Toolkits abound in the pursuit of good governance and accountability
by Glenn Hollands

The National Treasury has recently released a 150-page document entitled "A Guide to Municipal Finance Management for Councillors". The guide attempts to spell out in considerable detail the matters that councillors should consider when overseeing the financial decisions and management practices of the municipality. It expresses the conviction that councillors “will uphold the trust that the community has placed in their abilities to serve them well.”  Having experienced a very mixed ten years of democratic local government, ordinary citizens are perhaps less convinced that such trust is well placed. Nonetheless, government and agencies like the National Treasury have made a concerted effort to legislate and suggest a route to improved transparency in local government. The guide is one example of an increasing trend to provide practical ‘toolkits’ to public representatives to improve their performance in terms of governance.

How unique is South Africa in venturing into this realm of governance aids and why do we now find it necessary to provide detailed manuals on the proper operation of local democracy? Modern concepts of governance require that effective transparency measures reach beyond the state and into society. The more familiar United Nations literature tends to talk of the merits of coalition building between government, the private sector and civil society for the purposes of finding common purpose and for the pooling of resources. This approach also tries to spread the responsibility for governance failure; for example, corruption across all three sectors arguing that each is in some way prone to this failure. In South Africa, transparency-reinforcing initiatives by government and civil society organisations tend to have a common value framework based on the country’s impressive constitutional and legislation provisions. This gives South Africa a considerable head start compared to nations where no such common purpose exists. However, despite this apparently common objective to deepen good local governance, the respective strategies of the state and civil society tend to happen in parallel rather than in any cooperative or co-joined manner.  Collectively both state and civil society seek to advance local transparency and accountability in the management and deployment of state assets. The fact that the state and NGOs have distinctly different strategies is not necessarily wrong – independence and checks and balances being key elements of transparency objective. The state has its codes of conduct, legal frameworks and guides. Civil society organisations typically produce a range of transparency tools that match and give substance to the statal provisions.  Some of the latter tools have been the focus of previous Transformer articles. The menu of instruments include those that citizens can use at neighbourhood level to monitor local governance benchmarks; independent perception-based surveys that bring officials and communities collective attention to key governance issues; community-based planning and more recently citizens action to advance financial accountability.

Some might argue that this constant pressure for transparency detracts from formal political life and representative government.  The proponents of good governance, however, have largely overcome the somewhat limited critique that their concerns are rooted in a neo-liberal agenda that includes “economic liberalisation, privatisation and less government.”  The United Nations and the World Bank tend to argue that elections are not sufficiently frequent to promote accountability. More importantly in South African society and other nations with less sophisticated electorates, it is also true that voters do not necessarily punish breakdowns in local governance. Corruption appears to have flourished in the last five years of South African local government as this publication has demonstrated in previous articles. Punishment or negative consequences, however, have generally flowed from the state and agencies such as the Special Investigating Unit rather than the local electorate. The street protests around municipal services in 2004 /2005 appear to have been directed at changing the behaviour and priorities of local leaders rather than changing local leadership per se. Although there was some turnover in the 2006 local elections, it is as yet unclear that municipal leadership is capable of responding to that civic challenge. Concerns for transparency and good local governance have also been caste as “luxury items” in urban environments confronted by severe poverty and economic decline.

The UN-Habitat work around urban governance has warned that excessive bureaucracy and “opaqueness” in local administrations tend to have consequences such as lowering tax revenues that in turn limit the scope for pro-poor public spending. Decisions on public spending that are shielded from local public pressure frequently favour middle-class priorities over basic services to the poor. South Africa has arguably avoided such a scenario because the ruling party has largely remained consistent to its policy objectives with regard to municipal infrastructure and services spending (although in macro-economic terms and broader economic values this consistency may be lacking). What South African local governance culture has not been shielded from is an increasing propensity towards abuses of discretion, favouritism, nepotism and clientlism. There is also increasing evidence that political party machinery, especially the identification of suitable municipal candidates, is disdainful of the views of voters and of the needs of those who consume and pay for municipal services. The responses of the Ministry of Provincial and Local Government and its department indicate some level of awareness and even concern but little in the way of decisive action. Effective action seems more likely from the National Treasury and the Minister of Finance but even these agencies seem to adopt a very cautious approach to intervention and are highly sensitive of their limited constitutional powers in this regard. The continuing loyalty of revenue contributors and investors is a neglected concern. There seems to be an assumption that when their patience ultimately and legitimately wears out, national government has shown itself to be willing to close the revenue gap by tinkering with the municipal grant allocation formula. It is apparent, therefore, that state efforts to curb corruption and breakdowns of transparency will not be adequate unless matched by practical and locally owned initiatives by civil society.

