It’s time to get the political hacks out of Joburg city management

It’s crunch time for Joburg as local government elections loom in November. Either the political hacks who have enabled the city’s very visible decay are sent packing, or Joburg will continue crumbling from the inside.

The 13 entities under city management that provide key services, such as water and electricity, have become nesting grounds for political appointees. At least 10 of these entities are implicated in serious tender fraud.

Political appointments to these boards have sapped the skills needed to oversee their proper functioning.

A new report by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) provides numerous examples of political allegiance trumping competence in city appointments. The consequences are visible in Joburg’s pockmarked roads, and its failing water and electricity infrastructure.

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Since 2016 Johannesburg has had nine mayors and eight coalition administrations, with each change accompanied by an entourage of political bag carriers. Not only does this invite corruption, it makes continuity virtually impossible.

Joburg Water board lacks engineers

Not one member of Joburg Water’s board is a professionally qualified engineer, despite the utility’s obvious dilapidation and where nearly half of the water pumped earns no revenue due to leaks, outages and ageing infrastructure.

At least seven of the city’s 24 most senior management positions are occupied by acting appointees, while the city’s own annual reports point to persistent shortages of engineers, finance professionals, ICT specialists, project managers and supply-chain experts, says the CDE report Kickstarting Delivery – Joburg’s Mission Critical Jobs.

“City departments and utilities cannot continue to operate as political fiefdoms,” says CDE executive director Ann Bernstein. “Senior appointments and board positions are not bargaining chips to be divided among coalition partners.”

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Clock watchers and political appointees

CDE says cadre deployment is now deeply entrenched in both the administration and municipal entities, some of which have effectively become fiefdoms controlled by different political factions.

Management structures in parts of the city administration have broken down or been bypassed.

In one instance following the 2016 election, the EFF used its influence to push for the insourcing of workers previously employed through contractors.

By 2019, around 1 879 cleaners and 1 600 security guards were loaded on the municipal payroll under a DA mayor, at higher salaries. The problem was their former managers and supervisors were not brought in with them, leaving many of these workers with little supervision and considerable discretion over when, how and whether they worked.

That culture of work at your own discretion appears to have spread: a former deputy director estimated that only a third of employees were hardworking, with the rest made up largely of clock watchers and political appointees. A councillor has claimed that of the roughly 35 000 employees, only 900 were actively doing their jobs.

That makes the November local government election about considerably more than who becomes mayor.

Read: Johannesburg adds 700 managers as city struggles to pay bills

“The first test of the government elected in November will be who it appoints to run Johannesburg,” says Bernstein. “No turnaround strategy will succeed if the institutions responsible for implementing it remain weak, politicised and poorly led.”

Whoever wins the November election in Joburg will have some hard choices. One thing’s for certain: carrying on as before will be disastrous. The CDE argues one of the first appointments to be made by the new administration will be for city manager, and this must be conducted in a transparent and fair process.

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Joburg’s key utilities

Then come the three utilities that arguably have the greatest immediate bearing on whether Johannesburg works: Joburg Water, City Power and Pikitup.

CDE wants their boards populated by people with the technical, financial and management experience required to oversee what are, in effect, large and complicated infrastructure businesses.

Those boards should in turn appoint competent CEOs and hold their management teams accountable for results.

A useful suggestion from the CDE is to seek agreement from political parties ahead of the election in November to ensure political office bearers are kept away out of procurement, appointments and operational decisions.

If Johannesburg again ends up with a coalition government, this should be written into the coalition agreement.

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The principle sounds obvious but would represent a dramatic departure from the way Johannesburg has been governed in recent years: politicians should decide policy and priorities, while qualified professionals run the city.

Some problems are now so urgent that Johannesburg may not have time to wait for conventional recruitment processes.

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Where infrastructure is at immediate risk, CDE suggests bringing in outside engineers and other specialists on transparent, time-limited assignments while permanent appointments are made.

A new administration should start by identifying the senior jobs that are mission critical to getting the city working. Organised labour will try to slow this down, as happened in the Pikitup strikes of 2015 and 2016 repeatedly acted outside the formal labour relations framework, including striking without declaring a dispute and in defiance of Labour Court interdicts.

For mission critical posts, politically tainted or unsuitable people should be weeded out from the get-go by determining any grievance history or adverse findings from the Auditor-General or Group Forensic and Investigation Service.

CDE says the city needs to relook at its organogram top see where posts, rather than people, are redundant.

Another recommendation is to make performance management mandatory. “The main reason that South African municipalities struggle to dismiss underperformers for incapacity is that nobody documents their underperformance.

“Get this process right in a way that does not amount to constructive dismissal, and it may be possible to dismiss unsuitable people within 12 months,” says the report.

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The first test of the new Joburg  government will be who it appoints, how those appointments are made, and whether the people placed in mission critical positions are given the authority to do their jobs and then held accountable for results.

This on its own won’t fix the city, but it will start it in the right direction.

Read: Joburg on the brink of collapse

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