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For all levels of government - national, provincial and local - the basic principle is simple: make it as easy as possible for business and the economy to move forward.

Capable government creates the conditions in which economic activity can expand, and growth in turn expands the resources available for public investment.

When people generate wealth, they invest in the future. When they invest in the future, they generate revenue for government, which in turn can invest back into the economy and its people. This is Governance 101.

At its most basic, government, regardless of the level, is required to create an enabling framework, provide a basket of services, and secure and protect community and public resources.

I am not advocating for government to abandon its involvement in key areas of public interest. Local government, for instance, has a critical role in water distribution and waste management. Government more broadly has a role in energy, health and security, as well as in providing the framework and funding for education.

But to play a meaningful role in these areas, government needs revenue.

And to generate revenue through taxation, tariffs, charges and other income, it needs to be capable. It needs law enforcement agencies that are respected, government institutions that can deliver on basic tasks, and public services that actually function.

Businesses become confident enough to invest when they believe electricity will remain available, goods can reach ports, water will flow, contracts will be enforced and policy will remain reasonably predictable.

Confidence will come from fixing railways and ports - not merely announcing turnarounds, but actually delivering them; ensuring the country is energy secure; fixing our man-made water crisis; and making it easier to start and run a business.

Granted, much of this has been acknowledged and some of it is being done. But while we wait for national reforms to take effect, nothing prevents municipalities from acting as catalysts for local growth.

Blaming legislation and national government alone cannot stand as the sole explanation for local failure.

A useful comparison can be found in three Gauteng municipalities: Emfuleni, Johannesburg and Midvaal. All operate under the same broad national local-government framework, yet their outcomes are dramatically different.

There are multiple ways to measure success and failure.

One is the current ratio, which measures a municipality’s ability to meet its short-term debts and obligations using assets it can reasonably turn into cash in the short term.

National Treasury uses liquidity as one of the key indicators of municipal financial health. It regards liquidity as critical in determining whether municipalities can meet their obligations and sustain operations. Persistent cash-flow and liquidity problems can ultimately contribute to municipal dysfunction.

Midvaal’s current ratio is 2.84:1, meaning it has R2.84 in current assets for every R1 in current liabilities.

Emfuleni’s ratio is just 0.31:1 - 31 cents in current assets for every rand due.

Johannesburg is also below one, at 0.73:1, meaning it has about 73 cents in current assets for every rand of current liabilities.

The recently published FW de Klerk Foundation Local Government Report Card for 2026 reinforces this picture.

It found that Midvaal had “sustained clean administration, strong liquidity and reliable execution”, while Emfuleni “remains trapped in a cycle in which failing services weaken revenue, financial disorder constrains maintenance and incomplete accountability prevents durable recovery”.

Johannesburg, meanwhile, “retains immense institutional capacity and social reach, but unfunded budgeting, political churn, infrastructure losses and weak execution are eroding the value that capacity produces”.

The economic evidence points in the same direction.

Past research by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory shows long-term economic decline in Emfuleni alongside significant deindustrialisation, while Midvaal has retained a comparatively strong manufacturing base.

There are, of course, local factors that cannot be captured in a financial snapshot.

Emfuleni is vastly larger and more urbanised than Midvaal. But the two are particularly useful comparisons because they sit within the same Sedibeng regional economy and both have substantial manufacturing bases.

Johannesburg, by contrast, is an economy of an entirely different scale.

What the financial evidence does reveal is a stark difference in the quality of municipal administration.

Well-run municipalities make a difference. Localised change is possible, and we as voters should demand it.

We may not individually be able to reshape the macroeconomy or national policy, but our municipalities can still create the conditions for local economic growth and upliftment within the existing legislative framework.

There are enough functioning municipalities across South Africa to demonstrate that decline is not inevitable.

The question is whether voters are prepared to demand competence - and whether those elected are prepared to deliver it.

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I say this with dollops of sarcasm and self-deprecating humour, having often worked in the media and large-scale “do-good” organisations. In these environments, people have a tendency to overthink everything, overanalyse the smallest detail and eventually procrastinate over the very thing they set out to achieve.

What begins as a simple idea to “hold government to account” can, within weeks, involve a bevy of consultants, legal opinions and reporting structures that merely push documents from one person to the next. Internal bureaucracy eventually overwhelms the original idea. It loses momentum and dies

Rigorous oversight is important. Proper governance matters. But there comes a point when the human element - the willingness to stand up and fight for change - must take centre stage.

Sometimes, community activists and civil society organisations need to challenge procedure, rather than become trapped by it, to move an issue in the right direction.

I have been fortunate to work in the water activism space for several years, and I have seen first-hand how refusing to march to somebody else’s bureaucratic drum can make a difference.

I will give you two examples.

At one point, I participated in a World Bank-funded programme aimed at helping to tackle eThekwini’s chronic water-loss problem.

I was part of a group of community leaders who were expected to facilitate public engagement. The programme, called the Platform for a Water Secure eThekwini, or PWSeT, was established in October 2024 as a multi-stakeholder initiative to address water security, non-revenue water and infrastructure challenges in the eThekwini region. Its proposed tools included transparent monthly data dashboards and coordinated action between the public and private sectors. It is important to mention that it fell under the Presidential Working Group for eThekwini – set up by President Cyril Ramaphosa to radically tackle the city’s declining infrastructure and financial prospects.

Our role as we were to learn was to develop action plans and communicate with the public about how to save water.

A marketing team, no doubt funded, was brought on board. There was branding, website concepts, mascots, buzzwords and even a series of focus groups.

To us, however, the solution seemed fairly simple: run a door-to-door campaign targeting households that had not paid their municipal bills or were consuming unusually large amounts of water, and tell them the truth.

We believed a targeted campaign in affluent communities could serve as a starting point before being expanded to other areas. We even developed light-hearted social media content to support it.

We were working alongside municipal officials. We had seen the data and knew which areas contained properties that were not paying or were consuming excessive amounts of water.

We were ready to go.

Except we could not.

The municipality could not sanction the programme. Perhaps understandably, it could not hand the personal information of individual households to volunteers.

We proposed a solution: give us a formal mandate to do the work. If we were authorised to act as agents of the municipality, or given whatever title its lawyers preferred, we could proceed.

We even suggested working only under the supervision of a municipal employee or plumber.

Again, the answer was no.

The discussion dragged on for weeks and then months. Even the municipality’s legal department became involved.

We also began to realise that the city, did not really want us there. We were asking too many questions. For instance, why had the city never run such a simple campaign on its own dime?

After about six months, a new World Bank representative took over the project and its civil society component slowly disappeared, probably because of pressure from city officials. In reality the World Bank was ultimately seeking to finance large water infrastructure projects funded through various arms of the state. It therefore made the business decision to listen to its potential client.

But, ultimately, the civil society grouping of which I was part also failed.

We allowed ourselves to be drawn into the bureaucratic machinery of government. Before we knew it, our ideas had been diluted and eventually discarded. We failed to assert ourselves.

To date, no such targeted public-engagement programme has been implemented, and the results are clear.

As of June the municipality’s water consumption is 20% higher than its licensed abstraction allocation, while non-revenue water - water that is lost or supplied without being billed - stands at 55.4%.

A recent news report also indicated that the municipality is owed R46 billion for rates and services, with the debt increasing by about R800 million each month.

Meanwhile, my colleagues in Johannesburg, who participate in the Presidential Johannesburg Working Group, have approached the process very differently.

They refused to serve merely as communicators of government messages. Instead, they stood their ground and demanded a role in strategy and oversight.

Their success has been mixed, but they have not been excluded in the way Durban’s activists were.

