Party manifestos – do they walk the talk?

Does the DA create “change that moves SA forward”? We weigh up key claims.

The Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa’s official opposition party, governs 26 municipalities in South Africa. They are aiming to add municipalities like Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Tlokwe to the list in the upcoming local government election.

Their 68-page manifesto is titled Change that moves South Africa forward again. In the first pages, DA leader Mmusi Maimane spells out the DA’s vision for local government saying that “this document does not only make promises of a better future, it illustrates the progress we have already made in the municipalities we currently govern”.

Here we evaluate key claims in the DA’s manifesto about their past performance in local government. (Note: We aren’t able to fact-check promises but will keep an eye on whether they are fulfilled.)

Employment

When the DA launched their manifesto on 23 April 2016, the latest available data on unemployment in South Africa was from July to September 2015.

That data showed that 5 418 000 people were unemployed then, according to the narrow definition. These people are unemployed but tried to find a job in the last four weeks. The latest data, from January to March 2016, shows that the number has risen to 5 714 000.

The expanded definition of unemployment includes discouraged job-seekers. These are people who want to work but are not actively trying to find employment. According to the expanded definition, there were 8 304 000 unemployed people in South Africa in July to September 2015. This figure rose to 8 927 000 in the first quarter of 2016.

The estimates of the number of Capetonians working in the informal economy were included in a report on Economic Performance Indicators for Cape Town for the second quarter of 2015, the DA told Africa Check.

The informal employment sector, as measured by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), includes people informally employed, as well as people working in the formal sector or private households, but without a written contract or benefits such as medical aid or pension fund contributions.

The DA’s claim is correct for the second quarter of 2015, Stats SA’s quarterly labour force survey shows.

Source: Stats SA quarterly labour force survey (Jan-March 2016)

But the size of Cape Town’s informal sector employment as a proportion of total employment is low relative to other metropolitan municipalities in South Africa, Professor Dieter von Fintel of Stellenbosch University’s economic department, told Africa Check.

Von Fintel said that only Tshwane’s proportion was lower than Cape Town’s. In turn, South Africa has a comparatively low informal sector share when compared to many developing countries.

The DA said their claim is based on 2011 census data, which showed that the Midvaal local municipality’s unemployment rate was then at 18.8%. Compared to the 3 metropolitan municipalities and 6 other local municipalities in the Gauteng province, Midvaal had the lowest unemployment figures in 2011.

In 2001, the year after the DA first won Midvaal’s local government election, census data shows that the unemployment rate was 22.8%.

In support of the claim, DA spokesperson Phumzile van Damme pointed Africa Check to a City of Cape Town media release from July 2015. It stated that “since 2011, the City of Cape Town has created more than 140 000 temporary work opportunities for unemployed residents through this programme”.

This is backed up by the City of Cape Town’s annual reports, in which they reported creating 140 324 work opportunities between 2011/12 and 2014/15.

(Note: As Africa Check has previously explained, the number of opportunities does not correspond to the number of people who have benefited from the programme. Someone can be employed on different projects in the programme at different times with each work period counted as a separate job opportunity.)

Source: City of Cape Town annual reports

The DA’s research unit told Africa Check that “upon closer inspection we found that the heading for the unemployment figures that appear in the bar graph on page 13 of the manifesto is incorrect”.

The unemployment data they cited was actually for October to December 2015. That year the City of Cape Town’s narrow unemployment rate was 20.5% as claimed. However, the metropolitan municipality with the lowest unemployment rate was eThekwini at 15.9%.

Source: Quarterly Labour Force Survey Quarter 4: 2015

Comparable unemployment data at metropolitan municipality level has only been released in Quarterly Labour Force Surveys since the beginning 2015. Prior to that, it was only available every ten years in the census.The DA referred to the incorrect information as a “formatting error” and said it was “deeply regretted”.

The latest data, from January to March 2016, shows that the City of Cape Town’s unemployment rate had increased to 21.1%. The metropolitan municipality with the lowest unemployment rate was again eThekwini at 18.8%.

Pro-poor spending

Data provided by the City of Cape Town shows that the figure of 67% refers to what they call the “service delivery budget”

The “service delivery budget” includes the line departments City Health, Human Settlements, Safety and Security and Social and Early Childhood Development. It also includes parts of the budgets of other departments, such as Community Services, Transport and Utility Services.

A number of departments are not included in the city’s calculations. These include Compliance and Auxiliary Services, Corporate Services, Energy, Environment and Spatial Planning, Finance, Rates and Other and Tourism Events and Economic Development.

If the city’s figure of investment in poor areas and informal settlements (R17 504 774 569) is calculated as a percentage of the total latest publicly available 2014/15 budget (R35 458 835 000), the portion the city says it invested drops to 49.4%.

Read our report for a detailed explanation.

