Nov 3, 1995 - The Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC) is currently ... council~ that would govern until municipal elections, which occurred in.
T E N YEARS IN THE M A K I N G A History of the Evolution of Metropolitan Government in Johannesburg RICHARDTOMLINSON The Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC) is currently in the 'interim' phase of transition. As m a p p e d out by the Local Government Transition Act (LGTA) No. 209 of 1993, all South Africa's local governments are undergoing three phases of transition from apartheid structures: 9 The 'pre-interim phase', which prescribed the establishment of local forums to negotiate the appointment of temporary local government council~ that would govern until municipal elections, which occurred in November 1995; 9 The 'interim phase', beginning with the 1995 municipal elections and lasting until a new local government system has been designed and legislated upon and new local governments are elected; and 9 The 'final stage', when the local government system is established in 2001.
In Johannesburg's case, the 'pre-interim' phase evolved from the antiapartheid local struggles in the 1980s that led to the Soweto Accord in 1990 and culminated in a creative period of negotiations and research in the Central W/twatersrand Metropolitan Chamber from 1991 to 1993. The subsequent 'preinterim' and 'interim' phases have been characterised.by an extended period of uncertainty and political dispute, financial difficulties, and cycles of centralisation, decentralisation and then centralisation again in the powers and functions of the GJMC. The earlier struggles and the GJMC's subsequent difficulties, and indeed the focus on "integrated development planning" in the 1998 White Paper on Local Government (in which government charts the 'final stage'), reflects both the inequities and inefficiencies intrinsic to the apartheid city and a history of political imperatives overriding management concerns. In order to understand the Johannesburg study it is therefore best to begin at the beginning - to consider the impact of apartheid on the economic, social and administrative difficulties confronting local government today. This helps to explain w h y Johannesburg and South Africa entered into such a
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protracted and difficult process of local transition. The next section of the paper charts the processes underpinning Johannesburg's move from the 'preinterim phase' to the 'interim phase'. We are then in a position to consider the financial malaise besetting Johannesburg as well as the organisational review that led to proposals, presently being implemented, for a major restructuring of local government. I conclude with a review of what the 'final stage' means for Johannesburg. The focus throughout the paper is on the metropolitan level of government, since it is this level of government that will survive in the 'final stage'. Since this is a complex journey, Table 1 serves as a guide to the changing periods of centralisation and decentralisation. Note the reference to greater Johannesburg and Central Witwatersrand are to the same area. The essential borders of the metropolis were introduced in 1986 with the creation of a taxing authority 1 and accepted as the metropolitan border in 1993, but are once again up for re-demarcation, as explained below. Table 1. Trends in metropolitan centralisation and decentralisation Racially demarcated local government bodies
Negotiation Phase
Up to 1994
1991-1993
The 1990 Soweto Accord led to the formation of the Chamber to resolve outstanding problems that would lead to the resumption of rent and service payments, and essentially to work out how to integrate Metropolitan Johannesburg.
1993/94
The Chamber was restructured into the Forum in terms of the Local Government Transition Act of 1993. The Forum was c h a r g e d with negotiating the appointment of a 'pre-interim' council to g o v e r n until local g o v e r n m e n t elections in 1995. All financial, administrative and political authority would be centralised at the metro where the distribution of powers and functions w o u l d be negotiated, then d r a w n down by the substructures. Forum proposal of strong metro with 7 substructures proclaimed in November 1994.
Central Witwatersrand Metropolitan Chamber
Greater Johannesburg Local Negotiation Forum
Rather than merely a period of decentralisation, from a m e t r o p o l i t a n perspective this was essentially a period of disintegration as the different races operated under different legal and planning systems, had vastly different resource bases and different service levels.
TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING
3
Pre-interim Stage Strong metro with seven substructures
Dec. 1994-Nov. 1995
Strong GJMC established to manage process of transition. This arrangement was never fully implemented as disputes about the boundaries of the substructures led to a reassessment of the earlier agreement and a revised proclamation.
Interim S tage Weaker metro with four metropolitan councils
Nov. 1995-Oct 1997
Greater powers and functions assigned to metropolitan local councils. Financial difficulties encountered by GJMC and the metropolitan local councils, problems with redistribution, and management difficulties throughout the system prompted increasing recentralisation.
Strengthening of metro
Final Stage Dominant metro
Expected in 2001
The White Paper on Local Government prescribes a dominant metropolitan government and no metropolitan local councils.
