the application process as unpalatable and time consuming as possible for residents. The state appropriates [their] time" (Ruiters, 2018: 176).

For those who do access FBW allocations, these are mediated and controlled through technological devices, including prepaid meters, water management devices (WMDs), and water restrictors, transforming homes and families into "spaces of calculability" (Von Schnitzler, 2008). As Scheba et al. (2021) comment,

Despite continued efforts to portray the WMD as a significant instrument for sustainable development and responsible water usage, the harsh realities of living with the instrument are well documented, earning it the names 'Weapon of Mass Destruction' and ufudo, isiXhosa for tortoise. So named because these devices hide in their shell and we can't see what's going on inside

The use of WMDs is often portrayed as part of an effort to advance responsible citizenship and solve debt management. In the context of household poverty, however, they further entrench poverty, function to individualise a systemic struggle, reinforce a disconnect between the state and its citizens, and lend support to fiscal priorities over the universal human right to water. This is unfolding in a context of extreme and growing poverty and inequality, where over 12 million people are unemployed (by the expanded definition) and 2.1 million job losses occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic (Institute for Economic Justice. 2022)

A policy with an ostensibly progressive agenda is in practice resulting in questionable or deeply regressive outcomes. Households face impossible choices, resulting in an endemic crisis, that is arguably budgeted for in the form of municipal accounting.

I conclude that we must interrogate the primacy of the financial imperative in the municipal operating model. In the context of fiscal precarity, this has trumped equity commitments in the provision of municipal services. Ironically, the sanctioned model is itself deepening poverty and inequality (Ledger, 2021a). The current trajectory is intensifying a crisis of social reproduction – that is, the everyday work of life-making that includes care and infrastructural access - with gendered and racialised dimensions. Functional municipalities are critical for social reproduction, suggesting the urgent need to rethink and remake the model for providing public goods and to orient it explicitly toward life-making as opposed to revenue-making.

Suraya Scheba


References

Cirolia, L. and Robbins, G. 2021. Transfers, taxes and tariffs: Fiscal instruments and urban statecraft in Cape Town, South Africa. Area Development and Policy 6 (4): 398-423.

Dugard, J. 2016. The right to water in South Africa. In socio-economic rights: Progressive realisation? report. Johannesburg: Foundation for Human Rights

Institute for Economic Justice. 2022. Press Statement: Budget 2022/23 – A Lost Opportunity. February 25. Johannesburg, South Africa: Institute for Economic Justice. https://www.iej.org.za/press-statement-budget-2022-23-a-lost-opportunity/.

Ledger, T. 2021a. Access to basic services: Enabling progressive transformation or entrenching poverty and inequality? Short report on access to basic services. Johannesburg: Public Affairs Research Institute.

Loftus, A. 2005. Free water as commodity: the paradoxes of Durban's water service transformations. In McDonald, D. and Ruiters, G. (Eds), The age of commodity: Water privatization in southern Africa, pp. 200-216. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Millington, N. and Scheba, S. 2021. Day zero and the infrastructures of climate change: Water governance, inequality, and infrastructural politics in Cape Town's water crisis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45(1): 116-132.

Ndlovu, Z. 2021. Is remunicipalisation the answer for local government? Amandla 78: 26-27, https://aidc.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Amandla-78.14.10.2021.WEB_.pdf

New Frame. 2021a. Long Read – Senzeni Na?. New Frame, 2 April, https://www.newframe.com/long-read-senzeni-na/

Ruiters, G. 2018. The moving line between state benevolence and control: municipal indigent programmes in South Africa. Journal of Asian and African Studies 53 (2): 169-86.

Scheba, S.; Meyer, F.; Benson, K.; Karunananthan, M.; Farr, V. and Green, L. 2021. New packaging, same deal: City of Cape Town's new proposal to replace water management devices with the drip system will further water apartheid. Blue Planet Project, https://bit.ly/3Bidr7g

Scheba, S. 2022. Viewpoint – The South African water sector: Municipal dysfunction, resistance, and future pathways. Water Alternatives 15 (3): 632-649.

Stein, S. 2019. Capital city: Gentrification and the real estate state. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.

Tissington, K. 2013. Targeting the Poor: An analysis of free basic services and municipal indigent policies in South Africa. Report on basic service provision. Johannesburg: SERI

von Schnitzler, A. 2008. Citizenship prepaid: Water, calculability, and techno-politics in South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies 34.4: 899-917.

Yates, J. and Harris, L. 2018. Hybrid regulatory landscapes: The human right to water, variegated neoliberal water governance, and policy transfer in Cape Town, South Africa, and Accra, Ghana. World development 110(October): 75-87.

Photo Credit: Masixole Feni