A reading of the Presidency’s National Water Action Plan also reveals several proposals long advocated by civil society organisations in Johannesburg. These include the need for cities to ring-fence revenue from water sales and use it for water infrastructure and maintenance.

Whatever progress has been achieved is partly because activists refused to disappear into the bureaucratic jungle. They refused to overthink workable solutions and placed enough pressure on the Presidency for President Cyril Ramaphosa to acknowledge the severity of the crisis and assume greater responsibility for the response.

There is a fine line between acting responsibly and allowing a good idea to die beneath layers of red tape. The difference often comes down to confidence.

Civil society must not imitate the bureaucracy it is supposed to hold accountable. We need to assert ourselves, defend workable ideas and remain willing to make officials uncomfortable. If we do not, government opacity and declining transparency will win - and the very change we entered the room to achieve will be buried under another pile of reports, legal opinions and meeting minutes.

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That is more than a quarter of South Africa’s 257 municipalities as we get closer to the end of the month, there appears to be no end to the hardline action.

Treasury’s reasoning is sound. In some respects, it resembles a parent withholding a child’s weekly pocket money when it is repeatedly wasted and the rules are ignored.

But municipalities are not children that can be quickly disciplined.

They have lawyers, unions, political interests and entrenched patronage networks feeding from the public purse. More importantly, when funding is withheld, it is seldom councillors and senior administrators who feel the consequences first. It is residents.

The decision rests on legal grounds: persistent failure to comply with the Municipal Finance Management Act and its regulations, including requirements to adopt funded budgets, address unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, and meet statutory commitments.

This was not Treasury’s first attempt to discipline the errant municipal child. The affected municipalities were given notice and a chance to explain why their funds should not be withheld. Treasury says it also supported them through circulars, engagements, training, and national and provincial forums.

Yet many continued to ignore their legal obligations.

Treasury described this as a “dereliction of fiduciary duties by the political and administrative leadership of municipalities”. It warned that municipal failures were threatening councils and bulk suppliers such as Eskom and the water boards.

Since the 2021/22 financial year, municipalities and their entities have incurred R145.21 billion in irregular expenditure. That bill alone is almost R50 billion larger than Johannesburg’s R97.1 billion budget for 2026/27.

Many affected municipalities are not small councils with almost no economic base.

They include the metropolitans of Buffalo City, Nelson Mandela Bay, Mangaung and Johannesburg, as well large towns such as Emfuleni, Merafong City, Rand West City, Lesedi, Newcastle, Makana and JB Marks.

These municipalities have populations, businesses, property markets and revenue-generating potential. Their collapse cannot simply be blamed on poverty or a weak rates base. In many cases, it results from poor governance, weak revenue collection, political interference, irresponsible budgeting and an almost complete absence of consequence management.

The government’s answer is an extensive redesign of local government, set out in the Reviewed Draft White Paper on Local Government, gazetted on 7 May 2026.

The White Paper contains about 65 recommendations covering municipal structures, political leadership, professionalism of the workforce, finance, infrastructure, citizen participation and accountability.

But even if fully implemented, it will not fix local government on its own. In a best-case scenario, some reforms will take place only between 2027 and 2031, while other legislative and regulatory changes are expected only in the following municipal term.

The municipalities identified by Treasury are in serious financial distress now. They cannot remain in a five-year holding pattern. During that period, several could collapse, fail to pay staff, face protests by unions and communities, and halt services.

The delays surrounding coalition legislation further illustrate the problem. Laws intended to regulate unstable coalitions and limit the abuse of motions of no confidence have not been finalised. Related Municipal Structures Amendment Bills remained before Parliament’s Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs committee as recently as June.

Looking ahead is troubling. Before the 2029 election, the ANC may have new, more ideologically driven leadership, the Government of National Unity could have collapsed, and the MK Party, which has shown a lack of financial and organisational capacity, could be leading KwaZulu-Natal.

The uncomfortable reality is that South Africa lacks a consistently enforced strategy for repairing broken municipalities.

The ballot box remains one of the few ways residents can remove failed political leaders, but elections alone cannot rebuild an institution. Voters can replace a mayor or governing party, only to find the same compromised officials, contractors and patronage networks embedded in the administration.

Nor is withholding funding enough. It may force municipalities to produce compliance plans, but it will not rebuild billing systems, recover stolen money, repair infrastructure or remove incompetent officials.

The answer must be to place the consequences directly on those responsible.

Political office-bearers and administrators who adopt unfunded budgets, ignore financial laws or fail to recover unlawful expenditure must face disciplinary, civil and, where appropriate, criminal consequences.

Failed officials should not be moved to another municipality, and councillors should not be protected by their parties after presiding over financial collapse.

Ultimately, the most important reform is a change in mindset among councillors and administrators who regard public money as part of their personal or political fiefdoms.

National and provincial governments have also failed to act. Too often, political interests have stopped major interventions. They may have issued warnings, provided training and offered support, but allowed deadlines to pass without meaningful consequences.

They have spared the rod and spoiled the child.

It is time to correct that mistake.

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But the police would never be able to do this on their own. Their monopoly on the legitimate use of force has been badly eroded. As for the South African National Defence Force, serious questions have long been raised about its readiness and capacity.

Instead the containment will occur because of the open working relationship between police and South Africa’s enormous private security industry, and the inclusion of community associations - from community policing forums and ratepayers’ associations to neighbourhood watches and street committees.

Private security bosses have openly told public forums that the police have included them in their planning. They now have shared radio communication channels and, of course, using South Africa’s preferred method of communication, they are on exclusive WhatsApp groups together.

Private security firms have mobilised their own tactical response teams, riot vehicles, helicopters and rapid-response capacity to help the resource-constrained police maintain law and order.

What happens after 30 June is anyone’s guess. But it is clear that the country is moving into a new era of sanctioned, privatised policing. What this looks like in the future is difficult to predict, but let’s be frank: private safety and security companies already operate highway patrols, fire response units and ambulance services. In many areas, they are the only visible form of “policing” that exists.

What 30 June may have done is simply hurry up the inevitable.

There is also a great irony in all the planning to counter the March and March protest movement.

On both sides of the proverbial fence - those for the protests and those against them - people ultimately want the same thing: law and order.

And this speaks to the greater issue facing South Africans. We are a people who want peace and security, but we have a state that is increasingly incapable of delivering it.

It is in this void that community structures, including March and March, have taken root.

Community mobilisation only happens when the state fails.

And as to the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeps through the country, two things can be true at once: the state has failed miserably in managing our borders, and it is a human tragedy unlike any I have ever witnessed in our borders to see tens of thousands of foreign nationals effectively trapped in makeshift displacement centres, many of them because they fear for their lives.

But it is worth noting that community groups and volunteers have once again stepped in to fill the void left by the state, helping to provide basic services to displaced migrants. Without their intervention, access to food, sanitation and other immediate necessities would likely have been far more limited.

In a functioning state, there would be fewer service delivery protests if municipalities worked properly. Fewer environmental groups would have to drag the government to court if it simply followed its own environmental laws. And there would be fewer anti-immigrant marches if there was less corruption, better policing, improved governance and practical economic policies that actively tried to increase growth instead of suppressing it.

Over the weekend, I attended a community meeting in Glenwood, Durban, where more than 100 residents turned up in anticipation of this week’s marches. The public was not there to hear the police or Durban Metro Police, neither of which was present, explain a strategy for the area. Instead, they came to hear what the local residents’ association, neighbourhood watches and security companies had put together.

I have been involved in the planning of various Community Policing Forum imbizos over the past four years. If we had 30 people at a meeting, we considered it a success.

There is now such a clear lack of trust in policing that the public would rather listen to volunteers than colonels to put them at ease.

