Health Systems Research Unit

Local government restructuring - a brief overview
Linking health and environment in Cape Town, South Africa: The view from local government, July 1998

Background
Before the transition to democracy in April 1994, local government in South Africa was based on apartheid racial division. The ‘apartheid city’, as it has become known, had a number of key characteristics. Firstly, environment, health and other administrative structures were duplicated for each race group and between local, provincial and national levels of government. This resulted in fragmentation in terms of legislation, policy, programmes and led to inefficient and wasteful operations. In the Cape Metropolitan Area (CMA), for example, there were prior to 1996 some 18-20 different local government administrative structures with little metro level co-ordination. Secondly, local government was unaccountable, with Black South Africans having no elected representatives. Finally, service delivery was characterised by great inequities in access between well resourced White suburbs and severely under-resourced Coloured and Black suburbs (Barron et al 1996; Hirschowitz et al 1995; South Africans Rich and Poor 1994).

Against this background, a number of interrelated factors have contributed to the current state of local government in South Africa:

• The administrative fragmentation of the past was compounded by the lack of an overarching metropolitan authority or metro-level environmental management policy for the CMA.
• Previous policies enforcing inequitable service delivery have left the CMA with substantial infrastructural and service backlogs in black townships; with high capital and ongoing costs for quality facilities in white areas; and with an inadequate revenue base for attaining greater parity in services (Environmental Evaluation Unit, 1997).
• Far from promoting ecological and social sustainability, land use planning was a fundamental instrument of the apartheid city, leading to not only great poverty and inequity but also environmental degradation and wasteful use of natural resources.
• As the pace of urbanisation increased, apartheid policies such as influx control became unenforceable and large informal unserviced settlements grew on the borders of urban areas.

Crippled by rent and services boycotts, puppet local government administrations in the Black areas of the CMA had largely collapsed in the early nineties, worsening environmental health problems in the growing metropolis.

Local government under the new dispensation
Democratic national elections in April 1994 were followed by local government elections in late 1995 / 1996. In the CMA these took place in May 1996, and led to the formation of six Metropolitan Local Councils (MLCs) and the Cape Metropolitan Council (CMC), effectively rationalising the former plethora of local government structures through a major restructuring exercise (see Figure 1

Figure 1:   Municipal Government Structures

Major shifts in direction for local government are enshrined in Chapter Three of the new South African Constitution (Act 108 of 1996), in terms of two inter-related concepts: "cooperative government" and "sphere of government". The latter represents a significant departure from the hierarchical intergovernmental relations of the past to a system where national, provincial and local governments are each distinctive and have equal status. Cooperative governance means that although distinctive and equal, the spheres of government are also inter-dependent and must work together to ensure effective government.

The Constitution envisages a new, expanded and developmental role for the local sphere as a whole and for each constituent municipality. Objectives for local government include providing services to communities in a sustainable manner, while promoting social and economic development and a safe and healthy environment, and encouraging the involvement of communities in local government matters. Local government authorities now also have an important role in implementing policy in both the environmental and health spheres, and possess the primary responsibility for service delivery. The Constitution assigns the environmental or environment-related matters of air pollution, municipal planning, municipal transport, stormwater management, certain water and sanitation services, cleansing, noise pollution, and solid waste disposal to local government authorities. Other functions can be assigned to municipalities by national and provincial governments provided there is agreement and the requisite capacity.

Significant challenges also exist for local government around the need, formalised in the White Paper on Local Government, to reverse the legacy of the past through redistribution within and between local areas. The most important difference seen between the new form of local government and the past is the "creative and dynamic developmental role" for local government, to "ensure maximum impact on poverty alleviation within resource constraints, and to address spatially entrenched socio-economic inequalities" (White Paper on Local Government:vi). This needs to occur within the framework of Integrated Development Planning (IDP), linked to budgeting cycles. A further significant change is the presence of democratically elected councillors for all areas and all South Africans. This investigation into policy formulation and decision making therefore occurred at a time of great flux in local government, both in terms of directives set out in national level policy as well as structure and organisation at the local level.