JOHANNESBURG UNDER APARTHEID An Introduction to Johannesburg underApartheid Prior to the election of the National Party in 1948 urban segregation mimicked the colonial city by reserving the more attractive, healthy and proximate parts of town for whites. Africans were forced to the urban periphery, to live in poorly serviced townships or in informal settlements largely devoid of services. After 1948, under apartheid, most well located Indian, coloured and the few 'close in' African suburbs were flattened and their residents forcibly ejected to the urban periphery. The notorious apartheid city was the result. The hollowed-out urban form, with low-density, high-income white suburbs close to the city centre and large, impoverished, sprawling settlements on the urban periphery is usually thought of in physical planning terms. In fact, the
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apartheid city soon came to embody a variety of political and economic measures that subsequently came to impact negatively on a sustainable human settlement pattern and, notably, on the welfare of the low-income inhabitants of the cities. The key features of the apartheid city and their manifestation in Johannesburg circa 1990 are summarised in points I to 9. They should be read in association with Map I that shows greater Johannesburg's urban form circa 1990, with African townships and informal settlements dispersed away from employment centres and areas of white residence.
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Map 1 Johannesburg under apartheid
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T E N YEARS I N THE M A K I N G 1.
2.
3.
4.
5
Until the 1980s, de s pi t e the existence of a large u r b a n African p o p u l a t i o n , the u n d e r l y i n g p h i l o s o p h y was that Africans were temporarily in the cities to serve in the mines and in industries and services located in white parts of town. Once their working life was over they were supposed to go 'home' to the rural areas. This entrenched a migrant labour system that sffil produces a higher male to female ratio and smaller school-going p o p u l a t i o n as a proportion of the total population in Johannesburg. There were numerous prohibitions on black business and on economic development in the townships. The upshot of this economic segregation and apartheid zoning was that economic activity was forcibly located in white parts of town and created a tax base there. In Johannesburg's case, in 1990 these activities contributed 75 per cent of its rates revenue. 2 In contrast, 95 per cent of the revenue of Johannesburg's four black local authorities (BLAs) came from grants from the Central Witwatersrand Regional Services Council and from central government. Residential segregation created broad sweeps of low-income and impoverished settlements located (with security planning in mind) some distance from employment sites, retail centres, and white areas of residence. The consequence, in 1994, was that the average annual per capita income in Randburg, one of Johannesburg's wealthiest suburbs, was R53 927, whereas the same figure in Soweto, perhaps South Africa's wealthiest black township, was R8 358. Moreover, about 40 per cent of metropolitan households still earn less than R1 500 per month (Palmer Development Group 1998). With residential segregation w e n t a housing delivery system that subsidised low-income whites and to a lesser degree coloureds and Indians, and relegated the black majority to either homelessness or rental status with no security of tenure, as well as extreme overc r o w d i n g arising out of shortages of accommodation. The severe housing shortages are reflected in the high incidence of backyard shacks a n d s q u a t t e r s e t t l e m e n t s , a n d the i m p e r m a n e n c e i n d u c e d by urbanisation restrictions and insecure tenure led to poor quality housing. For example, in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) area (roughly corresponding to the Gauteng Province) in the early 1990s, there were some 850 000 'informal' housing units (of a total of about 2,05 million), or 39 per cent of the total. Of all new housing being built in the PWV area, some 89 per cent being built in the early 1990s was estimated to be unauthorised. In similar vein, some 27 per cent of the housing stock was built of impermanent materials, and only about 34 per cent (300 000 of 850 000 units) in the informal housing stock was built of permanent materials. The PWV's urban housing stock is of far worse quality than is to be expected, and this proportion of urban
6
5.
6.
7.