At this community meeting, the leadership used a projector to show where the area’s weak spots may be, which areas may be at higher risk of violence - in this case, areas with larger populations of foreign nationals - and what the action plan would be if widespread looting and violence were to occur, as it did in July 2021.

This emergency plan, which included flyers being distributed at the event and digital intel being shared openly online, was not something created in a handful of days. It has quite literally been a work in progress since the 2021 riots.

The riots of 2021 did something politicians had been trying to do for years: they mobilised a massive social cohesion programme across communities, as people realised that most of us want the same thing - safety - and that to achieve it, we need to work together. The aftermath has increased civic activism.

In my own community, the so-called “white” neighbourhood watch has effectively combined with the so-called “black” neighbourhood watch. I use the phrase “so-called” because neither group is exclusively made up of one race group in any event.

That is how far the needle has moved.

I have said this before: this government, which I still consider an ANC-led government, should be deeply fearful of the rise of community mobilisation.

Communities are talking. They are working towards common goals. And they are absolutely gatvol.

The June marches may be issue-based, and people have every right to agree or disagree with them.

But they represent something far deeper: a recognition, on whichever side of the fence you sit, that the state has largely failed in its most basic duties.

Come the local government elections in November 2026, this discontent is going to come alive in the ballot box. And at the centre of political life in South Africa, power is likely to move further away from political parties and closer to community movements.

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We see the fight for leadership, and the absence of leadership, at almost every level of government: in failing municipalities, collapsing infrastructure, broken water systems, crime-ridden communities and political parties that speak endlessly about renewal while protecting the same old networks of failure.

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But beneath all of this sits an even deeper problem.

South Africa has built a political culture in which leadership too often operates in an unaccountable space. The party failed. The system failed. The coalition failed. The municipality failed. The global economy failed. The previous administration failed.

Almost everyone failed, except the person in charge.

That is the void in our leadership class. It is not only a lack of competence. It is a lack of responsibility.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s handling of the Phala Phala impeachment process is one of the clearest national examples of this problem. Instead of allowing Parliament’s process to run its course, he has turned to the courts to stop or delay it.

Ramaphosa and his supporters will argue that he is entitled to due process. That is true. Every person is entitled to defend themselves but leadership is not only about what one is legally entitled to do. It is also about what one is willing to face.

A president who built his public image on clean governance, constitutionalism and the restoration of institutional integrity should understand this better than most. Phala Phala threatens more than Ramaphosa’s domestic reputation. It cuts into the image he has tried to cultivate beyond South Africa’s borders. He knows that if he is held accountable by a body of his peers, his global leadership ambitions are over.

When leaders fight oversight or hide behind process, they tell the voting public something important. They tell us accountability is acceptable in theory, but just not for them.

And our electoral system makes it easy to hide from accountability. We mostly vote for parties, not individuals. Even in local government, where voters may know their ward councillor, the real executive power in a metro sit with a mayor chosen through party and council processes after the election.

That system creates distance between the voter and the person who eventually holds power. It allows parties to campaign as brands and govern through individuals they may never have properly introduced to the public.

But come 4 November 2026, South Africans should refuse to play along.

This local government election cannot only be about party colours, slogans and old loyalties. It must be about leadership. It must be about the people who will actually sit in mayoral offices.

Yes, voters should ask who their ward councillor is. But they should also ask a bigger question: who does this party want to make mayor?

A serious party puts forward serious people. It selects candidates with a record, a CV, a public history, a governing philosophy and the courage to be known. An unserious party hides behind internal processes, factional compromises and vague promises that “the collective” will decide after the election.

The difference matters.

When we employ someone for a job, we ask for a CV. We check references. We look at past performance. We ask what they have managed, what they have built, what they have failed at, and what they learnt from those failures.

Yet when it comes to mayoral office, one of the most difficult executive jobs in the country, voters are often expected to accept whatever name a party produces after the votes have already been counted.

That must end.

The strongest mayoral candidates should be made uncomfortable in public before they ever get power. They should be tested in public forums, live chats, radio interviews, community meetings and open debates.

Every mayoral candidate should put their CV on the table and be forced to answer tough questions.

What have you led? What budgets have you managed? What institutions have you fixed? What failures carry your fingerprints? What conflicts of interest do you have? Who funds your campaign? What is your plan for water, electricity, billing, roads, waste, housing, corruption and municipal debt? Who will be in your mayoral committee? What will you do in your first 100 days? What will you resign over?

Our vote is a form of interview. If enough of us agree, you get the job.

The era of the party carrying the candidate must end. The era of faceless parties taking collective credit during campaigns and collective cover during failure must end.

The buck must stop with someone.

In 2026, voters should insist on knowing exactly who that someone is.

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The party’s problem is no longer simply that voters are angry. It is that the conditions which once allowed the ANC to dominate South African politics are steadily collapsing. If the country’s economic status quo remains intact, with low growth, few jobs, rampant corruption and weak leadership, then even the most basic trend analysis suggests the ANC could be fighting for political survival within the next decade.

On paper South Africa is still Africa’s largest economy by far with the IMF placing its nominal GDP at $479-billion (R7.98-trillion) – a clear $50-billion more than its second placed rival Egypt, with Nigeria, often touted as our great economic rival, coming in $100-billion behind South Africa. But our growth outlook is what tells the real story with projections placing us at around 1%. We need at least 3-5% to create meaningful change.

That is what makes the recent country risk analysis by BMI, the research company within the broader Fitch group, worth paying attention to. Like many other analysts, BMI expects the ANC’s dominance to fall further, placing its national share of the vote somewhere between 30% and 40%.

By contrast, BMI expects the DA to increase its municipal vote.

But the more revealing data lies in the longer-term movement of the two parties’ support.

In local government elections, the ANC’s decline has been sharp. It won 64.9% of the national municipal vote in 2006, fell to 53.91% in 2016 and dropped again to 45.59% in 2021. On that trajectory, and with the underlying drivers of voter anger, namely unemployment, poor service delivery, crime and corruption, either unchanged or worse, it is reasonable to argue that the ANC could sink below 35% in the November 2026 local government elections.

The DA’s position has been steadier, though not without its own limits. It won about 16.3% of the vote in 2006, rose to 26.9% in 2016, then slipped to 21.62% in 2021. Current projections place it at around 25% in the coming election.

This suggests that South Africa’s political story is not simply one of DA growth replacing ANC decline. It is more fragmented than that. BMI expects service delivery, particularly water, energy and infrastructure, together with crime and corruption, to be decisive in major battlegrounds such as Johannesburg, KwaZulu Natal and the Western Cape. It also expects parties such as the Patriotic Alliance and ActionSA to perform strongly, while leftist opposition parties such as MK and the EFF could struggle with internal conflict and fading momentum.

But the numbers only tell part of the story. What matters more is why voters are moving.

BMI’s report drew not only on its own research, but also on external sources, including work by the Zimbabwe based Sivio Institute, which conducts research on governance and citizen participation in African countries.

Earlier this year, Sivio released survey findings on South Africa, looking at public sentiment towards the Government of National Unity, local government and the broader direction of the country. The results help explain why the ANC’s electoral decline has become so difficult to reverse.

Overall, 70% of respondents across the country rated the performance of their municipality as poor.

Given that the majority of municipalities, about 176 municipalities, in South Africa are controlled by the ANC, this number can clearly be seen as a poll against the party.

Respondents reported deterioration across a basket of everyday issues, including employment opportunities, crime prevention, food security, health care and access to clean water.

The top three priorities identified by respondents were also telling: decent jobs, clean water and sanitation, and reducing crime. These priorities remained consistent across age, gender, location and employment status.

