Opinion: What exactly is a role of a public representative?

When we vote at local government elections for councillors, most of us really vote for the party and have no clue who the public representative is, whether they have the ability, qualifications, skills and passion to serve you.

The party will do their own internal process of selecting the candidates, in many instances the processes of selecting these individuals are biased to suit certain individuals in the leadership, it really doesn’t matter which party it is, some parties claim their processes are legit, they claim the processes were open and honest. They are lying.

When they select a councilor they create their posters and do a makeshift manifesto for them. In most cases these manifestos don’t link up with the issues in the ward, this person does not get presented to you as a resident and you don’t have an opportunity to assess their ability.

Let’s look at MPL’s and MP’s, how they are selected to represent you as a resident, what process is there for you as a resident to evaluate them to represent you in the provincial legislatures and parliament.

As a resident you leave it to political parties to choose, you really don’t have a choice at all, the same thing happens when it comes to the parties evaluating their performance and when they are not performing you don’t get to know about it, but they are your public representatives. And yes it’s your tax money that pays them.

 So what exactly does a councillor do for you?

They supposed to really inform you about what council does, where the opportunities are in council, raise your concerns in council that relate to your council-related services.

They must serve in portfolio committees and report back to their wards by doing the following, use their ward committees, report to NGO’s and other organisations such as faith-based organisations etc., they must write to local media newspapers, use community radio stations and TV stations in some cases, write newsletters and do public meetings.

So when last did you hear from your councillor on any of what happens in council? Did you know that Joburg municipality now boasts the biggest budget of R47 billion? Did you know or hear about the green bonds, the first of a kind in the world, intended to boost the green economy?

Did your councillor tell you about the Jozi at Work programme that seeks to get you as a communit              y to start you own cooperatives in your ward where you can do business with the city, simple jobs such as cutting that long council grass or even fix potholes in your ward, this programme aims to spend 10 per cent of the City’s budget in cooperatives and SME’s that you have started.

These are just some of the simple yet important examples of how your public reps need to constantly feed you information that should help develop our City/ country.

Majority of the councillors you elected can’t write to the media, can’t produce newsletters, can’t do radio or TV interviews, they have poor skills when it comes to public speaking, too many of them don’t read the reports of the portfolio committees, understand financial reports of the municipalities they serve or have even read the Auditor General’s report on their municipality.

Ask any councillor what the AG said in his latest report about the finances of the municipality they serve.

So why do we have MPL’s?

Have you ever heard any MPL speak about schools, hospitals, police stations, provincial roads and transport or any issues at a provincial level? Have you ever heard that an MPL has arranged a public meeting to discuss issues faced in the schools in the area where they serve? Or going to address a service delivery protests?

Have you ever heard anything from MPL’s reporting back to their communities about the budget and staff allocations of the local police stations, schools, hospitals etc in their constituency? Mind you, these people earn up to R45 000 per month; do you know that to earn such an amount in the private sector you have to be very qualified and work long hours. So why are they there?

MP’s are the same, we don’t know many of them, they are not vocal on issues, many are just plain useless, they too earn close to R50K pm, they can’t even speak confidently on the policy of the portfolio they serve on; they don’t even know their own party’s counter policies.

They also never arrange any public meetings to discuss the laws that parliament passes. I don’t know anyone who knows who the MP allocated to their ward or constituency is. Mind you, parties allocate MP’s to constituencies.

There have been so many laws passed in the past few years where public consultation should have taken place, but these MP’s never arranged a single public meeting.

In most cases MP’s and MPL’s are political leaders of councillors.

There was a report that came out in Parliament three years ago that the majority of the public reps can’t use their luxurious mobile phones, tablets, iPads and even know to use their laptops, but they get upgrades almost every year. This is so true.

Worse part though, these politicians don’t know how to use their diaries, they miss meetings, are late for meetings, don’t prepare for the meetings, don’t read the reports, but when in the meetings they want to speak, they raise issues that are already captured in the report they didn’t read.

I remember when I served as a councillor and Deputy Chief whip for eight years, how I had to reprimand grown men and women about being professional at their jobs, we also did an assessment on which councillors answered their cellphones and respond to missed calls, it was shocking to see that close to 70 per cent of the councillors didn’t answer their phones, 65 per cent didn’t even bother to return calls.

As a country we need to get to a stage where proper, open, inclusive processes and assessments are done. I know in the US it’s done this way, the public gets involved before political parties throw out some really useless, ineffective and non-responsive public representatives to serve us.