Standing outside Gqeberha’s high court last week, when the priority should have been beach or braai, I was reminded of an African proverb that goes along the lines of “when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers”.
And I wondered if the battle between co-operative governance MEC Zolile Williams, who wants to institute an executive committee governance system, and current mayor Retief Odendaal, who is determined to keep the executive mayoral system, was exactly the fight of two elephants.
And whether either outcome would be good for the metro’s grass.
In 2019, an international scientific panel, IPBES for short, endorsed by 130 governments, completed a global assessment of Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Their assessment was stark: a million different biological species are at threat of extinction within decades, and the situation has become worse, not better, in the last 50 years.
For Nelson Mandela Bay, easily a globally-significant biodiversity hotspot, that assessment should be a clarion call, a fire alarm, an incoming missile warning that we need to get working to secure our “grass”.
Our grass being our five biomes, our several nature reserves and two marine protected areas, our rivers and estuaries, our rocky shoreline, and our many reefs.
All are under threat. And that’s not good news for us.
Humans need the ecosystem more than the ecosystem needs us.
The IPBES assessment identified five key threats: changing land and sea use, climate change, pollution, exploitation of natural resources, and invasive species.
But for us in the Bay, there’s a more significant threat, and equally a lost opportunity, namely our dysfunctional local government, which incorporates both our political and administrative systems.
Uncompleted capital works and delayed maintenance, water leaks, blocked stormwater drains, overflowing sewers, filling in of wetlands, soil degradation, rubbish removal and disposal, alien plants sucking our rivers dry, algae blooms killing off our fish, manganese dust, air pollution, are just a few of the local things that threaten the health of our ecosystem.
All of which are under our local control.
Make no mistake, there are pockets of excellence throughout the political and administrative structures of our metro, with many councillors and officials breaking their backs 24/7 to keep the local government ecosystem functioning.
We owe them a great debt. But our functionality is so marginal, so razor thin, that one high-rainfall event like the eThekwini experienced last year is likely to push us over a system threshold into a state of permanent brokenness.
The ongoing state of eThekwini’s closed beaches illustrates the point.
While there is little argument that our local government is broken, a point both Williams and Odendaal appear to agree upon, the elephants in the room are fighting on how to fix it.
Both stridently argue that their interest is to halt the dysfunctionality and to get the metro working.
Both arguments are dismissed by the other side as a reflection of the other’s political self-interest, the ANC wants to retain the metro at all costs, the DA wants the metro to showcase its 2024 national campaign.
And both adorn their arguments with some popular half-truths: the ANC is corrupt; the DA is racist.
In this column I’ll consider briefly the case being made by the one elephant and understand its role in how things were broken. We’ll unpack the other elephant’s case in the next column.
Obviously, the answer is multiplex, and no single column can unpack it all, but if we use leadership as our measure, things become a little clearer.
For instance, since Nondumiso Maphazi was elected as executive mayor in March 2006, we have had 10 mayors in the subsequent three election cycles.
In effect, since mayor Nceba Faku and municipal manager Graham Richards’s terms ended, we have had no stable leadership of the metro.
And because both mayor and municipal manager are council appointments, the council itself has spent an inordinate amount of its time wheeling and dealing on these two leadership roles.
The consequence is an institution mired in controversy, strategically lost, and crisis-focused.
The MEC’s answer to this is to not only change the leadership once again, but to change the entire system.
The powers of the executive committee are still undecided, so what the executive committee will actually do, and how it will work are details still to be worked out.
It’s a recipe for ongoing chaos, not stability. And it doesn’t address the core problem.
In the last 16 years, the ANC of its own accord has replaced its own mayoral choice three times, each time supposedly to increase its appeal to voters.
Voters have responded by taking the ANC from 81 seats in a 120-seat council in 2006, to 48 seats in 2021. That’s not an endorsement of the revolving-door strategy.
And by most accounts, the current ANC councillors appear determined to boycott or disrupt council meetings in support of the MEC’s claim. In effect doing the same thing but expecting a different outcome.
The MEC would have greater impact on the metro’s stability by changing the ANC’s approach to metro leadership and council participation than by rearranging the chairs.
For sure the ANC is not the only elephant in the room, but it was the biggest, and changing its approach is still essential in getting the city working and rehabilitating its biodiversity.
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