In other words, voters are not asking for abstract ideological promises which is often promised such as expropriation of land without compensation, free national healthcare and preferential employment quotas. These may be important to some voters, but for the vast majority they instead are asking for the basics: work, safety, clean water and functioning government.

The most damaging finding for those in power, however, was on corruption. Asked what hinders effective performance, 69% of respondents identified corruption. That was five times higher than the next answer, incompetence among office bearers, which was cited by 13%. Nepotism was cited by 6%, while 5% pointed to a lack of oversight by councillors.

The response to the Government of National Unity was equally blunt. Asked what hindered its performance, 64% of respondents blamed corruption, while only 7% pointed to ineffective leadership.

That distinction matters. Voters are not merely saying leaders are weak or inexperienced. They are saying the system is corrupt from local to national government. The Madlanga Commission and the Phala Phala controversy make it even more self-evident.

The benchmark for national success was just as revealing. Asked what would show that South Africa was succeeding, most respondents said “well paying jobs for many”. The second most common answer was “corrupt elements in prison”. Home ownership came a distant third which is a win for private property ownership – often seen as the bedrock of every successful democracy around the world.

Taken together, the BMI analysis and Sivio survey point to the same conclusion: the ANC’s decline is not a messaging problem. It is not simply the result of clever opposition campaigning or temporary voter frustration. It is rooted in the lived experience of millions of people who cannot find work, do not feel safe, do not trust government and increasingly cannot rely on basic services such as clean water.

That brings the country back to the central question. If South Africa remains trapped in low growth, high unemployment, corruption, crime and failing infrastructure, the ANC’s decline will not just continue. It may accelerate.

And if those conditions remain unchanged, the issue is no longer whether the ANC can recover lost support in 2026. The harder question is whether, by the middle of the next decade, the party that once dominated South African politics will still exist at all in a form that matters.

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In South Africa, the governing party speaks about “renewal” at every opportunity, especially after political defeat. More recently, in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party spoke about the need for “renewal” after record losses in a series of local elections held in May across Wales, Scotland and England. It may even lead to a leadership challenge.

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The word is most often used to signal that there has been failure, and that a new opportunity has arrived to correct it.

For many South Africans, 4 November will offer a chance to “renew” local governments, many of which have become horrible failures. But the truth is that we do not have to wait for an election every five years to begin that renewal process. We can begin it every single year, if we choose to.

There is a misconception that public involvement in local government begins and ends with voting every five years, after which responsibility is handed over to elected leaders.

In reality, this thinking is part of the reason we have seen such a wholesale collapse in local government.

The public is simply not involved enough throughout the municipal financial year, which runs from July to June, and does not forcefully take up its role in the public participation process.

Currently, municipalities across the country are finalising their draft budgets for the period July 2026 to June 2027. At the same time, they are updating their Integrated Development Plans for the current electoral term.

In both cases, the public has, or should have had, the opportunity to comment on these documents from at least 31 March. Public participation periods vary, from a minimum of 30 days to as long as 60 days in some municipalities.

For residents and business owners, the main concerns will likely be the justification for increases in rates, water, electricity, refuse removal and other tariffs and levies.

It is your right to object. It is your right to demand a clear rationale for why money is being raised, how it will be spent, and what outcomes residents can expect in return.

For too long, our collective apathy has allowed municipalities to pass poor budgets and avoid responsibility when they fail to deliver on their stated outcomes. The public, as well as provincial and national government, have too often failed to demand that municipalities act responsibly.

But we may now be witnessing a shift.

In April, National Treasury severely rebuked the City of Johannesburg for effectively passing an illegal budget for the 2025/26 financial year.

In a letter from Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana to Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero, Treasury said the municipality was in breach of several municipal finance laws, citing unfunded budgets, poor cash flow management, weak financial systems, unrealistic revenue assumptions, overspending and serious non-compliance with reporting requirements.

For activists in South Africa’s leading city, this dressing down came as no surprise. The evidence of a poorly run city is clear for everyone to see - even President Cyril Ramaphosa, who, months before the November 2025 G20 Summit in Sandton, said Johannesburg’s decay was serious, visible and economically damaging.

While Ramaphosa may have been embarrassed by the state of the city, Godongwana’s letter was based on hard facts. It should exert real pressure on Johannesburg’s current draft budget, which is now open for public comment. It should also empower residents and civil society, who now know they are not alone in demanding accountability.

That is a win for residents.

But the pressure is not only being felt in what is arguably the country’s most high-profile dysfunctional metro. It is also being felt in the country’s best-run metro.

After months of legal contestation, and after Cape Town residents questioned whether the city’s 2025/26 budget was lawful, they received an answer.

In a significant ruling, the Western Cape High Court declared the City of Cape Town’s fixed tariffs, implemented in July 2025, unlawful and invalid because they were inconsistent with the Constitution, national legislation and the city’s own tariff by-law.

The city had effectively tied fixed tariffs for services to property valuations, regardless of actual service usage. The applicants were the South African Property Owners Association and AfriForum, with the Cape Town Collective Ratepayers’ Association joining the proceedings as amicus curiae.

There may be no real justice for residents who have already paid these charges over the last 10 months. But the court case has placed a brake on the city’s ability to continue down a path of imposing tariffs without proper consultation and lawful justification.

Municipalities are empowered to raise revenue. They are also constitutionally required to spend that money carefully.

But for too long, municipalities have operated in an accountability void.

It is South Africa’s middle and working classes that carry the greatest social burden.

Uncontrolled tariff increases, inflated municipal property valuations that affect rates, and expensive water and electricity charges caused by years of poor maintenance and government neglect have created an increasingly regressive local taxation regime.

There is no single panacea for the problems driving higher local government charges, unfair policies and regulatory overreach. But one key element in turning the tide is to make sure municipalities follow the law — and, more importantly, that they are held to far higher levels of accountability.

The Community Action Network has developed a useful timeline of the municipal budget process, which can be found at www.can.org.za/budget-timeline/. I urge you to look at it. It shows where and when residents need to get involved in the budgeting process.

Having your voice heard - even when you feel isolated and alone - is not in vain.

Collective voices do work. Fighting back does deliver results. Real renewal is possible and it starts with us.

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It is not difficult to see why this narrative has taken hold. President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged as much in his State of the Nation Address in February 2025 when he said:

“In many cities and towns across the country, roads are not maintained, water and electricity supply are often disrupted, refuse is not collected, and sewage runs in the streets.”

But, as Ramaphosa so often does, he and the governing party, which carry much of the responsibility for this crisis, still sidestepped the real causes and instead pointed to the “design of our local government system”.

Yes, the design of the system does need to be overhauled. But the continued refusal to admit that political leadership is a major cause of municipal collapse is a serious warning sign if the country is ever to fix local government properly.

I fully agree that municipalities covering vast rural, poor areas with almost no meaningful rates base need a different model. But when you compare municipalities with similar fundamentals, such as Msunduzi and Overstrand, it becomes clear that the key difference is often not the system itself, but the political leadership in charge.

If we are honest, municipalities run by the Democratic Alliance are, by and large, more functional and more prosperous than those run by the ANC.

Of course, there are always debates to be had about class, race and geography. Those factors matter. But they are not the deciding factor in whether a municipality succeeds. Leadership matters. Oversight matters. Internal party accountability matters.

The DA is known for enforcing internal discipline, from councillor level upwards. It has shown that it is willing to act even against senior figures in its own ranks, with Mmusi Maimane’s removal remaining one of the clearest examples. There is something in that culture of internal accountability that all South African parties should study.

