The Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs published the National Policy for the Provision of Basic Refuse Removal, dated October 2010 in Government Gazette number 34385, 22 June 2011.

Despite the fact that the Constitution guarantees access to basic services, many households in South Africa cannot access basic waste removal services because they are too poor to pay the costs involved.

The Policy recognises that there are huge variations in the ability of different municipalities to provide basic services and in the quality of services they provide. This difference has a strong poverty-bias; municipalities in low income and rural areas are less able to provide services than those in high income areas.

Refuse removal is a local government competency. The Municipal Systems Act requires that poor households have access to basic services. This policy seeks to provide the framework for guiding municipalities on the provision of free access to refuse removal for poor people as well as for the standardization of the quality of these services.

The objectives of the policy are:

• to establish a framework for the development, identification and management of indigent households that can be enrolled for the Basic Refuse Removal (BRR) services within the municipality; and
• to set guiding principles for the municipalities to follow in developing their specific BRR programmes.

A key principle which must be followed by the municipalities when deciding on criteria for eligibility for BRR services is the prioritization of especially vulnerable households. The policy expressly mentions the need for municipalities to prioritize poor households, child-headed households, older person-headed households, and people with disabilities. The policy only singles out these vulnerable groups, but does indicate that the municipality should develop any additional criteria that it deems relevant.

It is cause for some concern that the policy does not single out households with infants and small children, as well as women-headed households and households with members with chronic illnesses as especially vulnerable to health and other consequences related to poor hygiene attendant on poor refuse removal practices. There is a need for advocates from these sectors to engage with their respective municipalities before they develop their respective BRR indigent policies and highlight the importance of including these vulnerable groups as priority beneficiaries.

A further cause for concern is that the policy expressly states that municipalities should provide BRR services within the bounds of their financial stability and sustainability. Given the recent reports on the financial woes in many municipalities, there is a risk that this policy, as in the case of the free basic water policy, will not be realised in many of the municipalities with the poorest financial management and budgetary records; the same municipalities house the poorest people who are least able to afford BRR services. The policy indicates that there are a number of possible sources of funding. Internally, municipalities can cross-subsidize fro non-residential and wealthy customers. This source assumes the presence of such non-residential and wealthy customers; and assumption that is not valid in the poorest of municipalities. The other sources are the external – (1) equitable share grant and (2) municipal infrastructure grant.

There is a need for interrogation of the funding policies supporting (or, more specifically, not supportive of) the local government-led indigent basic services policies. Locally, advocates and community members should in the short-term engage with their local governments to ensure that the external sources of funding are put to the provision of basic services, and should seek to use policies such as this one to hold local government accountable to its obligations. In the longer term, there is a need to interrogate the bigger policy approach to funding basic services as it has proven to be an unsuccessful recipe in many poor municipalities.

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Click here to view the basic refuse removal policy.