Power to the people or, maybe, not – how to get things done in a democracy

One of the political conundrums of our age is how to get things done in a democracy.

I am talking about getting real, tangible things done like building major new infrastructure – bridges, tunnels, highways, railways, schools, sewage treatment systems, dams, power stations (of whatever energy source), pipelines, substantial housing schemes, airports, prisons.

Across the globe, the big democracies have an appalling track record in major infrastructure development.

Once a byword for Teutonic efficiency, Germany is now a byword for massive budget overruns and lamentable timelines. As a prime example, Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport only opened in 2020, 14 years after construction started, 29 years after official planning was begun and three times over budget.

Britain is possibly even worse off. Its new high-speed railway HS2 is now going less than half the originally planned distance at more than twice the budgeted cost and may be ready by 2033.

And the Heathrow third runway versus London third airport debate is more than 50 years old and still without any sign of shovels into soil anytime soon.

The Americans also have huge problems with high-speed rail (HSR). The California HSR is running at least a decade late and is as much as $100-billion over budget.

The 2010 Fifa World Cup kicked us into an impressive (if gouging and collusively priced) infrastructure building - the Gautrain, new or upgraded airports across the nation, and five brand new stadiums all sprouted quick-quick – but there’s been little or nothing since, in spite of Cyril’s constant waffling rhetoric on the subject.

And we all know what a complete disaster, on every level, the Kusile and Medupi power station builds were. Eight years late and R300-billion over budget is the headline.

So, what’s the problem? The problem is democracy. In several ways.

Firstly, big public infrastructure demands long-term political and budgetary commitment, usually beyond the life of any administration. A new government is not locked in to continuing support of the old project. In fact, it has often loudly railed against it while in opposition. Then it’s “A Review”, usually followed by “All Change”.

Britain’s HS2 has had to contend with six prime ministers, eight finance ministers and nine transport ministers, plus five chief executives and seven chairpersons. Little wonder it’s going nowhere slowly.

And civil servants usually make terrible project managers as they lack the necessary hard skills and are rarely held properly to account, especially in terms of budgets. They are more interested in politics and paperwork (and, often in our case, kickbacks) than they are in efficient outcomes.

Democratic governments are also attuned to public outcry. Every infrastructure build generates voluble protests, usually from those most directly disrupted, otherwise known in tabloid-speak as the Nimby Brigade. Nimby (Not In My Back Yard) is usually a dismissive term for selfishness, but I reckon we’re all Nimbies at heart – none us want our backyard dug up for a nuclear power station even if we’ll happily plug in the kettle when the beast comes onstream.

Anyway, you can’t make an omelette (or a new rail line) without breaking some eggs and politicians in a democracy dance on the eggshells of any protests gaining media oxygen (to scramble my metaphors).

And democracies have EIAs, planning regulations, heritage rulings, tenders, stakeholder consultation procedures and sundry other processes, none within the full control of central government and all of which can be run through several layers of independent courts until a sympathetic judge can be found to order the whole thing sent back to square one.

Undeniably this is A Good Thing – checks and balances and all of that – but it does make infrastructure development extraordinarily difficult.

Which, for some, is also a good thing. They would argue that these monster developments are dinosaurs. We should make do with what we have. Reduce demand rather than increase supply. Local small scale rather than national epics. Slay the god of growth.

That’s a debate we can have as long as we understand the old “cake and eat it” principle and are prepared to live without improved transport, power and water supply, mass housing and other things.

Many democratic leaders look at China with envy. It is the poster child for “getting things done”. For all its privatised trappings, China remains a command economy and when President-For-Life Xi Jinping commands, for instance, high-speed rail, he gets 46,000km of it in 17 years.

Similar astonishing results have been achieved in renewable energy. Entire cities are built in five years. There is much devilish stuff in the details of what China has done but done it has been. In that top-down world, I am not sure there’s even a Mandarin expression for Nimby. 

I have no desire to live in a Chinese-style society, and will take the democratic warts any time, but we do have to confront the systemic ineffectiveness of our way of government. Maybe the compromise lies in something Helen Zille once told me: “In an ideal world, planning would be a democracy and implementation would be a dictatorship.”

These musings were sparked by my finally getting round to reading a legendary book which was published in New York exactly 50 years ago and which still sells 20,000 copies a year. “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro remains the definitive analysis of power – the Getting Things Done kind of power.  

It’s a whopping, lyrical 1,200-page biography of Robert Moses - a man few outside of America have ever heard of, and who was never elected to any office, yet is probably the greatest builder that any democracy has ever seen.

From 1924 until the late 1960s, Bob Moses re-engineered and re-shaped New York, which Caro describes as a “Titan of cities, colossal synthesis of urban hope and urban despair”. Moses built freeways, tunnels, bridges, dams, interchanges, beaches (yes, beaches), parks by the hundreds, playgrounds, zoos, public sports facilities, the United Nations Building, Shea Stadium, the Lincoln Center, and many slum-clearance housing blocks.

He also built his own vast bureaucratic empire and generated independent sources of income by creating semi-autonomous authorities which issued their own bonds beyond government oversight.

Through his undeniable cleverness, phenomenal hard work, an astonishing eye for detail and legal drafting, political chicanery, a powerful cocktail of charm and nastiness, and very astute PR, he made himself immune from the whims and budgets of five city mayors, six state governors and six US presidents. (Moses had a particularly nasty, long-running fight with Franklin Delano Roosevelt – the two men loathed each other.)

The fawning New York newspapers and public saw Moses as The Man Who Gets Things Done and the politicians as the ones who get in the way.  

It is almost incomprehensible how much he built and spent, and how many people he employed. All at a time when it was a cliché to describe New York as “ungovernable”. He was described as the greatest engineer in the world, and he was a visionary architect, even though he had degrees in neither discipline. Moses studied humanities, law and public administration at Yale and Oxford.

But Caro’s breathtakingly brilliant research and prose makes it devastatingly clear that, while he Got Things Done, Bob Moses was not A Good Thing. His single-mindedness and untrammelled power had appalling consequences.

He addicted New York to the automobile and criminally neglected any investment in public transport. He was an elitist and a racist who spitefully ignored the needs of places like Harlem. He ran his concrete freeways right through the middle of historic communities, because that looked right on his map, and destroyed them in the process.

Caro estimates that Moses’s projects displaced as many as 500,000 people without any genuine consideration or proper plans for where they should go. His apartment blocks were loathsome places to live and contributed to the ghettoization of the city.

And his reputation for incorruptibility and fiscal discipline was a chimera – he feathered many nests and squandered immense amounts of money.  

The Power Broker is, in the end, a profound and cautionary tale. Getting Things Done is an immensely important thing which, in a democracy, demands people with thick skins, great skill, determination and an ability to work the system who are backed by robust and consistent political leaders.

But getting the right things done matters more. And that calculation demands clear priorities, balance, nuance and a complicated trade-off of interests which always will include making some people deeply unhappy.

That decision should never be the domain of one all-powerful individual like Bob Moses who, alone, decided the what, where, when and how much of every major project in New York for more than 40 years. DM