I genuinely hope the ANC learns from its greatest rival. After all, the DA has certainly learnt from the ANC. Its campaigning style today is unmistakably ANC-inspired: the hats, T-shirts, music, logo-branded clothing, buses and large-scale internal events. Years ago, the DA often looked and felt like a conventional European-style party: orderly, restrained and, frankly, stale. Today it has embraced the energy, symbolism and style of African political campaigning.

It has taken parts of the ANC’s campaign playbook, adapted them, professionalised them, sharpened them and turned them into a modern electoral machine. That is one reason it appears well positioned for major gains in the 2026 local government elections.

There is an important lesson in that. Learning from your strongest opponent requires humility. It means recognising that you do not know everything and that there is value in studying what others do well.

That, to me, is what the ANC has lost: its teachable spirit. It still talks as though it is self-correcting, but it often seems too consumed by its own mythology, too attached to its history and too convinced of its own correctness to truly reorient itself.

This election cycle gives the ANC an opportunity to do something different.

It must accept that it is likely to take a heavy blow and then begin the hard work of rebuilding trust among its own supporters with 2029 and 2031 in mind. That means dissecting how the DA operates as a modern, disciplined, data-driven political party, and then going even further by studying successful parties – not liberation movements that have run their economies into the ground.

I am no admirer of today’s ANC, but I do not believe its total collapse would be in South Africa’s interests. Its century-long history shows that it can change. As long as it exists in credible form, South Africa can still draw on the liberation legacy and moral capital associated with figures such as Nelson Mandela. That remains one of the things that sets this country apart from many other emerging markets.

The ANC can continue to debate and defend its positions on land, health, racial equity and foreign affairs. It can even modernise them for a younger population that cares far less about the Freedom Charter, Cold War loyalties or the old North-South divide.

But it has no future if it continues to be seen as corrupt, ineffective and unwilling to hold its own leaders accountable.

Because, in truth, most South Africans are not asking for miracles. They want affordable running water and reliable electricity. They want decent healthcare, steady work, safe and clean streets, functioning schools and real opportunities for their children.

Above all, they want leaders they can trust with public money to make those things possible.

Until this is fully understood, the narrative that municipalities run by the ANC are by in large dysfunctional will remain.

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Every moment of political energy spent nursing this relationship is time not spent on the real issues at home: a country that cannot grow fast enough, cannot create enough jobs, and cannot stop its major cities and towns from sliding deeper into dysfunction.

South Africa’s municipalities are direct beneficiaries of foreign investment. Foreign direct investment creates jobs, broadens skills and drives local economic growth. A vehicle manufacturing plant can be the difference between a town growing in prosperity and one edging towards decline.

When I lived and worked as a journalist in Richards Bay before 2010, multinationals such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Mondi and other industrial firms with global footprints did more than drive the once small KwaZulu-Natal port town’s success. They created a significant multiplier effect, helping generate hundreds, if not thousands, of local businesses and services. These companies also invested heavily in social responsibility programmes, particularly in skills development and school support, and they reached directly into previously disadvantaged communities to ensure those communities shared in the benefits of local industry.

So when we say the European Union is South Africa’s largest investor, accounting for over 40% of foreign direct investment, we should tie that reality directly to the municipal economies of Buffalo City through Mercedes Benz, Nelson Mandela Bay through Volkswagen, and Tshwane through BMW. Each of these firms anchors layers of suppliers, subcontractors and service businesses, which in turn employ workers and generate local spending. That translates into rates, service payments and wider economic activity. It creates more wealth. There are more than 2,000 EU companies invested in South Africa.

The same logic applies elsewhere. There are more than 600 American companies in South Africa. American firms invest in Johannesburg, Tshwane, Durban and Cape Town. China’s footprint is substantial, and Indian firms have also built a meaningful presence here. Each contributes to real municipal economies.

Iran does not belong in that category. According to a 2024 parliamentary reply, South Africa exported about R360 million worth of goods to Iran and imported about R68 million. According to South African Revenue Service trade data for 2025 and 2026, South Africa’s exports to Iran included higher-value products such as aircraft, helicopter and unmanned aircraft parts (which should be explained), mechanical and medical equipment, along with fruit, vegetables and significant volumes of lamb. The same SARS data shows South Africa’s imports from Iran are led by machinery parts, nuts, dates and carpets. There is no clear evidence of any significant Iranian business footprint in the South African economy.

This is the profile of a marginal relationship kept alive more by politics and memory than by practical value. No serious municipal growth, employment or industrial strategy depends on Iran. The relationship cannot honestly be defended.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC should stop mistaking warped ideological loyalty for national interest. The EU and the United States sit much closer to the centre of South Africa’s real economic life than Iran does. Their continued investment in South Africa signals tangible economic commitment, even amid the erratic rhetoric that sometimes comes from the current U.S. administration.

Both also recognise Iran as a problematic state. The United States formally designates Iran a state sponsor of terrorism, while the European Union has designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation.

That is where the argument must harden. In a stagnant economy with collapsing local government, choosing to preserve political intimacy with Tehran while risking distance from countries that actually invest in South Africa is foolish.

The ANC still has the dominant voice in South Africa’s foreign policy, and it needs to understand this reality. South Africa’s foreign relationships should be judged by what they do for South Africans in the places where they actually live. Do they bring investment? Do they support growth? Do they create work? Do they widen the economic base from which local government survives? The EU does. The U.S. does. China does. India does. Iran does not.

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We are now coming towards the end of the ANC’s local government show. Yes, it has been running for 30 years, and yes, it has been rather long but as your compère tonight, I can assure you: we are entering the finale.

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Under the starry night sky of Johannesburg - the epicentre of municipal failure - we have seen it all. Poverty thrives in the towers of Hillbrow, while, a few suburbs away, dishevelled moms pushing prams followed by Labradors wash their hair in the rain as if this is normal, and temporary, maybe permanent, and someone else’s fault.

Because Joburg - the last scene in the show - for all its concrete and brutality, will be the heart of South Africa’s local government election come November. Come rain, shine, and ruthless crime.

Yes, in Act 1 we had “the fixer” and “the champion of the working class”, Fikile “Razzmatazz” Mbalula, crying for water repairs in Bryanston while blaming the same working class for the crisis.

Yes, we felt the pain of Premier Panyaza “Undercover Boss” Lesufi, forced to take out the government credit card and book yet another hotel room just to have a shower.

And yes, we have endured a shallow Minister of Water — whose name warrants no mention — so out of her depth she wanted nothing more than to wash her hands clean after touching the filth of the unwashed of Johannesburg.

All of this showmanship has been aided and abetted by Jozi mayor Dada “I can’t fix Joburg” Morero, whose performance has been so weak that even his own party agents want nothing to do with him.

This cast of characters has awed, stunned, and repulsed us. Yet none has been as consistently “shocked and surprised” as their producer, director, and benefactor of unearned government salaries - the man who has starred in The Million Dollar Couch; The Good, The Bad and the Mine Magnate Grifter, and; Jurassic Park: Chameleon-in-Chief.

The one. The only. President Cyril Ramaphosa.

In all my years of presenting this awe-inspiring, death-defying, courage-intoxicating story called South Africa, have I ever come across a man able to stand so upright without the support of a backbone, speak with so little conviction - and yet somehow still say nothing at all?

A miracle this unique is only eclipsed by that one-time South African politician who wanted a commission of inquiry into where lightning comes from.

Ramaphosa’s final curtain call will not be remembered for “brave acts” of foreign policy. His name will not be written in the clouds. It will end around 2027 in a cough and a splutter - when cadres become coroners. And instead of being canonised - a gift he wants so badly he may have asked the Pope himself - he will be cannibalised by his own.

As this curtain draws to a close on the once-grand story of the ANC, we can assure you: the production house is already working on spin-off series.