Governance

The DA told Africa Check that they base this claim on three different evaluations:

1. the auditor-general’s reports from 2008/9 to 2013/4, as evaluated by the Dullah Omar Institute, a community law centre based at the University of Western Cape, with a research focus on multi-level government among others.
2. the Government Performance Index, a metric compiled by the research and advocacy organisation Good Governance Africa,
3. the Municipal Financial Stability Index (MFSI), compiled by the Ratings Afrika agency.

Auditor-general’s reports

The Dullah Omar Institute publishes an annual Municipal Audit Consistency Barometer in which they categorise a municipality according to the audit outcome it most often achieved over the past 5 years, in this case over the period 2008/9 to 2013/4. There are five possible audit outcomes, listed here from best to worst:

• Unqualified with no findings (clean),
• Unqualified with findings,
• Qualified with findings,
• Adverse with findings, and
• Disclaimer with findings.

According to the DA, it governs in 26 municipalities across four provinces: Gauteng and the Northern, Eastern and Western Cape. The Dullah Omar Institute’s report shows the DA mostly scored clean (unqualified with no findings) and unqualified opinions with findings between 2008/9 and 2013/4:

• Clean: 6 municipalities (City of Cape Town, George, Langeberg, Mossel Bay, Swartland and West Coast district)
• Unqualified with findings: 16 municipalities (Bergrivier, Bitou, Breede Valley, Cape Winelands district, Drakenstein, Eden district, Hessequa, Knysna, Laingsburg, Midvaal, Overberg district, Overstrand, Saldanha Bay, Stellenbosch, Theewaterskloof and Witzenberg)
• Qualified with findings: 1 municipality (Hantam)
• Disclaimer: 1 municipality (Baviaans)
• Not submitted: 2 municipalities (Swellendam and Karoo Hoogland).

The Auditor-General’s report for 2014/15 on the outcome of municipal audits, released in June, showed that 21 DA-run municipalities achieved a clean audit, 3 an unqualified with findings opinion and 2 a qualified with findings opinion.

But the Auditor-General’s reports speak to financial governance and not necessarily all aspects of service delivery, Karen Heese, an economist at research organisation Municipal IQ, told Africa Check.

Independent consultant to national and local governments Dr Andrew Siddle explained to Africa Check that the Auditor-General’s reports show “three things only: the soundness of financial reporting, [a municipality’s] legislative compliance, and the soundness of its reporting on performance management”.

When a municipality gets a “clean” report, it means that it has passed the test for all three of these elements – “nothing more, nothing less”.

Nonetheless, “if a municipality passes the ‘clean’ test, then it may logically claim to be doing some things right, and that can be justifiably be interpreted as a reflection on its approach to governance”, Siddle added. As such, Auditor-General reports “should be and are taken seriously”.

Government Performance Index

As for the Government Performance Index, the DA told Africa Check that it shows that “12 out of the 20 best run municipalities in the country are governed by the DA, with 9 of them in the top 10. Good Governance Africa ranked the country’s 234 local and metropolitan municipalities according to 15 different criteria across three spheres of performance: administration, economic development and service delivery.”

Africa Check verified the DA’s standing in the index. However, Heese cautioned against relying too much on the Government Performance Index as its measure of a municipality’s performance is based on limited information.

Ratings Africa

Africa Check was unable to verify the DA’s claims about the Municipal Financial Stability Index produced by Ratings Afrika. Analyst Charl Kocks said the data broken down by municipality was “proprietary” and we need to buy the report at a cost of R100 000 to access that.

However, Kocks did confirm that the average score for the Western Cape was 60 out of 100 and that it was the highest scoring province in the country, as the DA claimed. However, he could not tell us how many of the 22 DA-run municipalities in the Western Cape were included in the index.

Kocks explained that their ratings were based on municipalities complying with their requests for various categories of information. Whether or not all of the 30 municipalities in the Western Cape complied is unknown.

The DA manifesto promises that the party will create “a regulatory business environment that promotes growth and innovation”.

One of the ways it says it will do so is by repealing “apartheid-era policies, structure plans, bylaws and other procedures which contradict our commitment to freedom and fairness and which pose barriers to economic development and job-creating growth”. In the City of Cape Town, the DA claimed it had already repealed “over 300 such policies”.

The first document the DA sent us contained only 261 such policies. The list included policies from post-1994 – such as the “Goodwood Policy on the erection of Wendy houses” (1997) and “Fencing guidelines for N1 City, Goodwood” (2001).

In response, the DA said: “We do not believe the text suggests that the structure plans, bylaws and other procedures are all apartheid-era; indeed, a cursory look at the list should show that the policies, structure plans, bylaws and other procedures from the democratic era have also been repealed.”

The party then forwarded us a document listing an additional 75 policies, structure plans and frameworks as proof.

