The future beckons with promise if we fix the present

Julius Kleynhans & Jonathan Erasmus

Image: JoburgCAN

There is a central tenet that every state or government must fulfil to be successful and this recipe for success is widely recognised across many nation states, both in the global south and north.

In its most simplistic form it is to provide the framework and canvas for communities and businesses to thrive and to tax the citizens and business accordingly while maintaining and improving the systems that make it work.

These systems include the serious and often contested space of security, health and education, and what is expected and often taken for granted and viewed as mundane in developed states, such as refuse collection, energy, water, sanitation and accessible government services.

The size of the government and its underlying ideology are not major factors. What matters is that the government is fit for purpose and able to improve the lives of the people and meet the demands of a modern, mobile and highly informed society.

But what then must a citizenry do if its government fails to deliver to the point that the very systems it was elected to protect have been destroyed while taxes and service charges have continued to increase?

And at what point does a community begin to consider a form of self-governance to take over the running of services?

And lastly, when do citizens stop paying rates and taxes to the responsible government entity?

These are three difficult questions about an incredibly complex problem but we as South Africans are now being confronted by them whether we like it or not.

Let us paint the picture here. Our public sector education outcomes are amongst the worst, our public hospitals are in a severe state of collapse and our police are wholly under-resourced and lack the expertise to investigate crime. Public transport and energy, water and sanitation  infrastructure are spiralling towards collapse.

Most of the country’s state companies are no longer considered a going concern. If they were measured against the same standard that private enterprise was expected to meet, they would have been liquidated. The recent financial year end losses combined of Transnet, Eskom and the Post Office come to just over R30-billion. To put their losses into perspective, this is double the amount of money the entire Northern Cape received from National Treasury’s Provincial Equitable Share in the 2023/24 financial year.

The massive inefficiencies in our state have resulted in our country’s national debt ballooning. Nedbank, one of the country’s big four banks, estimates that for every R100 paid to the state, R18 gets absorbed by debt-service costs, never mind paying off the debt itself. The National Treasury predicts that by 2025/26 this number will rise to 25% of the national budget.

Years of reckless government spending and neglect of its basic responsibility to maintain and manage infrastructure has resulted in the growing privatisation of state responsibility.

It is not something people wanted to do. Households, businesses and communities did not want to spend their taxable cash flow on supplementing and then taking over government’s functions, which they already pay for via taxes and service charges, such as financing solar farms or building water reticulation systems and taking over the management of waste-water treatment works or even something as simple as putting in a water filtration system in their homes to ensure clean drinking water.

Most South Africans would prefer to send their children to an excellent state-subsidised school and not be forced to use private health services for the most mundane of requirements.

But it is happening.

Now let us revisit the earlier three questions.

Firstly, what must a citizenry do if its government completely destroys its own capacity to deliver? It is clear that communities need to mobilise and use their hard-fought right of the vote to elect a government that will at least try to be accountable and transparent. On every available metric, our current national government and most local governments have proven themselves incapable of governing.

Secondly, when do communities go it alone? This answer is much simpler: some already have. From Harrismith to Komani, this is taking place every day across the country.

Thirdly, when do the same citizens stop paying rates and taxes to the governing authority? This is the most emotive but can, in reality, be managed in a simple and concise manner. Through adequate regulatory changes and within the prescripts of the Constitution, we could reduce the individual citizen and business tax burden if we allow community organisations and homegrown South African businesses to finance and deliver services either through public-private partnerships or concessions. Efficiency and competition will drive down costs.

If these options are not available, then we use a growing body of case law involving community organisations and municipalities. Not every judgement has been favourable to community groups but every civil court application, regardless of its success or failure, helps pave the way for new actions as we continue to strive for, and seek, a more just and accountable form of governance.

There is no doubt that South Africa has the ability to win and there is certainly no lack of intellectual capacity and innovation. We can also be proud of the robust nature of civil society which is increasingly becoming more influential, from residents’ associations and street committees to those on the national stage.

We need to harness this collective energy. Through communities becoming organised across race and class, we can fix South Africa because we are Stronger Together. Time may be against us but if we get it right, the infinite nature of the future is beckoning.

 

Julius Kleynhans is the Local Government Executive at the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA). He has been a water and environmental activist for more than a decade.

Jonathan Erasmus is the project manager for the Community Action Network, an initiative of OUTA. Now an activist, he has over 20 years’ experience in mostly investigative journalism.