U R B A N F O R U M 10:1, 1999 housing built of impermanent materials is only known to be exceeded by Antananarivo in Madagascar and Dhaka in Bangladesh (Abt 1998). The layout of public sector townships, the only form of urban housing allowed to black families (as opposed to hostels for single workers) involved a sprawling low built density layout. Not only was this layout particularly inefficient and costly for service delivery, so too was the location on the urban periphery. Metropolitan Johannesburg currently has a population of about 3,5 million, with over 2 million living in townships and informal settlements on the urban periphery. Black household incomes and the ability to p a y for housing and services were and still are diminished as a result of being forced to the urban periphery and being located in low built density townships. In the first place, transport subsidies became necessary to enable workers to survive at these peripheral locations but, despite the subsidy, black urban workers were paying 9-11 per cent of their household income on transport. This amount is twice the international average and as much as they are p a y i n g on housing. Secondly, unemployed, spatially isolated household members are removed from knowledge of informal sector opportunities or day-labour opportunities, or find the cost of investing in getting to employment centres too risky when set against the possibility of not finding a job. Thirdly, the sprawling layout of the townships diminishes small business opportunities (when these became allowed) because the market is dispersed over great distances. With the lifting of barriers to black small enterprise, we have seen a relocation of enterprises from the townships to the Johannesburg city centre and the flourishing of many new enterprises there. Urban black households only spend 8-10 per cent of their incomes on housing, whereas white households, by contrast, allocate between 18 and 22 per cent of their budgets for housing. The discrepancy in spending and saving for housing between blacks and whites is striking since elsewhere in the world it has been observed that low-income households tend to allocate a higher proportion of their budgets to housing than do higher income households. This can be explained by the black history of impermanence, subsidised public rental housing that created a false impression of reasonable housing expenditure, and the peripheral location of new housing opportunities that diminishes their m a r k e t values. This has led to h o u s i n g b e i n g r e l a t i v e l y undervalued by the African community, with little sense that housing represents a secure store of value or a vehicle for the accumulation of wealth. The failure to develop a viable p r o p e r t y m a r k e t in the townships has helped to prevent the emergence of a firm tax base for the institution of local property taxes that could support the provision and expansion of municipal services (Abt 1998). Currently the former
TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING
8.
9.
7
African townships generate about 10 per cent of the GJMC's assessment rates and service charges. The budgetary priorities associated with limited expenditure on African housing were similarly revealed in municipal infrastructure and services, which were generally poorly supplied in the townships and scarce or non-existent in informal settlements. Thus, even in 1998, 62 000 households (23 per cent) in the Southern Metropolitan Local Council had inadequate access to water (defined as a communal standpipe within a reasonable distance) and 86 000 (31 per cent) had inadequate access to sanitation (defined as v e n t i l a t e d i m p r o v e d pit latrines) (Palmer Development Group 1998). 3 The cost of upgrading these services is estimated to be R600 million to R700 million. Shortages of water and poor sanitation are a primary contributor to disease and so to lost schooling and lost workdays and thus lost household income. Local government was predicated on the notion that towns and cities could be compartmentalised into separate racial units presided over by racially separate local g o v e r n m e n t s , with their own fiscal, legal, administrative, planning and 'representative' systems. Metropolitan Johannesburg had 13 local government structures. The protests against the illegitimate BLA system took the form of boycotts on payments for rents and services. In most instances households have not resumed paying for services and the legacy of the boycotts bedevils the financial sustainability of local governments today and impedes service delivery.
Local Struggles that Led to the Soweto Accord4 Community Councils were introduced into African urban areas in 1977 and were given the powers to set rents and expected to administer the townships. They were replaced in 1982 by BLAs, but the BLAs were in an impossible situation - as illegitimate political structures, they were supposed to collect rents and services payments and use this inadequate revenue basis to run the townships. Especially from 1984 there were campaigns to boycott BLA elections and structures. The Soweto Rent Boycott, eventually carried out by 80 per cent of Soweto's formal rent-paying households, began in mid-1986 in response to the increased service charges, deteriorating services, worsening economic conditions and as a repudiation of the BLA system. It was led by the Soweto Civic Association that was at the centre of a powerful network of neighbourhood structures. The rent boycott was built upon five key demands: 9 The arrears owed by people who have supported the boycott must be written off. 9 The houses must be transferred to the people.
8
URBAN FORUM 10:1, 1999 9 Services must be upgraded. 9 Affordable service charges must be introduced. 9 A single tax base for Johannesburg and Soweto must be introduced.
'One city, one tax base' became a national rallying cry. N e g o t i a t i o n s to e n d the boycott b e t w e e n the Transvaal Provincial A d m i n i s t r a t i o n (the National Party government), the Soweto People's Delegation (the negotiating arm of the Soweto Civic Association), and the Soweto, Diepmeadow and Dobsonville BLAs, began in earnest in July 1990 and were concluded three months later. In the Soweto Accord, government essentially conceded all the Soweto People's Delegation's demands, writing off R516,2 million in arrears owed by residents and establishing a forum to negotiate the implementation of the remaining demands. The Central Witwatersrand Metropolitan Chamber was established for this purpose. The incentive to government for writing off the arrears was that the Soweto Civic Association undertook to negotiate an end to the rent boycott in the Chamber, but it subsequently failed to convince residents that they should resume paying for rent and services.
