The Broken Relationship Between the Government Machinery and its People: A Reality or a Myth?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the breakdown of relationship between government machinery and its people as far as service delivery is concern. Service delivery is a complex and difficult task in South Africa. When politicians during local and national elections engage in elections campaign, quite often the politicians are bombarded by service delivery demands from the citizens. In turn, the politicians make elections promises to satisfy the service delivery demand of the citizens should they be elected to office. After, the election season has, the politicians elected to office rarely interact with the citizens to deliver the election promises. This can be attributed to many factors, such as breakdown of relationship between government machinery and the citizens, lack of capacity by the government machinery to deliver services to citizens amid the growing population in South Africa, break of trust between government and its citizens, poor service delivery, corruption and maladministration. The paper is conceptual and descriptive in nature, which means document and review literature on government has been used to collect data. The paper argues that the relationship between government machinery and its people is broken. The empirical results indicate that the relationship between the government and its citizens has broken.