By Kerwin Lebone

There were many illegal protests against municipalities last year. Most commentators concluded that they were all about lack of service delivery, but the South African Institute of Race Relations shows in its latest publication that the facts are not as simple as that. This is a according to a report in Business Day.

The survey’s statistics actually show that there has been reasonable progress by municipalities in the provision of essential services to communities.

According to the 2004-05 edition of the South African survey, not all illegal protests were about service delivery. For instance, demonstrators in Free State were driven by perceptions that municipal officials had abandoned them.

In other areas communities erupted because they favoured the idea of belonging to one province and not another. There were communities that resisted being transferred from Gauteng to Mpumalanga or North West, and others protested against having been transferred from Mpumalanga to Limpopo.

There were protests about service delivery, most notably about lack of sanitation facilities or against the bucket system. Most demonstrations concerning housing delivery took place in the urban areas of Gauteng, Western Cape and Eastern Cape.

There are many issues that prevent municipalities from being economically viable and from delivering essential services to citizens. Among those frequently cited are lack of skills; corruption; and failure to spend budgets.

Frequently overlooked is the creation of jobs, specifically in the rural parts of the country. More rural jobs would ease the influx of people into the urban municipalities and thus minimise the demand for housing (and services associated with it) in those areas.

Reasonable minimum wage demands and meaningful land reform, including proper training of emerging farmers, are some of the initiatives that could sustain livelihoods in the rural areas and ease the influx of people into overcrowded urban areas.