The Central Witwatersrand Metropolitan Chamber The Chamber was established by agreement between key stakeholders as a p o l i c y - m a k i n g b o d y that m a d e decisions by consensus. The initial membership of the Chamber comprised the Transvaal Provincial Administration, the local government bodies in the greater Johannesburg area and five civic associations. This membership grew rapidly so that it eventually included 53 member bodies, notably all relevant local government bodies, many more civic associations, white ratepayer and residents associations, and, in particular, the now unbanned ANC and other political parties. There were also many observer bodies such as trade unions, educational institutions and organised business, all of which were invited to participate in the Chamber. The Chamber had extraordinary legitimacy as a transitional structure. According to its chair, Van Zyl Slabbert, the Chamber aimed to 'provide a forum for non-racial and democratic structures of... local government and to improve the quality of life of the people by establishing a common tax base and upgrading the quality of essential services' (CWMC 1993:6). In effect, the Chamber aimed to set in place a process of remedying the apartheid city. The C h a m b e r established a n u m b e r of working groups i n t e n d e d to transform the urban system. These working groups set out to prepare detailed proposals while the Chamber, at the same time, responded to immediate crises concerning, for example, violence, land invasions and i n a p p r o p r i a t e d e v e l o p m e n t decisions. The greatest progress was made in d e v e l o p i n g recommendations in respect of the constitutional, institutional and financial
TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING
9
structures of urban governance and the physical and social infrastructure and associated operating services. To a significant degree, the Chamber developed an integrated and sustainable development framework for metropolitan Johannesburg. However, while the Chamber's consensus mode was useful for agreeing on process and preparing developing frameworks, it was of limited usefulness when it came to agreeing on products and seeing to implementation. The difficulty lay in discussing the allocation of powers and functions and the restructuring of a local government system employing 29 000 people in the absence of national guidelines regarding what the new local government system should look like. The Chamber was not alone in facing such difficulties. During the second half of the 1980s there had been parallel challenges to the apartheid .city and town throughout South Africa. The process invariably consisted of denying the BLA income in the form of rates and services boycotts, and frequently also of consumer boycotts of white-owned shops, and retaliatory deprivation of services. With neither side able to win decisively, the local level result was frequently negotiations. 'Local forums became the schools of the new South African democracy' (Swilling and Boya 1997:171). These local forums, the Chamber included, were on their own unable to substantively change fundamental aspects of the apartheid urban system. But in 1992-93 those negotiating the Interim Constitution realised that a national framework was needed to guide the local transition via the local forums. The National Local G o v e r n m e n t N e g o t i a t i n g F o r u m was created in 1993 comprising the national g o v e r n m e n t , o r g a n i s e d associations of local government, political parties and the ANC Alliance (that included trade unions, the South African Communist Party and the South African National Civic Organisation). The National Forum negotiated the LGTA. Schedule 2 of the LGTA indicated the powers and functions of local government, but as Padayachee (1996), at the time Chief Executive Officer of the GJMC observed, it was a particularly 'esoteric' piece of legislation. For example, Schedule 2 refers to 'Metropolitan promotion of economic development and job creation', 'Metropolitan environment conservation', and 'Metropolitan co-ordination, land usage and transport planning', without providing criteria to distinguish between metropolitan and local. The LGTA provided very little substantive direction; its focus was on process. The LGTA mandated local forums to negotiate locally appropriate solutions consistent with principles of nonracialism, democracy, accountability and one tax base. The task was to establish a new local government structure, the 'pre-interim phase'.
