by Peter Kimemia

On 8 May 2008, following just over a year of painstaking research and re-working of drafts, the Reference Group (RG) of the Good Governance Learning Network (GGLN) held a meeting during which the resultant report entitled Local Democracy in Action: A Civil Society Perspective on Local Governance was launched.

In a show of good faith and commitment to the involvement of key stakeholders to the process of shaping the governance debate, the GGLN invited a senior policy analyst, Prof Steven Friedman, and the Director General (DG) of the DPLG – Ms Lindiwe Msengana-Ndlela – to respond to the presentation of the report. To her credit, the DG honoured the invitation and even turned up with a few of her senior officials.

It is, however, the bizarre drama enacted by the DPLG officials that left everybody wondering just what the DG and her team were up to.

Up to the point when they started commenting about the report, one would have been forgiven for believing there was genuine commitment on the part of the DPLG to engage constructively with the civil society formations in devising the best strategies for dealing with our society’s myriad governance and service-delivery challenges.

Much of that hope was dealt a debilitating blow by the unprecedented spate of incoherent defensive rebuttal mounted by the DPLG.

However the DPLG was not actually mounting a defence – it was engaging in an exercise that largely smacked of grandstanding and a lack of appreciation of research. In not so many words, following the presentation by the GGLN detailing areas where government had done fairly well and numerous others where performance was still wanting, DPLG’s response was that they had known about the problem areas since as far back as 2002!

This could have been welcomed as a rare, candid and unusually humble admission of failure on the part of government to respond effectively to people’s governance-related grievances.

Indeed the admission of failure would have been forgiven had the DPLG team explained to the gathering why it had taken them so many years to tackle the issues raised by the GGLN in the report.

But even more worrying and shocking was the attempt to trivialise the issues by derisively suggesting that the GGLN criticisms had not been blistering enough, and that there was a need to revisit the notion of ‘critical thought’.

The stunned gathering listened in disbelief as the DPLG appeared to suggest that civil society should adopt a more critical line of engagement with government. No one appeared to believe the sincerity of the ‘call to arms’, although the DPLG officials might have gone away with a false sense of victory over a supposedly ‘nosy’ civil society.

Perhaps besides the DPLG shooting itself in the foot through an arrogant admission of failure and reluctance to accept sensible suggestions on how to tackle the issues in question, the sheer display of unmitigated ignorance of the value of research to public policy-making was the most disturbing indication of underlying systemic weaknesses that may explain the wanting service-delivery performance in many municipalities.

DPLG’s dismissal of credible research work as ‘anecdotal’ and the insistence that it would require data from the over 3 000 odd council wards across the country in order to see sense in taking appropriate measures to tackle governance problems was either a dishonest attempt to skirt around specific cases of bad governance at local level, or an unintended display of capacity challenges.

Ground zero studies on research explain that one does not necessarily need to use the entire population in order to come up with credible results. The latter are mainly based on reasonable and defensible sample sizes.

Basically, there are no escape routes for the DPLG, and the cheap shots at the GGLN are just that – cheap shots. In the meantime, the GGLN and civil society in general should decline the invitation to turn hysterical in their criticism of government. They should continue offering constructive and well-considered research-based suggestions on how governance can be improved in the country.

On its part, the DPLG needs to re-work its attitude towards public participation, and be less condescending and prescriptive regarding how civil society formations should criticise.

DPLG’s rightful role is that of delivering services to the people. Undoubtedly, there is value in self-examination and criticism for purposes of improving oneself. However the role of criticising public policies and performance of government departments is rightly in the ambit of opposition parties, the general public as well as civil society formations.

You simply cannot be an activist and a state bureaucrat at the same time!

The Local Government Transformer June-July 2008