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São Paulo, 19/11/2008 “If you are cold and want an extra blanket, you might petition the minister of justice, but you will get no response. If you go to the commissioner of prisons, he will say, “Sorry, it is against regulations.” The head of prison will say, “If I give you an extra blanket, I must give one to everyone.” But if you approach the warder in your corridor, and you are on good terms with him, he will simply go to the stockroom and fetch a blanket” Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 497 “By mobilising the resources of urban communities, government and the private sector we can make our cities centres of opportunity for all South Africans, and competitive within the world economy. The success of this will depend on the initiative taken by urban residents to build their local authorities and promote local economic development.” Nelson Mandela, The Urban Development Strategy White Paper 16 March 1996
1 - Old and new challenges South Africa faces a legacy of impressive disparities. While it displays a reasonably comfortable per capita of 2.700 dollars, and proudly shows its rich cities and modern infrastructures, 30 thousand children die every year from problems that are cheap and easy to be solved, 12 million inhabitants out of an estimated 41 million do not have access to adequate potable water, 21 million lack basic sanitation facilities, 30 to 40 percent of the active population are unemployed. Apartheid has been overthrown, a democratic government has been elected, the country is opening itself to the world. But for the administration, the problems have grown more urgent, and it now faces more than the already tragic legacy of apartheid. Opening to the world means that the cocoon of protected market with low salaries is now exposed, and the economy is faced with a whole set of measures that will tend to further depress modern sector employment. Thus the repayment of the social debt must be made parallel to a major effort of restructuring and modernizing the economy. As other countries have found, economic modernization is not possible, at the present stage of technological development, without social development and an educated workforce, and corporations will now feel the full economic weight of decades of insufficient social investment. Opening the internal and external borders has led to a massive acceleration of rural exodus, and vast demographic displacements which demand a new generation of investments on infrastructure and social services. Informal settlements spring up almost overnight, absorbing the limited financial and even more limited public management capacities. Simultaneously, the political pressure for service delivery has been strongly increasing, since the vast majority of the population consider that the time has come for them to have what they were deprived of, and if possible at the same level of those that deprived them. While poverty and deprivation have been comfortably isolated in townships, disparities presently mingle throughout the urban space and create new pressures for change. To face the legacy and the new challenges the new regime inherited a fragmented state, with little management sense in a modern view, with sometimes dozens of overlapping structures; a mosaic of district and administrative divisions that are different for justice, education, health and other areas that should be able to work in a coordinated way at the level of impact; and a general lack of minimally logical demographic space distribution, with absurd settlements distant from jobs or infrastructure, generating high costs of transportation and lack of synergies between social, economic and cultural space. This urban structure has correctly been diagnosed as having become financially unsustainable for the apartheid regime. But it continues to be structurally unsustainable now. 2- A new political strategy Thus the government has to simultaneously promote transformation of society and transformation of its own instruments of government, under heavy pressure from the global economy for cost-effectiveness, and from the social backlog within the country demanding jobs, salaries, infrastructure and social services. The first strategic decision of the new government is that such challenges are to be met by all the key roleplayers in the country, and not by the government alone. Considering the challenges to be met, there is clearly no other path. While this has been a common piece of rethoric in many places,in South Africa it gave place to practical instruments of participatory government. Thus the creation of the National Economic Development and Labour Council, NEDLAC, a negotiating and agreement making body consisting of government and the other social partners, allows for the main national issues to be negotiated with all stakeholders. The ideas of national unity, of partnership, of a clear understanding of the different interests became a philosophy of governance. Issues such as unemployment, savings and investment relationship, access to basic services and infrastructure, low productivity, income and other key problems can thus be effectively negotiated with a long range time-horizon, and with stakeholders understanding that improved social and economic productivity improves the situation of everyone. In a time of easy government-bashing, South Africa is building government capacity not by expanding its bureaucracy but by improving its leverage power on society as a whole. A second major decision concerns the privatisation issue. The clear option for partnership-based governance enables the government to build a new vision of the respective roles of the state, the private sector and communities: “Although the Government of National Unity expects to gain valuable insights from studying and observing the successes and limitations of comparative models of administration reform, caution and critical analysis will be exercised in considering the applicability and possible incorporation of such models into the change process in South Africa. This will certainly be the case with the move towards cost reduction and the privatisation and contracting-out of state services. The Government is well-aware that in some countries this has had adverse effects, in terms of declining service standards, worsening conditions of employment for staff, rising unemployment and the increasing marginalisation of disadvantaged groups, women and chilren in particular. The move towards a leaner and more cost-effective public service in South Africa will therefore be based not on privatisation but on the creation of effective partnerships between government, labour, business and civil society, and the building of high levels of community involvement in the local delivery of services.” A third key element of the strategy is to rely on decentralized and participatory management, envolving local administrations and community ownership of development initiatives. Thus the outdated and inefficient models of social services delivery, centralized and based on charity for the poor, are to be substituted by empowerment and by local organization. Social services do not work efficiently if people do not feel responsible for them, and responsability involves citizenship and full local decision capacity. 