Johannesburg – Until now, I have been sceptical of attempts to describe the Covid-19 pandemic as some kind of opportunity.
Opportunity for whom and for what?
PPE tenderpreneurs perhaps?
But following the looming local government elections chaos, I have since adjusted my earlier levels of scepticism.
The preamble to our constitution notes the injustices of our past, commits to healing past divisions, cultivating democratic values and improving the lives of all South Africans.
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Twenty-seven years since the commencement of our democratic dispensation, we stand on a heap of some constitutionally enshrined rights, which are nevertheless unclaimable and practically inaccessible to many South Africans.
Of course, it is better to have these rights in the constitution and fight for access to them than to have to fight for their inclusion in the constitution – which is what the struggle against apartheid was about.
One recognises that a national constitution is as much a promise as it is a declaration of the existing state of affairs.
National promises and national ambitions have their place, especially in a liberal democracy and a capitalist society like ours.
But when the gap between the promises and the actual state of affairs appears to be widening instead of narrowing, there is a problem.
For millions of South Africans, the touchstones of our constitutional dispensation, namely: human dignity, equality, human rights, no racialism, non-sexism, and the rule of law, are at risk of becoming meaningless shibboleths.
Our Bill of Rights declares that “everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected”.
But what happens when the state fails to respect and appears uninterested in protecting the inherent dignity of citizens, such as in the case for South Africans living without water and sanitation?
Think of Michael Komape, five, Lumka Mkhethwa, 5, Lister Magongwa, 7, Oratilwe Dilwane, 5, and Siyamthanda Mtunu, 6, who died when they fell into pit latrines or when the walls and/ or floors of make-shift school toilets collapsed on them – between 2007 and 2018.
Noting that there were more than 3 000 pit latrines in schools in August last year, Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga told parliament that pit latrines will be eradicated in 2022 – that is, in four months.
Don’t hold your breath.
All these indignities while some politicians and their parties have been feasting, ever so brazenly on the public purse. All these when the auditor-general has recently found: irregular expenditure in municipalities now amounts to R26-billion , some municipalities do not pay over the relevant taxes to SARS, many municipalities are run by consultants and many government employees continue to do business with government.
In light of these developments, we cannot simply lunge into another local election.
As a nation, we have to pause and think about the meaning of this moment in our history.
On the one hand, we have a governing party whose application to force the the electoral court to reopen candidate registration was on and then suddenly off ; on the other hand, we have an IEC that has taken the extraordinary step of directly asking the apex court to postpone the elections.
In this constellation of incidents, accidents and the looming big decisions, I see a possible opportunity to reset our floundering local governance. We have to guard our right to vote with our very lives.
We deserve better than a set of empty promises colourfully dished out every five years.
We have to interrupt our flawed electoral system and stop rewarding the people who are breaking our municipalities, collapsing our towns, destroying our cities and ravaging our villages.
Perhaps we should be asking the IEC and the Constitutional Court to consider postponing local government elections indefinitely.
While at it, they should remove the current lot of elected officials whose term will end in a few months anyway.
For at least one year, let us take leave from the political parties whose main interest does not seem to be the improvement of the quality of lives of South Africans in the past 27 years.
During this period of leave from the thugs in suits, let us appoint a task team of competent and respected South Africans to develop a better local government electoral system than the one we have.
In the interim, perhaps we can hire professionals to run our municipalities.
Aft er all, as the auditor-general has noted, the people we elect prefer to hire consultants to do their jobs.
We might as well cut out the middle man and hire the consultants ourselves.
• Profesor Maluleke is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship. Follow him on Twitter @ProfTinyiko
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