There’s the reality show Naked, Alone and Unemployed, where we explore the lives of former deployees as they attempt the terrifying challenge of finding real jobs - based on merit.

One to really look out for is Daar is nie water op my stoep — a heart-warming story, set in Houghton, of how one family learns to live completely without water and instead finds nourishment in decades of promises tweeted out by a government that left the building years ago.

Many will enter the hit telenovela Scandal! as writers, bringing the show out of retirement. They have experience, after all.

But what, you may ask, is waiting in the wings? What is our next grand act? Who will try to steal the show… and sell it to the Russians, the Chinese, or the Iranians? Who will lead the cast and launch a new season? Can it be better than the last?

My dear audience, may I remind you: this is an interactive show like no other.

You are in charge.

Because it is your vote — yours, and yours alone — that will decide what takes the stage next.

How you vote will determine the content of this show.

And for 60 million South Africans, this story is the greatest show on earth - so make your vote count.

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In the South African context, most civil society organisations exist as a mechanism to first interact with power and then hold it to account. The third, less spoken-about pillar, is fundraising.

They have, for the most part, been extremely successful in exposing government failures - whether in constitutional compliance, foreign policy, mining, or blatant environmental abuses. And it is without doubt because of civil society that key documents and information we now take for granted, are in the public domain.

But what exactly is the legal standing of such organisations? Do they have more power than ordinary citizens?

Resident and ratepayer associations are clearly mandated - formally or informally - to question municipal officials on tariffs and service delivery. Professional bodies fight for regulatory and legal changes that, in their view, will improve standards and make their members’ work easier… and yes, probably wealthier.

In almost every case - and it becomes more acute the bigger the organisation becomes - there is a drive to increase revenue, because activism is not free. Something, somewhere, needs to be paid for.

The great myth about civil society is that it is stacked with an army of do-good volunteers in tie-dye shirts willing to go to extraordinary lengths to improve South Africa. Like any myth, there is some truth to it. But the hard, cold fact is that mobilising, campaigning, and fighting for whatever your cause may be costs money. Sandals are replaced with power suits, ties and judicial gowns.

I was recently interviewed by a doctorate student on civil society’s perspective on transparency, citizen oversight, and accountability mechanisms. And it was while working through those questions that I realised few people understand how civil society organisations operate in the public square - and even fewer understand their influence, power, and perceived place in society.

Large organisations such as the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA), AfriForum, Greenpeace, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa, and many others may be exceptionally vocal in public debate. They speak truth to power as demanded by their vastly different constituencies, and they all take on complex legal matters at some point. But they do not lead any fight - especially one involving civil litigation - without being prepared to go all the way.

South Africa’s large civil society organisations often have significant financial war chests. But it is precisely because of this full-commitment approach that they cannot take on every complaint, grievance, or potential exposé brought to them. Every decision, every major piece of activism, carries a financial burden that must be ring-fenced.

And their credibility relies on them being finishers.

And then there are the predations of a government that is increasingly antagonistic towards civil society - and increasingly flirting with the idea of regulating the sector to prevent “foreign interference”.

This development did not emerge in isolation. Civil society has been so effective at holding government to account that the state now blames its own failures on the very people exposing them - as if the problem is the spotlight, not the rot.

But we must be careful not to elevate civil society to a mantle it should not hold.

Civil society organisations may be juristic persons, but they are not special juristic persons. They are merely vehicles - often highly organised, sometimes well-funded - through which like-minded individuals demand change and action.

I was asked by the doctorate student whether legislation should be changed in the anti-corruption space to give civil society “a place at the table”.

My answer was emphatically no.

What we don’t need is additional legislation creating a class system where better resourced, more vocal, politically astute organisations get a seat at the table, while ordinary citizens who pay their taxes every day don’t. And at some point, some bureaucrat will need to pick winners and losers - and will corrupt that power to their advantage.

I have sat - as have many of my colleagues in the civil society space - in far too many rooms where the communication and documents provided are deemed “confidential” and “must not leave the room”, when in fact it has all been created on taxpayer time and taxpayer money.

Your money. My money.

Instead, we need to drive for greater transparency and accountability - and where we really need change is in making documents public by default.

Greater transparency is not easy. It means more questions and more push-back. But it also demands better thinking, better planning, and stronger systems - because evidence-based change doesn’t happen by accident.

If we really want to change South Africa, we just need to get the basics right. Every municipality and every government department must respect the electorate and stop hiding behind walls of secrecy.

They do this to protect their own interests.

The public must demand access to protect ours.

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While the ANC holds roughly 40% of the national vote, it should no longer control 100% of South Africa’s foreign and economic policy levers.

This leadership failure to grapple with the fundamental question of how we make money - and with whom we make it - has far-reaching consequences, including whether there is cash to fix potholes or fund capital projects so that gogos in the rural hinterland can access water.

This lopsided power imbalance has fuelled the chaos we increasingly see in our foreign policy, most recently in South Africa’s participation alongside Iran in a naval war-games simulation off the coast of Cape Town. One of the more concerning aspects of South Africa’s conduct during this exercise - which also involved China and Russia - was that our government appeared to become concerned about Iran’s inclusion only because it dovetailed with critical negotiations with the United States and South Africa’s bid to remain in AGOA (the African Growth and Opportunity Act), rather than because of Iran’s deadly crackdown on protesters and the communications blackout imposed on a public demanding serious economic and political reform.

Our country’s growth is nearly stagnant, and it has struggled to break consistently above even the government’s generous 1.5% annual growth estimates. To raise living standards and increase GDP per person by just 1%, we would need growth of about 2.2%. To see real change, we need to start growing at around 5% or more, year-on-year, for at least a decade.

But between June 2024 and June 2025, South Africa shed 55,000 full-time jobs and 174,000 part-time jobs. These numbers show no sign of reform.

We are alienating Western powers - among the main purchasers of many of our manufactured goods - while cosying up to extremist states and allowing ourselves to be used as a pawn by rising powers. The problem is that the ANC wing of government risks becoming little more than a patsy for Russia and China, while providing a veneer of moral legitimacy to regimes that openly threaten violence against their own people and our trading partners.

In every instance, they can all easily discard us. Their survival does not rely on our trade or political dexterity.

Instead, we have everything to lose. President Donald Trump’s feelings towards South Africa may be uniquely volatile, but his departure from office in January 2029 will not fundamentally change the broader U.S. outlook on a country that openly courts American adversaries - not merely as trading partners, but as military partners.

And it frustrates me that National Parliament has yet to intervene and have a real discussion about how we build an economic and foreign policy future based on the new political dynamics that exist in our country.

Parliament is the mechanism through which our trajectory can be changed.

If South Africa is serious about rebuilding growth, restoring credibility, and protecting its long-term interests, then Parliament must do its job: interrogate foreign policy choices, test economic strategy against real-world outcomes, and force accountability for decisions that affect every household.

The era of policy-by-default is over. Either Parliament steps up, or the country pays the price for its silence.

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Our government has sided with Venezuela on this matter, thereby supporting Maduro, who by most accounts, was a brutal dictator and whose claim of being the country’s legitimate president is contestable in the public square.

One of the great hypocrisies of our government has been its ability - or at least its intent - to portray itself as a moral authority on the global stage, while failing to deliver even the most basic services back home.

We are such a wealthy country with immense possibilities. I truly believe this. Yet when we have children drowning in school pit latrines, collapsing infrastructure, and about 65 people being murdered a day - with only about 11% of those murders resulting in a guilty conviction - I find it difficult to take our government seriously on just about any global moral issue.

I will continue to maintain that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s posturing on the global stage has less to do with South Africa’s real, long-term economic interests and more to do with securing his own short-term legacy as a global statesman, while his reputation back home is lukewarm at best.

