The KwaZulu Natal Floods will test the state's resolve on its District Development Model of service delivery

      Upon assuming office as the fifth President of South Africa for its sixth administration, President Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation Address to Parliament announced a new service delivery approach modeled around the centrality of the District (and Metropolitan) Municipal jurisdiction as the focal space within which the sum impact of government will be seen, felt, and showcased. In introducing this model the President said  “our decision was premised on (1) efficiency, (2) cost-containment, (3) cooperative governance, and (4) strategic alignment…this is the start of a wider process of (5) arresting the decline in State capacity and (6) restructuring our model of service delivery so that it best serves the citizens of our country. We will be adopting a district-based approach – focusing on the forty-four districts and eight metros (52 municipal district jurisdictions) – to speed up service delivery, (7) ensuring that municipalities are properly supported and (8) adequately resourced”

The President had in essence committed the sixth administration to the eight elements identifiable in the paragraph out of his speech. These would, in a performance-intensive democracy, be immediately packaged into performance measures or categories within which the model is evaluated for its general efficacy. The District Development Model is an innovation of a Ramaphosa Presidency to make intergovernmental relations work and bring to bear practicalness of co-operative government. 

When the COVID19 pandemic was announced as a national state of disaster in March 2020, the deaths, public health delivery challenges, management of human custody based service delivery centers such as schools and prisons, human transit centers where international travelers would be received, and general societal hygiene to mitigate the spread of the virus became stark reminders of how service delivery can be a greater risk than the pandemic itself when government at any level does not perform as well as it should. The brute facts of the pandemic having found that government's failure to anticipate and respond to the magnitude of the disaster were in fact symptomatic of how government's broader inability to adapt its systems to manage abrupt challenges occasioned by non-human and yet real catastrophes. 

Notwithstanding, central agencies of the state, calmly led by President Ramaphosa, responded by activating the disaster management structures and processes provided for in legislation, and putting in place a regulatory center with which society could be navigated through the pandemic, the integrated nature of the pandemic dramatized the need of organs of state, in all spheres of government, to perform as part of one national response system. Performance of government was for the duration of a national lockdown heroic as the call to duty and management was about curtailing human movement, thus reducing the mass spreading of the virus to levels where the health system might not be capable of handling the outburst. It would be the challenge of opening up economic activity and allowing citizens to interact beyond their households that exposed the limitations of organs of state's capacity to act as a system. 

Whilst on paper organs of state have well-crafted policy goals, well conceptualized and rational processes, stricter accountability systems such as answering to both legislatures and chapter 9 institutions, it would be their inherently political nature, profound differences of mandates, and the general culture of being a bureaucracy within which they operate that conjure up different obstacles. The challenges that were observed, especially when learners had to go back to school, were indicative of how deficient intergovernmental planning was in respect of integrating service delivery in one of the largest in-state-custody service delivery areas like basic education. What would have been assumed to be a straight forward delivery system integrating basic services such as water and sanitation proved to be the greatest exposure area of how uncoordinated statewide planning is, including it legislated integrated development planning chapter in local government. 

As the planning to return learners to school was unfolding, it became apparent that solutions that are taken for granted would in organs of state have as obstacles the following; functionaries within organs of state are generally appointed on the basis of their command on policy and/or political connections rather than track record in executing large scale programs; functionaries have not staying power attached to program completion and thus are unable to integrate into posterity where overlaps occasion such designs; functionaries in organs of state are more afraid of penalties for failure which are greater than the rewards for exceptional performance; and that organs of state as creatures of democracy, allow everyone a rightful stake in their activities, thus making functionaries vulnerable to disapproval by the dominant even if they are not correct. 

The experience of COVID19, hopefully recorded and captured, should be instructive in how the KZN disaster is managed through the District Development Model. The model, or approach, is about the practical expression of cooperative government in (a) service delivery sector(s). Co-operative government is in this context "a multi-sectoral concept, which recognizes the distinctiveness of all levels or spheres of government within a state, yet acknowledges their distinctiveness within the overall structure of a state. It recognizes the complexities within societies and promotes the coordination of all levels and/or spheres of government to prevent competition and duplication. It recognizes the discipline of national goals, policies, and operating principles focuses on the promotion of cost and time-effective settlement of disputes, and acknowledges the idea of collectively utilizing public resources within a framework of mutual support. 

Cooperative government also highlights the importance of a clear division of roles and responsibilities of a government to prevent overlapping and confusion on the various government levels and/or spheres, and to ensure maximum effectiveness". As a orientation in intergovernmental relations, the interactions and transactions between and amongst organs of state in the three spheres of government, cooperative government provides the principles within which the district development model operates. Put simply, therefore, the DDM is a convergence of the legislated IDP process, cooperative government, and intergovernmental relations within a district as a space. 

In conditions of disaster, the DDM would procure for all principles of integrated planning within a context of rapid delivery. It is perhaps the first time since COVID19 that the entire, country as an interdependent whole will be focused on solving the KZN disaster as a single spatial problem. The KZN floods have transfixed the South African population, as leaders and citizens seek to respond to a disaster whose dimensions are more certain and known. The business community in the SADC region and more acutely in the whole of South Africa are stepping up to find answers to the many questions the scale of the disaster raises. Experts are working together to provide the best information directly to the public (for example, to coordinate national logistics priorities, bring stability to the human effects of the disaster, and much more. Arguably, no expert community has a more important role to play in finding the solutions the country needs and communicating trustworthy information to the public

With remarkable speed over the last few days, we have seen captains of industry announcing contributions to relief measures, we saw government agencies announcing packages of interventions, we saw multilateral bodies bringing the international recognition of the disaster, and yet we have not heard of an integrated development response package that anchored the intervention as a District Development Model chapter of the disaster. 

In order to put the KZN intervention on a DDM path, it should at the least respond to Ramaphosa criteria as outlined in the state of the nation address hereinabove. 

CUT!!!

🤷🏿‍♂️A ndzo tivulavulela