Internationally there are several examples of civil society initiatives that appear to hold promise in this regard. Here are some of these examples.

• Japanese lawyers in the city of Sendai established an ombudsman function in the mid 1990s. The ombudsman used Japanese law to request and, where necessary, legally extract, information on municipal expenditure. This was in response to evidence that local government officials were abusing entertainment and business expenses to influence central government employees to make preferential grants to particular municipalities. The LG officials were also padding such expenses to line their own pockets and like certain MPs in the South African parliament, were abusing public travel provisions for their private benefit.

• Survey-based tools that measure local government accountability according to pre-defined indicators are an increasingly accepted governance tool and include basic checklists, corruption surveys, vulnerability assessments and the well-known report or score-cards. Checklists usually seek to generate information on a range of different aspects of municipal business and life. In the city of Piraeus in Greece such a survey was undertaken by the municipality in partnership with Transparency International and was championed by the mayor. A four-day study obtained the views of municipal staff and unions and civil society organisations. The findings were presented to the municipality and included the need for codes of conduct for mayors, councillors and senior staff, the need to expand the limited disclosure of assets and the lack of systems for receiving and dealing with complaints.  A similar assessment was undertaken in four towns in Nambia in 2001 by USAID and the Nambia Association of Local Authorities Officers, however, this exercise was less inclusive of local civil society and was mainly a self-assessment by the authorities themselves. Findings related to the need to develop policies and procedures, public participation and relations between councillors and staff. The UN and Transparency International concluded that it was “not particularly relevant to civil society and private sector participants” and urged a more general approach inclusive of such groups.

• The Kenya Urban Bribery Survey targets three groups (micro and small enterprises, the corporate sector and individuals) through a structured questionnaire that enquires into the respondent’s experience of interacting with different public bodies over a 12-month period. The exercise is geared towards generating an index that aggregates six indicators of bribery namely incidence, prevalence, severity, frequency, cost and size of bribe. Results of interest were that two out of every three persons reported that they were required to pay a bribe for a public service; the poor were significantly more vulnerable to corruption than the well-off; corruption was increasing; most bribes were relatively small; and the Kenya Police were regarded as the most corrupt organisation followed by the Nairobi City Council. These results have formed the basis for a number of initiatives to increase transparency in Kenyan society and government.

• In Rhode Island USA, the Ethics Commission oversees the codes governing financial disclosure by public officials. All elected officials, candidates for public office or persons appointed to serve state or municipal government must file financial disclosure statements annually. They are required to disclose sources of income and assets, business interests and significant creditors – the obligation extends to spouses and dependent children. The Ethics Commission uses a computerised database to maintain the information and does updates for new appointments, resignations etc. The Commission itself ensures that the necessary forms are completed by public office holders and other liable persons. The public may access these disclosure records and may have copies made for a small charge.

South African civil society and the NGO sector in particular is increasingly making its own contribution to this growing global development industry. Locally developed monitoring instruments have emerged in response to specific needs and the authentic experience of community-based programmes. It is, nonetheless, important to remind ourselves that failures in democratic governance are not unique to municipal government in South Africa and that many of the international toolkits retain great practical value and lessons despite their sometimes over-zealous marketing.

Sources
1United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2004 Urban Governance Toolkit Series
2http://www.nbr.org
3 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2004 Urban Governance Toolkit Series p 34

The Local Government Transformer Vol. 12 No. 5 Oct/Nov 2006