The Greater Johannesburg Local Negotiating Forum The Chamber was r e s t r u c t u r e d into the Greater J o h a n n e s b u r g Local Negotiating Forum in terms of the LGTA. The power balance in the Forum
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differed from that of the Chamber. The Forum comprised a statutory side essentially the pre-existing white local government structures (effectively led by the Johannesburg City Council), and the non-statutory side - where the community organisations and non-governmental organisations led by ANCoriented white, coloured, Indian and African activists schooled in consensus politics gave w a y to 'a different breed' of mostly African ANC politicians more accustomed to a confrontational political style. 5 'They insisted on cancelling all agreements and threw out all the previous research. '6 Unlike the wide-ranging agenda of the Chamber's working groups, the Forum's agenda focused on the tasks laid out in the LGTA. The Forum was charged with negotiating the appointment of a 50 per cent statutory / 50 per cent non-statutory council to govern until local government elections. There wa s quick a g r e e m e n t on a t w o - t i e r m e t r o p o l i t a n structure, w i t h the metropolitan government having the capacity to redistribute income across the metropolis. The difficulty lay in agreeing on the powers and functions of the metropolitan and local governments and agreeing on the borders of the governments. Note that the concern was with the internal boundaries. The Chamber had effectively agreed upon the metropolitan boundary in 1992 when it accepted the area of the Central Witwatersrand Regional Services Council. After a few small additions in 1993, in August 1993 the Chamber decided on the outer boundaries. However, the inner boundaries and the number Of metropolitan substructures (MSSs) proved to be highly contentious. Without any sign of agreement, at the last meeting of the Chamber in the same month the matter was referred to arbitration. The arbitration committee was presented with a number of models that essentially fell into three categories (Mabin 1998): 9 The ANC model consisting of three or four MSSs motivated by the need for an adequate tax base for each MSS and the redistribution of resources across the MSS 9 The Democratic Party's suggestion of up to 20 MSSs motivated by the desire for small jurisdictions and greater democracy and participation 9 The Civic Association of Johannesburg proposal for seven MSSs, which held that a strong GJMC w oul d be able to undertake redistribution and that one needed seven MSSs in order to achieve democratic governance In September 1994 the arbitrators decided in favour of seven MSSs, following the lines of the Civic Associations of Johannesburg, shown as a in Map 2. In November 1994 negotiations in the Forum culminated in an agreement to replace the existing thirteen local government bodies with a transitional metropolitan structure and seven MSSs. The MSSs were not financially viable and depended on being part of a metropolitan system that would redistribute resources among them. The CBD was singled out as a special MSS because it
TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING
11
generates a substantial proportion of municipal revenue and has a small population. It would fall directly under the metropolitan council. The other MSSs would fall under MSS councils. The new councillors for metropolitan and MSS councils were appointed from statutory and non-statutory lists on a 50/50 basis (Padayachee 1996). Until the allocation of p o w e r s and functions was d e c i d e d a m o n g metropolitan and local elected representatives, all powers and functions were to be vested in the GJMC. In other words, original powers lay with the GJMC which was to manage the change process. The GJMC was also given the task of approving the overall budget for the metropolitan area and of determining m i n i m u m levels of service delivery in the area (Emdon 1998). This was a period of relative centralisation in Johannesburg's local government and was quite unlike the processes under way in the other metropolitan areas. The agreement was announced in Proclamation 24, and on 1 December 1994 the GJMC and seven metropolitan MSSs were proclaimed into existence.
THE PROCESS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT TRANSITION Negotiating the New System of Metropolitan Government: A Period of Centralisation 7 The intention was that the GJMC and the MSSs would agree on the allocation of powers and functions and would then design organisations capable of delivering the allocated functions. The GJMC and the MSSs were to be staffed by redeploying personnel from the old local government bodies. This meant that the MSSs w o u l d 'draw d o w n ' powers when they had their administrations in place and were able to exercise those powers. Each MSS had to prepare and submit detailed management plans to the GJMC that addressed their n e w l y agreed powers and functions and p r o v i d e d the necessary o r g a n i s a t i o n a l structure, b u d g e t s , i n s t i t u t i o n a l and a d m i n i s t r a t i v e requirements and implementation programme. However, this was not a case of bargaining among equals. In the case of the Eastern MSS, the management plan was superseded by one dictated by the GJMC. s The GJMC prepared for the change process by establishing: 9 Interim administrations for each MSS to help prepare management plans for the MSS 9 AMetropolitan Management Team comprising the chief executive officers of the GJMC and the MSSs, the Town Clerks of the old local government bodies, and strategic support staff, which acted as the 'engine room' of the transition process 9 A Strategic Support Team in the office the Chief Executive Officer of the
GJMC
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URBAN FORUM 10:1, 1999
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