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The ANC wants your municipality to do more itself. It calls this “re-municipalisation”: bringing outsourced services such as cleaning, security, waste collection, meter reading, water tankers and more back into the staff structure – and cost structure - of municipalities. Its manifesto promises to do this in every ANC-led municipality within two years.

What this simply means is the ANC is doubling down on its failures. And it will affect your monthly household budget. It also offers no guarantee of improved service delivery.

Every rand a municipality spends ultimately comes from somewhere: your rates and tariffs, transfers from taxpayers, or money diverted from another service. And the evidence from municipalities that have tried large-scale insourcing should worry every South African already battling a high cost of living.

In Mangaung, the estimated cost of insourcing security guards was around 20% higher than the existing private sector service (roughly R18.7 million extra). In eThekwini, officials estimated that insourcing security could cost twice as much. A later eThekwini feasibility study put the cost of a partial insourcing at a whopping R2.6 billion, compared with more than R4 billion for full insourcing. In Nelson Mandela Bay, insourced security costs reportedly rose from an expected R117 million a year to R180 million, and then nearly doubled to R218 million. At one point, Treasury officials warned that further insourcing costs could require a 2.5% property-rates increase for every resident just to fund the insourcing of this one service.

This is the problem with treating “public” and “private” as ideological badges. The resident still pays for it regardless.

The DA’s approach is different. We believe municipalities must be strong, professional and capable but they do not have to do everything themselves. Our manifesto explicitly supports using public-private partnerships and external providers where they can reduce costs, improve efficiency, bring in scarce expertise or get services working faster. On waste collection, for example, we propose using private providers where financially feasible to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Just as importantly, we will protect the money residents already pay. Water and electricity revenue should be reinvested in water and electricity infrastructure, not swallowed by bloated salary bills or used to plug unrelated budget holes. Maintenance cannot be sacrificed because ANC and other governments can’t balance a budget or stop irregular expenditure.

And to be clear, the DA does not argue for outsourcing everything. Nor is it an argument against municipal workers. Where a municipality is delivering excellent services, it can continue to do so. It is a simple principle that benefits the public. Where the DA governs and where we will govern after the November election, we choose the delivery model that gives residents the best service at the best sustainable cost, and hold whoever delivers it, public or private, to strict standards.

South Africans are paying more for food, transport, electricity, housing and almost everything else due to the ANC’s three decades of failure. Local government should be helping to ease that pressure, not adding to it for ideological reasons.

The choice for South Africans in November is therefore practical. One manifesto starts with who should deliver the service. The DA starts with you: Does it work and is it affordable?

That is how we get towns and cities working, protect household budgets, and build a country of hope.
 

Issued by DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis