A Blueprint to Dismantle Apartheid Spatial Differentiation? A Reflection on 25 Years of the White Paper on Local Government

There is a significant international discussion on how government can tackle the issue of spatial inequality. The South African local government sphere presents one of the most visible examples of how historically deliberate geographical underdevelopment has created modern spatial inequalities. Local government is designed as perhaps one of the most egalitarian governance systems in the world. Constitutionally grounded and further articulated in the 1998 White Paper on Local Government (WPLG), local government in South Africa is designed to reflect the key tenets of an “ideal municipality.” This vision is based on a developmental, transformational local government committed to working with communities and individuals to find long-term solutions to their social, economic, and material needs while also improving their quality of life. Using reports, datasets from government databases, and articles, this article comprises a qualitative literature analysis to provide an assessment of the WPLG transformation promise using three indicators representing the ideal municipality provision: service delivery, governance, and local economic development. The article argues that developing appropriate intervention strategies within the present developmental local government milieu presents a service delivery quandary because, despite the principle of equitable distribution, the current design of local government has perpetuated inequity in the provision of public resources. In this case, residents in local wards are unable to support viable economic and service delivery alternatives. To buttress this point, a service delivery survey showed that the poorest (informal settlements and rural areas) communities in South Africa express the strongest levels of dissatisfaction with services.