By now, thanks to a mistranslation, it has become accepted wisdom that the Chinese word for crisis combines both danger and opportunity.
By now, thanks to a mistranslation, it has become accepted wisdom that the Chinese word for crisis combines both danger and opportunity.
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel put a different spin on the idea when he said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
I hope this applies to the most recent crisis in Grahamstown’s municipal management, and that it leads to all of us doing things differently.
One of those things is to ask detailed question of the politicians about financial management.
The United People’s Movement held a meeting recently to try to understand the payment crisis and what to do about it, as has the Grahamstown Parents’ Network.
A groundswell of popular action may have started. Ordinary citizens have grounds to be upset not only about poor “service delivery” but about being left in the dark.
It’s no surprise the word “bankrupt” cropped up in discussions of the municipality’s failure to pay its workers at the end of last month.
If you can’t pay your outstanding debts you are bankrupt, but the word is more than slightly misleading when applied to local government like Makana Municipality.
It’s true that a major city in the US, Detroit, has recently declared bankruptcy. It is unlikely national government would allow that to happen in South Africa.
If Makana really couldn’t pay its bills, the provincial or national government would have to step in to take over the management of the municipality.
The municipality has blamed a “cash-flow” problem, in other words, it could not pay the workers because it was owed money and wasn’t paid in time.
According to a statement by the Vice Chancellor of Rhodes, Dr Saleem Badat, the municipality attributed the problem to “the delay of an anticipated payment from the national Department of Public Works”.
A press release on the Makana website, by municipal spokesman Mncedisi Boma, attributes the cash-flow crunch to non-payment of rates by a number of institutions and individuals, and though he doesn’t mention the Public Works department, perhaps it is one of those institutions. Rhodes University, he states, owes R8-million, and the university disputes this amount and queries the billing system.
Because a number of debtors have not paid their bills, it was decided the bigger debtors should be asked to pay at least half of what they owed, including Rhodes, Boma says, and arrange to pay off the balance.
At the request of the municipality, according to Dr Badat’s statement, Rhodes paid its monthly bill of R2.5 million a few days early, as well as an extra amount of R500 000, which the university will deduct from November’s bill.
At the heart of the matter is, according to Boma’s admission, the billing system, whose methodology some large businesses and government departments have queried. Boma says the municipality is fixing this: “The Makana Municipality has and is currently putting systems into place to ensure that our billing system is credible and that our Credit Control Policy is vigorously implemented.”
We should all be glad of that. A friend and colleague this month received a rates and services bill for R8 000 from the municipality for the house she moved in to not so long ago.
Querying it, she was told by one official that she had been charged a year’s worth of water, but the charge would be changed to monthly, and she should pay R2 000 rather than R8 000. How can a monthly rates and services bill suddenly drop from R8 000 to R2 000?
I don’t doubt that some people and institutions just don’t pay their bills, or pay their bills late, government departments among them, but the billing system seems to need fixing. In any case, the municipality should have had a contingency plan and have been able to borrow the amount short-term.
My question is, has anything really changed in Makana, thanks to this crisis? Will the same circumstances that led to this particular crisis simply manifest themselves again in some other form?
One of my students produced a thought-provoking story on the potential cost to Grahamstown of our infrastructure problems.
Danielle Gordon, one of the Post-Graduate Diploma in Journalism students, wrote an article explaining how the failing municipal infrastructure may scotch a partnership between Makana Municipality and the National Arts Festival to establish Grahamstown as the Creative Capital of South Africa by 2020.
I find the idea exciting, re-imagining Grahamstown out of its provincialism and projecting it on to the national stage. And it is distressing that the bubble may be pricked by local realities.
Perhaps we need a still more serious crisis to spur change.
