CHAPTER 5 RESULTS
5.10 Co Sensing – Seeing the System
122 regulations they become defensive, start talking tough and blaming others including the regulatory authorities for the problems that they face”. This type of pattern has played itself out on an ongoing basis making transformational relationships with the WMU and the LSU impossible.
5.9.7 The Technical Expert Sector
All the technical experts indicated that they are unaware of any partnership or dialogue type processes between the WMU and other key stakeholders within the broader Msunduzi waste management system. All the technical experts agreed that from their experiences it would seem that the WMU leadership appears not to like outsiders becoming involved in waste management issues. They cited the landfill monitoring committee, the integrated waste management planning process and the mooted waste park project as examples from their personal experiences where the leadership of the WMU and the LSU prefers instinctively to isolate themselves from processes involving outside stakeholders. One of the technical experts captured the prevailing situation in the following manner: “Senior officials from the waste management unit of the Msunduzi Municipality do not want to open their minds to new ideas, they want to control everything, so it is going to be very problematic to get new ideas of the ground, I have tried since 2000 without success because they do not care about the environment, they look to make money from processes, they do not have the skills and understanding to do their own jobs, they are unlikely to innovate, they are not open to partnerships, MIDI seems to drag Msunduzi along, the university provides intellectual and financial capital, the MM is reluctant as always to come to the party”.
All the technical experts agreed that the WMU leadership is averse to taking responsibility for their legislative obligations, and one of the technical experts described the situation in the following manner, “officials within the waste management unit prefer for complex issues to float around in open spaces with no one talking responsibility to resolve the issue, no one has a mandate to act when you confront them with options and there are no champions to be found who are willing to work with outside parties to get things done”.
123 5.10.1 The NGO Sector
Most of the representatives of the NGO sector were frustrated by the inability of the MM and the business sector to see the entire waste management system from the extraction of raw materials through to the production of goods and discarded materials to the eventual release of greenhouse gases from decomposing organic waste buried in landfill sites. They believe that the limited progress that has been made on waste prevention and waste minimisation issues within the MM can be attributed to the MM and the business sector lacking a big picture, system wide perspective that enables them to see linkages between climate change, production and consumption patterns and waste management. One NGO representative summed up their concerns with unsystemic approaches by saying, “we need to stop calling it waste because it is not waste, it is discarded materials that can be recycled or reused, if we stop seeing it as waste we encourage people to add value to the materials they have collected either at a landfill site or from bins, we need take a life cycle approach to materials, a more systemic approach to issues of resource management – not waste management”.
Another NGO was frustrated by the destruction of biodiversity within watercourses in the MM caused by the dumping of domestic waste into river systems due to the lack of collection services and the failure of the MM to educate people that rivers are not places to dump
domestic waste. The NGO reported that interactions with the WMU did not prove to be useful as they did not see rivers as their area of responsibility. According to this NGO, “the narrow approach to waste management is resulting in pristine river systems with high biodiversity levels being destroyed and nobody within the MM wanting to take responsibility for the situation, more frighteningly there appears to be a lack of understanding of the services provided by ecosystems to human beings, in the case of rivers, the most valuable of all resources, fresh water”.
Another area of concern expressed by the NGO sector was the creation on an unsustainable society within the MM due to the huge gaps between the rich and the poor and the role that the MM was playing in entrenching these inequalities by paying huge salaries to their top management and then being unable to provide poor people with jobs and services due to a lack of resources. The inability of the leadership of the MM to see how they were
perpetuating the system of inequality and poverty by their actions was cited as a classic case of unsystemic thinking at the highest level of leadership within the MM.
124 5.10.2 The MM Waste Management Services Sector
Senior managers within the WMU and the LSU are focussed largely on the waste
management system as it exists within the MM organisational boundaries. According to one senior manager within the WMU, operational level staff cannot see the bigger picture and the system that their unit is part of nor are they prepared to adapt to meet the needs of the system.
The manager explained that “middle management and selected operational level staff where taken on a study tour of operations at Durban Solid Waste in order to expose them to the operations of a very successful waste management organisation, after the visit we agreed to copy certain practices in order to improve our operations, within a week most of the
innovations were stopped because workers complained that the new systems were creating more work and affecting their overtime payments”.
All the senior managers of the WMU and the LSU agreed that the MM did not operate as an integrated whole but rather as separate parts of the whole. In their opinion it was almost impossible to get the different business units to co-operate with each other in order to provide services in an integrated m anner. An interesting example of this type of behaviour cited by a senior manager of the WMU, “we have a situation where the Parks and Recreation unit will cut grass or trim trees and then expect the WMU to collect their cuttings because they consider it as waste whereas they are quite capable of collecting these trimmings on their own and making compost or taking them to a garden refuse site, but in a silo type
organisation like the MM each unit does only what it should do and nothing else usually out of fear of spending their budgets or creating additional work which there staff will refuse to do”.