3 - The integrated local development approach The traditional philosophy of service delivery must be revised. As what is at stake in not some complementary support for the poor, but the delivery of basic infrastructure and social services to more than 25 million deprived people, the very cost of the process shows that mere extension of services is not the solution. The extension of health services, for example, with its present concentration on curative and hospital medicine, would probably absorb the whole social budget. And expecting the poor communities to financially sustain such services is simply not realistic. The social area relies not on economies of scale, but on synergy and very adequate tailoring of the initiatives according to local situations. No one knows better what street gets muddy when it rains than the community that uses it. Centralized decision making can be adequate for the construction and management of a big hospital, but not for the thousands of small scale actions that will generate preventive health measures. And social services are not exactly “delivered” to a community: they must be built into the local culture and daily life, through breast feeding, adequate use of water resources, family support of school related activities and so forth, demanding a permanent management structure to make the services sustainable. For the rich, social services can ultimately be considered as commercial utilities, which they will buy as they need them. But for the rapid promotion of poor communities, the school must also be used as a means to ensure the children have at least a good meal, the good will of women’s organizations must be used to promote hygiene and other issues, the participation of the community is necessary to ensure garbage disposal and a safer environment and so forth. It is impossible to expect that sectoral actions decided in different ministries will magically become coordinated at the local level, if the recepients do not get organized for this coordination. Integration is necessary, and it is feasible only at the level of impact of the different social services. The alternative of more extended central services with heavier government planning systems to ensure overall coherence, and longer fingers with new tiers of government to ensure outreach is not only politically undesirable, but simply less efficient both from quality and cost perspectives. Evidently, it is not only a question of passing more public resources to the local level. Society must be allowed to administer itself more flexibly, in accordance with the characteristics of each municipality. The new style requires simpler and more direct mechanisms of participation by key players at local level - business, unions, community organizations, traditional leadership, scientific and information institutions and others. It also requires new, more rapid mechanisms for communication with the population, because a society has to be well informed to be able to participate. It requires flexibilization of financial mechanisms, with fewer rules and auditors and more direct control by committees and councils of the communities involved. It requires that local government's field of interest be broadened beyond urban cosmetics and some social issues, to become a catalyst of economic and social forces in the area. Finally, it requires the formation of horizontal networks of coordination and cooperation between municipalities, both at the general level and around sectoral programmes. 4 - Institution building time-horizon and social urgencies These views are clearly exposed in the different white papers and other government policy papers and studies, and correspond to the modern trends of public administration. They are also essential for Unicef’s contribuiton to the country programmes, since they outline an adequate institutional environment for social programmes to be productive. Nevertheless, they are central government strategies. Between the political decision at the level of central government and the effective creation of capacity at the local level, there is a time lag that anyone involved in institution building and transformation of public services knows to be very long. The local councils have just been elected. The “who does what at what level” discussion between central, provincial and local government is still under way. Traditional administrators at the local level are frequently unwilling to help with the effort of community participatory development. Training a new generation of personnel takes time, and their acquiring experience and competence will take even more time. Thus there is very high competence at the administrative core of government, and an exceptional capacity to draw up and to negotiate adequate strategies. But the foundations of the administrative pyramid, including provincial but especially local governments, will take a long time to have their capacity increased. A key policy gap is thus the time lag between the definition of policies and the capacity to create the institutional environment for their implementation at the local level. The Masakhane Campaign, aimed at normalising governance and accelerating municipal service provision, shows that creating local and sustainable capacity requires a wider set of measures. 5 - Service delivery in the transition period The transition period, which the Government sees as ending in 1999, when the new elections are due, is thus a crucial period. Services will have to be delivered on a new scale and at a pace that cannot wait for the long institution building period. While it is basically correct that the deprived communities should not expect government to solve their problems for them, it is also true they must be given support to take the necessary initiatives. Thus direct support to community organization has become essential. What is suggested in this paper is that direct support to communities, aiming at the stimulation of their own initiatives to solve their basic problems, should rely on fast-track flexible administrative schemes that would gradually be incorporated into the formal administrative system as the local governments develop sufficient management capacity.
6 - Strategies The basic government white papers on urban developement, rural development, public service transformation, as well as the National Economic Development and Labour Council papers and others, are of very high quality, and bring a fresh approach to the tiring left-right discussions on the role of the state. They deal directly and honestly with the key issues of social disparities, economic development and environment sustainability, not as theoretical papers, but as action oriented guidelines to be discussed with the different government tiers, business, unions and community organizations. The following suggested strategies pin-point some issues that have appeared to be insufficiently stressed, or that were not raised in the consulted papers.
7 - Suggested research The world is changing too quickly for even experienced administrators to have the answers. In the consulted documents and the discussions with officials of the government, NGO’s, street children and others, it became clear that some areas need a strong research effort.
