Garbage accumulates alongside Highveld road in Kempton Park, 8 March 2023. People have resorted to dumping their waste along the street next to the Highveld Waste Station onthe side of the road. Picture: Neil McCartney / The Citizen
While it is an archaic phrase – and no doubt regarded by some as politically incorrect – the term “civil servant” does accurately describe what any government worker should be when carrying out his or her job.
You are there to assist ordinary citizens and whether they pay formal rates and taxes is irrelevant.
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You are essentially there to make sure the system works … so that people have access to the services it is the duty of a government to provide.
The problem with present-day South Africa is that government workers and those who supposedly have political oversight of them are, seemingly, not accountable to those ordinary citizens.
This is particularly evident in the nondelivery of basic services to those people who actually pay for them.
For some reason, municipalities believe they are above the law when it comes to not fulfilling their part of the implied social contract.
Yet, as ratepayers, many residents enter into an actual contract where, if they default on what they owe, they are disconnected.
The same doesn’t apply the other way around when, for example, municipal negligence results in electricity blackouts or water shortages, both of which have plagued Gauteng residents for months.
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Now, though, at least one lawyer believes a municipality can be held accountable for damages if its customers can prove it was negligent.
In the case of Ekurhuleni, the council has admitted it delayed replacing old electrical infrastructure, which is now collapsing under the impact of repeated load shedding and leaving people without power for days or even weeks.
There must be many other towns and cities where cadre deployment incompetence and corruption have led to similar disastrous outcomes.
Maybe if these councils realised they could be forced to pay compensation for losses suffered as a result of their incompetence, they would start to act like proper businesses.