//CORRECTED REPEAT//TRADE-SOUTH AFRICA: A City In Need Of A Hero

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Farah Khan

JOHANNESBURG, Jul 21 2000 (IPS) - Johannesburg in December 1998 was a city in need of a hero.

Its glitter, tarnished by capital flight and a decade of bad management, Africa’s golden hope was in fact deep in the red.

While suburban services declined, the townships waited and waited for the fruits that freedom had promised.

Thus, the initial clamour that greeted the advent of the Johannesburg rejuvenation plan, Igoli 2000, and its three champions, who were drawn from the cream of the crop.

In that month, former Transport Department director-general, Ketso Gordhan, was appointed city manager or CEO; African National Congress member, Kenny Fihla, was appointed chairperson of the transformation lekgotla (the political structure overseeing Igoli 2000) and Roland Hunter became the CEO of the Finance department.

But two years down the line, while the city rejuvenation and financial budgeting plan is continuing apace, its reputation is scarred by a protracted dispute with 35 000 municipal employees for whom Igoli 2002 is a pejorative.

On the SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) web site, the city’s biggest trade union has a entire section called Anti-Igoli 2002.

Designed in blood red with continually flashing yellow news buttons, it is a symbol of the deep anger that workers feel for the programme now called Igoli 2002 because it’s in its second phase.

Fronting the worker and civil protests against Igoli 2002 is Trevor Ngwane, a former ANC councillor who was axed for writing a column in the Sunday World newspaper lambasting the city plan.

Ngwane, along with a coterie of left-wing academics from Wits University, provide the intellectual muscle behind worker protests.

Together with SAMWU, they have assembled material to show that plans like Igoli 2002 around the world which adopt “alternative service delivery mechanisms” like public-private-partnerships result in higher costs and declining service standards.

Ngwane and co. believe workers will have less participation in city management than they now do.

A key bone of contention for Samwu is that it has not been adequately consulted on Igoli 2002.

“Igoli 2002 was launched as a non-negotiable blue-print and it was drafted by people who have never worked in municipalities,” says the union’s president Petrus Mashishi. Gordhan says that he has spent 245 hours talking to trade unions about Igoli 2002.

Part of the reason for the protracted fight is that both sides are stuck in their positions.

Gordhan who was faced with a R400 million overdraft when he took office, chose a conservative but arguably wise plan to reduce the overdraft by imposing a belt-tightening budget in which all capital expenditure was frozen. (one US dollar is equal to 6.7 SA rand)

Faced also with a massive bureaucracy in which productivity levels were not reknowned, he adopted a World Bank model which pins its hopes on the private sector.

Igoli 2002 turns on a fulcrum of ring fencing the Council’s various businesses into mini and autonomous units run by private sector executives on business lines.

It is not strictly privatisation, but “corporatisation” Igoli 2002 operates on principles anathema to public sector unions because it does not countenance a trade union role in what it regards as a management arena.

The union also opposes any form of privatisation. It also does not encourage “political interference” and tries to keep councillor participation in the running of services at a minimum of 20 percent of the boards of the 10 companies that will eventually run Johannesburg.

“Participatory processes were thrown away,” avers Ngwane. Gordhan retorts that trade unions and organisations, like Anti Igoli 2002 forum, did not pitch up at ward meetings where the plan was put to the public.

Backed with research from Bolivia, Argentina and Canada, Ngwane believes prices of basic services like water and electricity will rise.

In meetings in his Pimville constituency in Soweto, he is telling a dirt-poor community that rises in electricity and water tariffs are the fault of Igoli 2002.

“Our plan is to build a struggle on the ground using mass action, education, raising public awareness about and against Igoli 2002,” says the Johannesburg Council’s dread locked bete noir.

The forum wants a return to the vision of participatory local government which the progressive ANC-led movement crafted with its allied SA National Civics Organisation in the Eighties.

They want participatory budgets like those operating in Porto Alegre in Brazil and devolved funding as exists in the Indian state of Kerala.

Samwu and civic associations believe there should be a lifeline supply of water and electricity to indigent users and a progressive tariff structure so that those who use more, the rich, subsidise the poor.

“If you’re using water to wash your car, you pay more. People must be willing to pay to fill their jacuzzis, you know,” says Ngwane.

Mashishi concurs, “Running local government on business principles will only benefit the rich, and the poor will suffer.

Business principles imply that profit must be made from services – this means those who have no money will be neglected.”

His statement is not entirely true. Operating services on business principles, according to Igoli 2002 documents, means that council companies must not overshoot their subsidies and so drain the city coffers.

The unicity administration model of Igoli 2002 is redistributive.

In essence, it uses the wealthy suburban and business tax base to provide services to the townships.

But what Mashishi’s statements do signify is the huge gulf that has grown between Igoli 2002’s managers and its workers. The two sides are talking straight past each other and even five months of political negotiations among the leaders of the Tri partite Alliance negotiations have failed to bring them closer.

The Tripartite Alliance is the political alliance between the ANC, the Congress of SA Trade Unions and the SA Communist Party.

Earlier this month, workers protesting against Igoli 2002 overturned bins and blocked roads with graders.

Traffic ground to a halt and police broke up the strike. The next day, the Council’s Labour Relations specialist, Makgane Thobejane (a former trade union lawyer) went to court with labour lawyer Halton Cheadle, seeking an interdict against further wildcat action by SAMWU and the Independent Municipal Association of Trade Unions (IMATU) which had joined the protest.

Samwu has 25 000 members in the Council and Imatu has 10 000. The Council successfully blocked further action by the union. In the same week, an agreement was signed to end the dispute SAMWU had declared earlier this year on Igoli 2002. They agreed to negotiate restructuring within 30 days of the signing of the agreement.

Samwu sees it role in local government restructuring in a similarly broad way.

It wants the city to negotiate all restructuring and a unicity administration model.

SAMWU wants more pro-poor policies like lifeline services and progressive tariffs and stakes it identity on the “public delivery of public services”. Anything else is “exploitative” and will replicate apartheid municipalities, it believes.

Samwu spokesperson, Anna Weekes, says that a trade union alternative to Igoli 2002, submitted as an Emergency Plan in December 1998 was ignored.

She argues that the union is happy to negotiate better and more efficient service delivery, productivity and financing.

“We were talking about cost-benefit analyses, integrated development plans and broad public consultation,” says Weekes, to illustrate that the union does not oppose municipal change and indeed knows it is necessary.

Weekes says that instead, Igoli 2002 is consultant-driven and that even councillors have been left out of the planning loop.

Igoli 2002 is a transformation exercise and as such, it has generated the deep insecurity that change exercises carry in their wake.

In line with Igoli 2002’s division of the Council into 10 operating companies, workers are being transferred to the new companies. Their employers are changing; management lines are being altered and so are working patterns.

Employees have secured a three year moratorium on job losses and a guarantee that working conditions (i.e workplace conditions; pension; medical aid) will remain the same.

Still, this is not enough. “What happens at the end of the moratorium. They currently have an open-ended contract Why change it now?” says Samwu’s Johannesburg spokesperson.

Negotiations are continuing to try and forge consensus between the Johannesburg city council and the two trade unions – Samwu and Imatu.

The parties set the end of July as the final deadline for negotiations. If the bargaining chamber could not reach agreement, “the parties may exercise any rights they may have”.

For Samwu, this means going on strike. For the Johannesburg Council, this means its right to continue to implement the plan to save South Africa’s most important city from ruin and bankruptcy.