Health

The DA claims in its manifesto that the City of Cape Town runs treatment centres “in accordance with the Matrix Model of treatment” in Delft South, Khayelitsha, Manenberg, Milnerton, Parkwood and Tafelsig. A leaflet provided to Africa Check explains that the Matrix Model is an intensive outpatient treatment programme developed in the US.

Africa Check called the centres on the list and confirmed that they offer Matrix Model treatment. However, the international Matrix Institute on Addictions lists only two of the centres as officially accredited on its website.

Housing

The DA pointed us to a February 2015 parliamentary reply by the ministry of human settlements as proof.

It showed that the Nelson Mandela Bay metro had by far the most title deeds yet to issue, followed by the City of Cape Town.

The figure has since changed.

Nelson Mandela Bay’s municipal manager, Mthubanzi Mniki, told Africa Check only 15 339 title deeds were outstanding as of 30 April 2016. Of these, 1 473 were for pre-1994 housing stock and 13 866 for post-1994 stock.

The information is not yet publicly available, though.

Water loss

The Drakenstein municipality is located in the Western Cape and comprises the towns of Paarl and Wellington.

Van Damme told Africa Check that the figures cited were supplied by the municipality. She provided a booklet which stated that “water losses in the Drakenstein municipality were an unacceptable 34% in 1999… Through a coordinated programme of action, the municipality reduced the water losses to 12.1% by 2013.”

The municipality was however only formed in December 2000 when the Paarl and Wellington municipalities were amalgamated.

Drakenstein municipality spokesman, Mart-Marié Haasbroek, told Africa Check that the figures shared by the DA were from the town of Paarl, located in the Drakenstein municipality. They could not be attributed to the municipality as a whole.

“Before 2012, the statistics for the other towns in Drakenstein were estimated and are therefore less reliable and reflects more erratically. Data for Paarl has always been accurately measured,” said Haasbroek.

Is the EFF your “‘last hope for service delivery”? We evaluate their manifesto.

South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party is contesting a local government election for the first time in 2016, having only been registered as a political party in September 2013.

The EFF’s local government election manifesto is titled Our last hope for jobs and service delivery. Like the African National Congress’ manifesto, the EFF’s is also 32 pages long but unlike the ANC, they do not have previous local government performance to highlight.

EFF president Julius Malema says that their manifesto “is different from the rest because its success will primarily be gauged by the number of jobs the municipality will create and the number of lives that would have been improved”.

Here we evaluate whether the EFF will be able to keep key promises, based on current laws. We sent questions to the party asking for clarity on how they were planning on implementing their promises. At the time of publishing this report we had not received a response.

(Note: Last week we examined the ANC’s election manifesto and next week we fact-check the Democratic Alliance’s manifesto.)

Land expropriation

Promise: “The EFF People’s Municipality will pass by-laws which will expropriate and allocate land equitably to all residents of the municipality for residential, recreational, industrial, religious, and agricultural purposes and activities with the principle of use it or lose it.”

Our verdict: If the public works minister delegates power to a municipality and adequate compensation is paid.

Municipalities are allowed to pass by-laws which the public is allowed to review and comment on. But this power doesn’t extend to expropriation.

“The EFF’s election promise mentions the passing of municipal expropriation by-laws, which is superfluous and irrelevant,” said Benjamin Cousins, emeritus professor at the Institute for  Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies of the University of the Western Cape.

Cousins said that South Africa’s impending Expropriation Act “does allow for the [minister of public works] to delegate powers of expropriation to another organ of state, including a municipality, which then becomes an ‘expropriating authority’”.

But the land cannot be expropriated arbitrarily, according to Bulelwa Mabasa, a director at Werksmans Attorneys specialising in expropriation litigation.

“Land cannot be expropriated simply because it is not being used. There must be a legitimate public purpose or public interest,” Mabasa explained.

The EFF’s promise would also require an enormous amount of money to implement. Local government expert Andrew Siddle told Africa Check that the EFF’s promise was not financially feasible unless the expropriation was on a “no or only partial compensation basis”.

The act, in its current form, requires that the amount of compensation paid to the owner of the expropriated land or property be “just and equitable”. It must reflect “an equitable balance between the public interest and the interests of the expropriated owner”.

The South African Constitution requires that this compensation be based on a number of factors, including the current use of the property and its market value.

Schools

Promise: “The EFF’s People Municipality will ensure that all schools under its jurisdiction have running water, sanitation and refuse removal.”

Our verdict: It is already a municipal function.

Under the South African constitution it is the function of local government to provide running water and sanitation “not just for schools, but for all residents,” Siddle told Africa Check.

But according to the Department of Basic Education’s National Education Infrastructure Management System, there were 604 schools without access to water in South Africa in 2014. The majority were in the Eastern Cape (339) and KwaZulu-Natal (183).

There were 474 schools without sanitation facilities in the country in 2014. Again, the majority were in the Eastern Cape (366) and KwaZulu-Natal (66).