8 - Recommendations for Unicef South Africa is a country where human rights have been flagrantly violated as a matter of government policy during a long period of time. Reversing the injustices is an enourmous endeavour for the current Government of National Unity, and the international community should put its share in the effort, especially in view of the fact that it is currently an important case of transition towards a human development oriented model. The uniqueness of this development model deserves to be supported and monitored closely for its results. The current dominant development models in the rest of the developing world and the countries in transition, has frequently led to increasing poverty levels, deeper income and social disparities and more often than not negative changes in the environment. The South African experience provides an important opportunity of trying out alternatives policies. The Unicef Programme in South Africa has the opportunity to be unique in that the country has its own financial resources to implement inovative programmes wich do not depend on external funding. Since in South Africa, policies, institutions and implementation systems necessarily have to be transformed from the exclusionary apartheid system that was also unique in its perversity, to adjust to the new political and social project, UNICEF can and should play a most important role in advising the social policy development, institution building, unification of fragmented service provision, establishment of information systems and capacity building that the new unified model requires. This special type of Country Programme necessarily requires high level technical staff of the most diversified knowledge, especially in view of the magnitude of the changes being sought and the high level of the government counterpart that is proven not only by the rich discussions held by this mission but also by the high level of sofistication of the documents being prepared by the government. Regarding specific activities, aside from policy formulation and institutional development, emphasis will probably be needed in supporting capacity building at all levels of government and most specially at local government level; in supporting the establishment of information systems; and in the creation of a mass communication system in order to support the education efforts and to improve community participation in its partnership with government. The opportunity of early work with authorities that later consolidate as such has proven its benefits in earlier UNICEF work. Establishing relations with Mayors as soon as possible, even before many of the mayor social service delivery functions are legaly assigned to them will pave the road for future common efforts. Even though practical work with two or three selected local authorities would be desirable in order to gain experience and start the process, the ideal situation is to support an coalition of local governments in their efforts to protect children and broaden their opportunities for development. Another important issue is that South Africa, with its dynamic demographic change and the fact that 80% of the economic output is urban, provides Unicef with an opportunity to upgrade its urban-oriented social policies. This is clearly the case, for example, of water and sanitation policies, where the individual latrine pits and water wells usually implemented in rural areas do not correspond to the more systemic solutions necessary in urban areas with greater population density. In the general trend that is leading from vertical and sector oriented social delivery systems to territory-based integration, horizontal coordination, networking and more knowledge-intensive action, South Africa offers Unicef an opportunity to gain more experience in this programme implementation philosophy. The process of transformation will not be easy, will be plagued both by overlaps and gaps and will necessarilly have to follow a path of sucessive approximations as soon as existing constraints can be overcome. Would South Africa succeed, it could become a model and a hope for the future of the African Region. UNICEF needs to keep up with such an effort. List of consulted documents South Africa Country Programme Strategy Note White Paper on Reconstruction and Development Taking the RDP Forward The RDP. The First Year Reviewed Rural Development Strategy of the GNU Urban Development Strategy of the GNU White Paper on the Transformation of the Public Service Water Supply and Sanitation Policy White Paper National Sanitation Policy Draft White Paper for Social Welfare A New Housing Policy and Strategy for South Africa The Organization, Governance and Funding of Schools
Education White Paper 2 Green Paper: Policy Proposals for a New Employment
Standards Statute The National Small Business Enabling Act in Draft Bill Form Municipal Infrastrucutre Investment Framework Making People-Driven Development Work Local Government Transition Act Towards a National Health System Urban Environment Discussion Document on a Framework for Social Partnership NEDLAC: Towards a Social Partnership Correctional Services Act, 1995 Key Indicators of Poverty in South Africa Draft Programme Plans of Operation: 1997-2001 Transcending the Legacy Negotiating Change: Building Local Democracy in South Africa Rehabilitation of Children in Especially Difficult Children in Especially Difficult Circimstances,
Programme Plan of Operations (Draft) Children in Especially Difficult Circumstances in South Africa
UNICEF Proposed Programme of Cooperation Between
The Government of National Unity and UNICEF: Health and Nutrition Programme Draft for Discussion UNICEF and South African Government of National Unity Programme of Cooperation. UNICEF and South African Government of National Unity
Programme of Cooperation. `Programme Plan of Operations
1997-2001. Social Policy and Programme Development Education Master Plan of Operations and Programme Plan of Operations 1997-2001 Hygene and Environmental Sanitation
Programme Plan of Operations for UNICEF Cooperation in South Africa (1997-2001) Draft for Discussion External Relations and Communications
Draft Programme Plan of Operations 1997-2001 South Africa's Nine Provinces: A Human Development Profile Housing Capacity Building Programme (Draft) Annual Report For The Year to 31 March 1995 1979-1995 Commemorative Issue A National Household Survey of Health Inequalities
in South Africa The People's Dialogue and South African Homeless People's Federation. South African Statistics The Street Children of Hillbrow Street Children
The Institute for the Study of Man in Africa The South African Street Child: Developmental Implications Street Children Have Dreams Too
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