According to all the senior managers interviewed the disintegrated systems within the MM result in the WMU and the LSU having little control over the staff employed, service providers procured and repairs undertaken to its fleet. A manager who is frustrated by the silo mentality that operates within the MM remarked that “ I have to deal with a situation where people who know nothing about waste management take decisions about the staff who should be employed in my unit, I end up getting staff who know very little about waste and I get held accountable for poor service delivery, the system we have in terms of employment
125 and procurement effectively strips me of the power to take decisions on how to improve service delivery”.
5.10.3 The MM Political Sector
All the political representatives indicated that most politicians within the MM were either focussed on issues that affect their wards or their Portfolio Committee or their own personal financial interests. All of them were of the view that most politicians are unlikely to have the time or the insight to examine system-wide issues affecting the MM. All the political
representatives agreed that most senior managers of the WMU and LSU look after their own interests and do not care about the bigger picture of climate change, poverty and
development. One of political representatives interviewed believed that many senior
managers were using their power to create systems so that they could benefit privately. One political representative of the ruling party indicated that the cadre deployment policy of the ruling party had ensured that in some cases “officials were employed who had no clue about what they are supposed to do, how are they then going to understand the challenges involved in the entire waste management system?, how are they going to work with external
stakeholders who will realise they are clueless and importantly who will want to work with them?
Another political representative indicated that senior managers and political heads of Portfolio Committees often end up “merely defending their own turf, refusing to take
responsibility for the performance of their departments and having a very narrow conception of reality since they only consulted each other on issues that affect all the people in the city, so those types of people lead this city and they see the system as themselves, they do not see other people’s views and things as they really are”.
5.10.4 The MM Labour Sector
Both the trade union representatives outlined ways that the human resource system within the MM could be changed in order to improve the lives of workers in the WMU, LSU and the broader MM workforce. They argued that should changes be made in the human resource system workers would be motivated and service delivery would be improved. The changes they referred to included changes to the job grading system, salaries, promotions and other
126 remunerative type of changes to the current system within the MM.
5.10.5 The Business Sector
Both representatives of the PCB believed that most of their members focussed on understanding systems that affected their businesses and were quite skilful in using their knowledge of these systems to make profits and avoid losses. One of the representatives outlined the efforts their members had made in trying to improve the waste management system within the MM, “some of our members began to see the opportunities out there for preventing waste, recycling and setting up a new waste industry, they did research to fully understand the issues and the local system, in one case an investor was even found, but they were ahead of their time, the MM officials listened to them and went away and like lots of projects within Pietermaritzburg, nothing was ever heard about it again”.
According to the PCB representatives the MM seems to lack a long term vision and has a narrow conception of the key role players within the MM development planning system.
“They think in terms of five year election cycles, development takes longer than that to materialise, if they planned for a longer term period they could begin to understand the bigger issues that affect MM, instead they update their IDP every year and think they have planned, they go out and have consultations with communities but have you ever heard of them consulting us, well they do not do that because the system that they think about does not include us’.
One of the PCB representatives indicated that in his assessment of the Dinokeng Scenarios within the MM context, it would seem that other stakeholders like organised business were walking behind the state allowing the state to lead when it is clear that all stakeholders should be part of efforts to govern, lead and develop our society. The representative concluded that such a situation resulted because key stakeholders like business allowed government to exclude them and continue to view municipal issues from within the organisational
boundaries of the MM only and not to see the larger system of which they were all a part of.
5.10.6 The Regulatory Authority Sector
Both regulatory authorities were concerned that MM leadership continued to ignore the negative effects poor waste management services had on environmental systems. Key
127 amongst these were the water sector which was being polluted by uncollected domestic waste, poor operational management at the landfill site and pollution from untreated sewer due to the lack of proper sanitation services to many residents within the MM. Both representatives were of the opinion that many decision makers within the MM did not fully understand the interrelatedness of all environmental, social and economic systems.
One of the representatives of the regulatory authorities indicated that from personal
experiences working with some officials and politicians responsible for waste management within the MM it was quite routine for unsystemic blaming game allegations to be pulled out of the hat sooner or later when a service delivery deficit about the MM was queried; “usually they resort to blaming other levels of government for their failures, for example, the slow pace of extending refuse collection services is blamed on national governments meagre equitable share grants and not their own wasteful expenditure patterns, the poor operations at the landfill site is due to the district municipality not taking responsibility for their
functions and not providing additional resources and the lack of recycling activity is due to provincial government not providing for a recycling facility within the MM”.
5.10.7 The Technical Sector
Most of the technical experts concurred that despite the numerous study tours to other cities and conferences attended by senior managers of the WMU and the LSU, these have not had the effect of enabling Managers to identify best practice solutions from other waste
management systems that could be used to fix the problems of the MM.
To most of the technical experts the senior managers from within the MM cannot see beyond their own personal benefits and in some cases people are in positions for which they do not have the required capability and technical expertise. Most technical experts felt that they were not being utilised effectively by the MM to solve the problems currently being faced as well as the problems that are being created for the future by the unsystemic „quick fix‟
solutions that are currently being implemented.