Housing

Promise: “The EFF’s People Municipality will abolish all forms of informal settlements and dwellings and provide adequate human settlements for all.”

Our verdict: If the provincial government grants enough funding.

An informal dwelling is a “makeshift structure not erected according to approved architectural plans”, as defined by Statistics South Africa. This includes shacks in informal settlements or in backyards.

According to the 2014 General Household Survey, 12.9% of South Africa’s 15.6-million households lived in informal dwellings.

Local government expert Andrew Siddle told Africa Check that upgrading informal housing was already a “long-term goal” for South Africa as a whole and questioned how the EFF would fund it.

“It should be remembered that under current legislation and framework, housing is primarily a national and provincial responsibility, with local government having limited powers,” he added.

According to South Africa’s Housing Act, municipalities are responsible for progressively providing housing in their area and identifying and designating land for housing and ensuring that water, sanitation, electricity, roads, storm water drainage and transport are provided.

Robert Cameron, professor at the University of Cape Town’s political science department, told Africa Check that the promise was feasible but would require funding.

“They could abolish informal settlements but would have to apply to the provincial housing boards for money,” Cameron said.

Sanitation

Promise: “The EFF’s People Municipality will make sure that each and every household within its municipality has [a] flushing toilet, which will be connected to the municipal sewage system and/or to clean, safe and durable septic tanks.”

Our verdict: If each household has water in their yard.

“Government policy is to provide sanitation to all but it still relies to a large extent on ventilated improved pit toilets and there is still a long way to go in certain provinces,” Andrew Siddle told Africa Check. “[The] only new thing from EFF is that all toilets [will] be flushing.”

Stats SA defines adequate sanitation as “flush toilets connected to a public sewerage system or a septic tank” or “a pit toilet with a ventilation pipe”. In 2014, 79.5% of households had access to this level of sanitation.

A guide to service delivery levels by the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs highlights that “sanitation service levels need to be planned in conjunction with the availability of water resources and supply”.

For example, a household accessing water through communal taps cannot have a flush toilet installed. The basic level of sanitation that can be provided in this scenario is a pit toilet with a ventilation pipe.

A household must have a roof tank or a yard tap with a toilet connection in order to have a flush toilet connected to a septic tank. A flush toilet connected to the municipal sewage system requires a fully metered and pressurised household water connection.

Because of these limitations, the provision of flush toilets would also require the provision of on-site water for households. In 2004 an estimated 46.3% of households had piped water in their dwellings and 27% has access to water on their property.

Electricity

Promise: “The EFF’s People Municipality will ensure that there is 100% electrification of every household in the municipality within the [sic] 5 years of being in government.”

Our verdict: Informal settlements, migration and rural areas pose an impediment.

South Africa’s Department of Energy defines “universal access” as 97% of households being electrified. It notes that “full electrification is unlikely to be possible due to growth and delays in the process of formalising informal settlements”.

Robert Cameron, professor at the University of Cape Town’s political science department, described the EFF’s promise as “laudable” but difficult to achieve.

“The problem in the big cities is in-migration. As soon as municipalities have provided services to some informal settlements, there are new migrants coming in requiring services,” he said.

The extent of the housing backlog and the ease of connecting households in isolated areas is also an impediment to universal electrification.

“Given that the [housing] backlog in municipalities is not a uniform proportion everywhere, and some municipal areas include deep rural regions, the feasibility of practical 100% electrification of every household is approximately zero,” Trevor Gaunt, emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town’s electrical engineering department, told Africa Check.

In 2014, Stats SA reported that 86% of households were connected to mains electricity.

Free basic services

Promise: “The EFF’s People Municipality will provide free basic electricity and [water] to the poor.”

Our verdict: Registered poor households should receive free basic services from municipalities.

Poor (indigent) households that register with municipalities qualify to receive free basic water and electricity because they receive no income or have a low income.

Statistics SA’s non-financial census of municipalities for the year ending June 2014 reported that 237 out of 278 municipalities had indigent support policies.

In 2014, 2 048 052 of South Africa’s poor households (58.8%) received free basic electricity.

The department of energy recommends 50kWh per household per month be supplied free. This is enough to power basic lighting, a small black and white TV, a small radio and to do “basic ironing and basic water boiling”, according to the Department of Energy.

That same year 2 460 135 poor households (70.7%) received free basic water. This is set at 6 kilolitres a month per household and should be available within 200 metres of the household.

Some households that are not registered as poor also receive free basic services, depending on the municipality they are in.

In 2014, the following proportion of consumer units (which is a billing unit, not a household)received free basic services:

• 4 633 999 consumer units (38%) received free basic water.
• 2 365 147 consumer units (23%) received free basic electricity from municipalities and service providers.

These figures include the indigent households mentioned above.