Insight: NDP and active citizens

THE NGO world suffered a blow in March this year when Idasa closed its doors as funding for democratisation programmes reduced to a trickle. As a well-resourced NGO, it had done much to advance citizen-state interaction and underline the importance of active citizenship in a healthy political system.

Active citizenship is now one of six National Development Plan (NDP) priorities designed to lead us out of a governance crisis that affects all spheres of government to varying degrees, but local government in particular.

But what does it really mean, and could the NDP and its espoused values be, as the labour movement has suggested, another neoliberal ruse to deflect responsibility from the state and cast the poor at the mercy of the market?

On this score, the NDP and subsequent utterances by the commission that drafted it, give little away. Clearly the NDP responds to failures of government and public administration by emphasising the rights of citizens and the need to build “human capability”. It is fairly bold in its call for increased accountability to citizens and direct citizen participation in for example, municipal planning – on terms framed by local neighbourhoods rather than municipal bureaucracy.

But this tells us little of what the NDP sees as a concrete alternative, and there is an unnerving sense that the emphasis on societal transformation is partly because the architects of the plan saw limited prospects for setting the institutions of government on a new course.

At a time of widespread community protests, it might have been expected that an agency of the state would talk of responsible citizenship but, instead, the narrative is about active citizens. Many of our nation’s most disenchanted citizens are already very active – building barricades, burning municipal halls, mounting rates’ boycotts and chasing their ward councillor out of the neighbourhood. Perhaps it is this social energy that the NDP seeks, rather optimistically, to redirect.

The NDP apparently sees little wrong with citizens demanding their rights outside of the tired framework of ward committees, official forums and mayoral imbizos. Rather than flogging the dead horse that is “participatory local government”, the NDP seems to accept that new means of making municipal leadership answerable are on the cards. But what exactly does it have in mind?

Sceptics might argue that behind the rhetoric of active citizenship lurks the spectre of the good citizen – imbued with a sense of “civic responsibility”, the good citizen pays their taxes, gets involved in charity work, is respectful of authority and generally avoids serious confrontations with the state.

But the NDP seems to go further and expands the idea of political agency within our system of governance. This principle requires accountability and responsiveness from government as a matter of routine, rather than the subject of periodic campaigns and programmes.

But it also requires citizens with enough energy and motivation to not simply demand rights but also to monitor government and provide critical feedback on a more socially inclusive basis.

The concept of political agency goes beyond a narrow customer services’ framework and sits uncomfortably with those whose only concern is to have their verges cut and keep the rates’ bill as low as possible. It also sits uncomfortably with those local politicians who see the allocation of municipal “favours” as the backbone of their careers.

Unfortunately, our system of party endorsed nominations and manipulated lists ensures that many, if not most councillors, claim their authority and livelihoods on the basis, not of qualification or public service capability, but a position within the party hierarchy. Reversing this entrenched political culture poses a huge challenge for the National Planning Commission (NPC).

It is at this point that the understanding of the NPC and the average government official/councillor probably diverge. The culture of government that has evolved over the past decade has tended to reinforce accountability to the party, rather than the public – a reality acknowledged by the NPC, the national treasury and others.

The Daily Dispatch regularly carries accounts of the ANC intervening to resolve issue of governance, the performance of the public service and even administrative problems which should rightly be the responsibility of the state. Increasingly these interventions come, not as a last resort, but as a preferred option to remind us of the party’s omnipotence and to retain political control over a faltering civil service.

The idea of political agency or active citizenship threatens this comfortable sinecure. It suggests something that re- establishes accountability to local citizens through a process of deliberation and negotiation where the outcomes are less certain. But genuine trade-offs that involve winners and losers carry a degree of political risk. Is this what the NDP really has in mind and how does it plan to square this with existing political culture?

A good start would be to acknowledge that civic activism, short of riots, has survived in many parts of the country. In communities like Thembelihle and Leandra, crisis committees pressure council for improved services and mount their own initiatives to ensure development of the area. Several NGOs spread over various provinces have developed models and “tools” for communities to engage with and provide feedback to municipal government.

In our own province, citizen groups have got together to better understand municipal systems in order to pressure for shifts in service provision and better governance. Community journalists have been trained to better report on municipal planning, reporting and financial accounting. NGOs have helped communities to undertake independent assessments of municipal performance and to tackle local governance problems in a systematic way.

At this stage, however, the messages from government are still quite mixed and echo the wavering political support for Planning Minister Trevor Manuel.

Clearly the idea of the vanguard state – a state that directs and leads the transformation of society itself – still has a powerful resonance. This conviction emerges almost daily in the utterances of politicians and senior civil servants whose idea of civic activism does not extend much beyond loyal citizens donning government sponsored T-shirts to pick up litter in the main street.

As the NGO-authored 2013 State of Local Governance Report notes, “yet the dominant political culture is not in favour of civic activism and active citizenship as put forward by the NDP...”

The logic of active citizenship becomes even fuzzier when the various public works programmes are included in the discussion and terms like partnership and empowerment are bandied about.

Programmes like the “community work programme” and the “extended public works programme” are excellent initiatives to provide an economic safety net and get some useful public services in place at the same time.

The link that they create between citizen and state, however, is primarily of a material welfare nature. The stipend, meagre as it is, creates a bond between citizen and government that is essentially about benefactor and beneficiary. Linking civic activism to such a relationship is by definition anomalous.

Government may also find it hard to let go of the highly regulated forms of “citizen engagement” it has so carefully crafted. In his policy speech this year, Eastern Cape local government and traditional affairs MEC, Mlibo Qoboshiyane committed R7.8-million to public participation forums as a strategy to “combat service delivery protests” and promised a “ward committee framework” to standardise operations and to assess the functionality of ward committees.

As much as ward committees and IDP forums are part of the existing municipal policy framework, it remains to be seen whether it is possible to breathe new life into these rather lacklustre models. Some might advise the MEC to save his money and to explore instead the NDP’s as yet undefined but slightly more promising vision of citizen-based monitoring and activism.

Glenn Hollands is a local government consultant