Precarious Liberation by Barchiesi Franco;

Author:Barchiesi, Franco; [Barchiesi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3407287
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2011-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

At the beginning of 1999, the chair of the management team—city manager, ANC politician, and former activist Khetso Gordhan—presented the iGoli 2002 plan, which the city council ratified on March 16. Up to that point, neither the unions nor civil society organizations had been asked to comment on the plan; the municipality started consulting them only after its approval (Thobejane 2000).

IGoli 2002 eventually opted not for full-scale privatization but for corporatizing and commercializing municipal activities. It transferred service delivery responsibilities from municipal departments to autonomous business units, or “utilities, agencies, and corporatized” (UAC) entities operating as registered independent companies but with the council as their sole shareholder. Three UACs, designated as “utilities,” were put in charge of income-generating services—water and sanitation, electricity, and waste management. “Agencies” are responsible, instead, for nontradable services like roads, stormwater, parks, and cemeteries. The municipality is no longer supposed to subsidize the budgets of the UACs, except for agencies, which do not generate income through direct user payments. UACs, conversely, can enter service delivery contracts, monitored by the council, with private entities. Households defined as “indigent,” initially estimated at a mere 20,000, would receive a modest lifeline of free water and electricity (Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council 1999a). In its methods and objectives the plan was in many ways reminiscent of late-apartheid local government privatization. It used the fiscal crisis to shape public perceptions and mobilize consent for drastic technocratic solutions, supposedly speedier, less controversial, and more efficient than democratic deliberation. On such premises, it could then propose the subcontracting of services, the elimination of public cross-subsidies, the reduction of the council's redistributive functions, and an emphasis on user payments as a condition to finance the expansion of utilities. Institutional amnesia on the historical role of private accumulation in the city's social disparities allowed the council to glorify market discipline as its modern-day savior. According to municipal consultants, market-based utilities could optimally insulate payments for services from political interference and give local politicians a powerful weapon against property invasions, rent boycotts, mortgage defaults, and illegal water and electricity connections (Govender and Aiello 1999).

The ANC intervened decisively in support of iGoli 2002 and suppressed dissenting voices like Pimville (Soweto) councilor Trevor Ngwane, expelled from the party for criticizing the plan. COSATU denounced the Johannesburg municipal restructuring as neoliberal, and SAMWU made it a central target of its antiprivatization campaign.31 The municipal union did not object to the need of restructuring to tackle the city's fiscal crisis, but it feared that the new corporatized entities would lead to layoffs, the employment of casual labor, and the erosion of workers' benefits. SAMWU resented the undemocratic process of iGoli 2002, a plan that “in the style of old apartheid politicians” denied “a transformation of the city in a way that will benefit the poor.”32 Its opposition resurrected the discourse of labor-community links to reinforce workers' claims with the plight of the poor and their frustration at the lack of progressive change:

Whilst acknowledging the crisis, we are firmly of the view

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