I am no expert on international relations or international law, but I do know that it exists in practice — mostly around creating an enabling framework for global trade. Most states comply because it oils the wheels of commerce, but big, powerful states can ignore the rules more easily.

At a local level, South Africa could - and has - ignored Southern African Development Community (SADC) agreements and protocols when it suits our government’s internal interests. Simply put, we make up about 51% of total SADC GDP and effectively fund the budgets of many of our neighbours through the Southern African Customs Union subsidy system. We have the power to change our mind.

It is not that countries or people in power deliberately want to break down law and order. It is that they can do so without consequence - and therefore they do, when it suits their own interests.

If the Zondo Commission of Inquiry and the more recent Madlanga Commission of Inquiry have taught us anything, it is this: if a person in a position of power believes they can get away with what many would call acts of criminality, they will pursue those actions.

The fact that not one senior ANC member fingered by the Zondo Commission has ever been prosecuted - and that many remain in government - is a clear indication that where there is power, there is often no justice.

In my hometown, there are large areas of land that have been effectively hijacked, where brick-and-mortar houses are being constructed without permission or legal access to services. Despite years of rate-paying citizens complaining about the growth of what many believe are mafia-owned territories, the law and the municipality have failed to act.

Similar hijacked properties exist across the country, and law-abiding citizens feel powerless and helpless in trying to stop these encroachments.

The only plausible explanation for these land grabs continuing is that they have political cover.

Power trumps justice.

It is unfair, it is unjust, but it is true.

If we truly want justice to be fair, then we need to hold every government institution, every person - and on a geopolitical stage, each nation - to the same standard.

And the best place for us to start is at local government level.

We may not individually control the justice system, but we can, through our vote, enact a form of justice by removing political leaders at the ballot box - and ultimately shape not only local, but national and foreign policy too.

Our local government elections will not be won on what a leader thinks about Israel and Gaza; whether they believe in a multipolar world or not; or whether they defend dictatorships or believe Somaliland is a sovereign state.

Instead, our local elections - which will hopefully occur in November - will be fought on the battleground of access to water, safety and security, local economic development, and yes: potholes, parks, and verge maintenance.

Yes, it is important to stand up for the globally oppressed. Yes, it is important to call out global bullies. And yes, it is important to stand for justice.

But if we really want our voices to matter beyond the news cycle or social media headlines, we need to stay razor-focused on the issues back home in order to build genuine credibility.

The global geopolitical chaos of today will be replaced by the global geopolitical chaos of tomorrow. And the quicker we get our house in order, the more effectively we can try and shape global events.

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We have failing infrastructure. We have ageing infrastructure. We have sub-standard maintenance - and in too many places, no maintenance at all. We have polluted water sources, while we continue to pollute our rivers on a massive scale. And through all of it, there is almost no consequence for any of it.

And this crisis is not happening unnoticed; it is just that no one in power knows what to do. President Cyril Ramaphosa has instituted two Presidential Task Teams to help resolve the crisis, both in Gauteng and in eThekwini, but this is more about politics than actual intervention.

Ramaphosa knows that losing political power in Gauteng and eThekwini would be catastrophic to his party’s fortunes.

Furthermore, what we’ve come to learn about national power is that it has little impact - if any - on persuading failing municipalities, so often tasked with delivering potable water and removing wastewater, to act in any profound manner.

The truth that underpins all of this is simple: there is no consequence for inaction. Money keeps changing hands. Contracts keep getting issued. Delivery, if it happens at all, is more a by-product than a prescribed outcome.

When the political elite hear the words “water crisis”, too many of them understand it as a get-rich scheme — from water tankers to bulk water projects that always overrun on costs.

We can’t change that overnight. And that, to me, is the real crisis inside our water crisis.

City and water authority officials do not feel any heat for poor leadership, poor execution and poor results.

Instead, what we hear is whining about a lack of funding. We hear mea culpas, not lateral, solution-driven thinking.

Yes, we need money. But if we were truly hard up for capital, then surely cultural projects like erecting statues and changing town and street names should not be happening. Excessive ministerial junkets should be off the table and the national airline – SAA – would not constantly be bailed out.

We could go further - brutally - in redistributing funds. We could pull back some international obligations, from our case against Israel to ending all assistance to Cuba and exiting military interventions across Africa.
We could also flex local power and rewrite the rules of the SADC customs union in our favour.
We could end the Covid-19 Relief Grant.

But none of this will happen.

The point I am making is that South Africa does not lack the money to fix our desperate water crisis. We simply lack the political will. Our national political priorities are elsewhere.

Because if there was political will, the water crisis in Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality in the Free State - which is close to a decade old - would have been resolved. Instead, political parties active in the municipality appear more concerned about changing the name of its main town, Harrismith.

The municipality’s water service agency — Maluti-a-Phofung Water (Pty) Ltd - is so defunct that it failed to honour its tax obligations and went for several years without a functional board. All the while, large tracts of the municipality have been without water.

Meanwhile, in Durban, the closure of beaches over the festive season has become the norm, not the exception.
The failure by the city’s political leadership to recognise the link and importance of the beaches in the economic cycle, from retail to real estate, is blind ignorance.

And instead of redirecting every spare rand to fixing the city’s wastewater treatment works, which continue to flush millions of litres of sewage into the ocean every day, the city erected statues of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. I have no issue with either man, but each statue cost R22-million. I honestly believe these two men would be horrified to know that money that could have been used to protect millions of people from bacterial infection was instead spent on vanity statue projects honouring them. Ironically, Tambo’s statue is on the beach front.

I firmly believe the 2026 local government election will be driven by the water crisis in our country.

If leaders do not visibly advocate for cutting the fat on glamour projects - and do not actively campaign for more funding to be diverted towards water security - many of them will be voted out of office.

And I sense a growing anger across the country. From Bekkersdal in Gauteng to Tulbagh in the Western Cape, people are angry.

They are tired of empty promises. But mostly they are tired of their dignity being disrespected by blue-light brigade leaders who only seem interested in their problems when elections are around the corner.

If I were in political office, I would seriously fear the growing wrath of a crisis-ridden nation - with the water crisis being the last straw.

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That is why the G20 is meeting there. That is why every major sporting and globally relevant cultural event takes place in the city of gold and that is why Joburg matters.

Few recall the Democratic Alliance’s 2006 coalition victory in Cape Town under Helen Zille. But almost everyone remembers the high-stakes drama in Johannesburg’s council chambers after the landmark 2016 local elections, when Herman Mashaba became the city’s first DA mayor.

Mashaba, a virtual unknown to many South Africans, became an overnight household name.

While the DA’s Cape Town win paved the way for its 2009 takeover of the Western Cape- eventually pushing the ANC out of serious contention there - it was the 2016 Johannesburg elections that many see as the true political turning point.

Because Johannesburg - home to Soweto and the ANC’s headquarters, Luthuli House - had fallen.

To give a clear example of the power of the city, over two decades ago I was a journalist in Zululand, covering numerous violent protests at the University of Zululand. The university, alma mater to figures like Blade Nzimande and Constitutional Court Judge President Raymond Zondo, was a hotbed of unrest.

Political agitators often stoked the flames of discontent, usually to gain leverage over university leadership. But the real fuel was the chronic failure of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) to deliver on its promises. Year after year, students were denied access to residences or barred from progressing academically because of unpaid fees and withheld results.

These protests were intense - marked by arson, campus evacuations, suspended classes, and the riot police using non-lethal force to restore order.

Yet, outside of Zululand and the university community, few noticed.

Why? Because the main campus is tucked away in KwaDlangezwa, a rural village outside eSikhawini, near of Richards Bay. The unrest remained geographically and politically contained. The local dynamics - primarily between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party - had little resonance beyond KwaZulu-Natal.

That changed in 2015.

Suddenly, the same grievances found a national stage when the University of the Witwatersrand – Wits - became the epicentre of the #FeesMustFall movement. The reason? Location. Wits sits in the heart of Johannesburg, South Africa’s cultural and financial hub. Images of students being arrested went viral. Now the issue of NSFAS and student fees were no longer a provincial matter impacting poor students in rural universities - they had become a national crisis, impacting middle-class families.

Whether the movement achieved its goals is still debated. But one thing is clear: without the involvement of major Johannesburg-based universities and the middle-class in general - the issue would never have reached the national consciousness.

Johannesburg matters. It is the centre of middle-class life in South Africa. It is a city of aspiration, and hope. It is our El Dorado.

And that’s the lens through which we must view the Johannesburg Water Protest held on 1 November. Hundreds of residents, across class and race, came together with a unified message against the local government: the city is in a water crisis because of poor leadership.

Protests in Johannesburg are nothing new. But this one was different. And this time, they were heard.

In the past, a mayor might have delegated the task of receiving a protest memorandum to a junior official. But this time, Mayor Dada Morero showed up in person.

Helen Zille, widely seen as a frontrunner for the 2026 Johannesburg mayoral race, was also present. She understood the significance of the moment.

The political headwinds of change are clearly blowing.

Civic discontent is a central feature of Johannesburg, and its profile is now being elevated unlike ever before.

I have no doubt that communities across the country took note of Johannesburg’s civic uprising - and many will follow suit. Politicians, unless blinded by arrogance, will be forced to listen.

The future of governance at every level in South Africa will hinge on narrow margins. Ignoring any constituency now comes at a steep political cost.

This is a massive challenge for any governing political party with a poor record in any democratic state. Just six years ago, a short campaign of positive press in newspaper headlines still had the ability to move the dial - but that is ancient history now.

The US-based satirical news website The Onion published an outlandish piece in 2007 titled “Media Landscape Redefined by 24-Second News Cycle.” It was clearly meant to be a joke in our then-reality of broadsheet and tabloid newspaper options, as well as the 6 pm and 8 pm news bulletin cycles. The 24-hour news channel business was dominated almost exclusively by CNN and the BBC. eNCA — South Africa’s first 24-hour news channel - only launched in June 2008.

In this spoof piece by The Onion, it claimed that CNN had started CNN:24, providing a full bulletin in just 24 seconds with headlines such as “Ford No Money Everyone Fired”, “Iraq Bomb Kill Truck”, “Dow High Now”, and “Squirrel Water Skis.”

In the modern news cycle, this type of reporting is not unusual at all. We call these hashtags — #SquirrelWaterSkis.

The piece claimed that an “ace reporter” no longer needed to command the language they reported in but simply had to shout out keywords. Watch any video or read content on any social media platform like X, TikTok or YouTube - it’s all about keywords that can improve the content’s ability to “go viral.”

It also took a stab at and correctly predicted - how quotes would be taken out of context due to limited space, because “the sound bite is going to be a fifth of a second.” It said that if a politician remarked, “Not only do illegal guns kill people in the inner cities faster than anything else, but more young blacks die of gunshot wounds than any other group,” it would be reported as “kill people” or “blacks die” — and that’s all anyone would remember.

The infamous song by The Kiffness titled “Zol” is a perfect example. Just 10 seconds of an April 2021 speech by former health minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma - which in full stretched several minutes while she discussed Covid-19 restrictions on tobacco and alcohol - became an anthem for the absurdity of the lockdown rules implemented by the South African government.

The time needed to grab your attention on social media is now so minimal that one or two words explaining a story clearly will generally win your click and your share.

Finally, what has fundamentally changed the power of news is that everyone is reporting it. Because everyone is a citizen journalist, standing out from the crowd is hard.

Major news outlets are being challenged by everyone. YouTubers and podcasters command bigger audiences - and therefore greater influence - than entire television news networks.

For a politician or political party, this provides both a significant opportunity and a challenge.

The opportunity is that they can self-report, build grassroots momentum, and aim to create viral content. They can also circumvent once-hostile media outlets.

The DA has done this with better success than others, hosting “breaking news” events on social media and regular podcasts with its various leaders. They are softball interviews made to look like real news events.

They can communicate directly with their voter base, and those on the fence can be reached without any major cost.

Previously, politicians had to compete for limited newspaper space and minutes on television news. Political parties had to court media houses, essentially buying space through adverts and press junkets. That doesn’t matter at all now.

But while the opportunity is massive, the challenge is that single media events, moments, breaking news stories and even exposés no longer work.

Despite the time to grab the attention of a media consumer being approximately 10–20 seconds — even less than The Onion’s spoof prediction — what truly matters is the long arc of the story.

Bizarrely, in an era where news reports must be short and everyone is pressed for time, time still matters in how we formulate ideas. A political party’s favourability is decided over a period of time and is influenced by micro-incidents that eventually create a narrative in the voter’s mind.

And once a narrative is built, it is very difficult to change in the short term. That too takes time.

This is the existential threat facing the African National Congress as South Africa’s governing party. The narrative for many South Africans is unfavourable to the party, not because of one moment, but because of multiple - possibly thousands - of moments over the last decade., the latest being the Madlanga Commission uncovering the nexus between the ANC, gangsters and highly ranked crooked police members. And every moment the ANC’s fail to recognise that their arc lies in dangerously unfavourable territory, it pushes their path to recovery even further into the future.

A recent clean-up campaign by the ANC-led City of Johannesburg may track well on social media among supporters, but the systemic issues of no water, broken traffic lights and potholes over an extended period will be difficult to undo. The ANC-led coalition will likely lose power no matter how many brooms they deploy to the streets between now and the anticipated November 2026 local government election. They are out of time.

Black swan events do occur, but they are a one-in-many-million occurrence. If a party’s strategy to win requires such, it will lose.

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Because, even when the ideas are good, even when the intention is there, the government they lead has repeatedly, for more than a decade, mostly failed to implement its policy direction.

Their recent announcement of a “10-Point Plan” to rescue the economy is a case in point.

There are smart people within that cohort of 80-plus members of the NEC, but part of the reason their plans are mostly ignored or poorly implemented probably lies in the fact that there are over 80 people making the decisions.

The NEC is an archaic, Soviet-era body that allows the responsibility for bad decisions and poor implementation to be spread evenly across the group, meaning no one is blamed.

This means the ANC has no way to be nimble internally in changing positions and aligning projects to what is fit for purpose, budget, and reality. Instead, the only way they can truly gauge success is through the local, provincial, and national elections.
And even then, despite horrendous outcomes in elections going back to 2016, the party is unable to look internally and fix its core — its heartbeat — the NEC.

What has instead happened is that the same people are recycled in different capacities depending on the faction in control.

I say this as someone who has been part of various organisations that have taken a scalpel to reposition their purpose.

When I worked in the media industry and the digital revolution was gaining momentum, leadership teams were forced to cut vast numbers of non-profitable positions. This began around 2012 and, if you’ve been following the media industry, has continued until 2025 — and will likely continue going forward.

Modern media is a cash-intensive, low-margin business, and leadership teams understand that survival means being nimble and responsive.
In 2012, the Mail & Guardian boldly stated they would follow a principle of “Digital First” — all stories would break online first. In May 2025, they embarked on a round of retrenchments because their print media was officially no longer profitable. Soon, they will only be digital.

From my first newsroom experience at the Sunday Telegraph in London over 20 years ago — where there were two floors of staff dedicated to one weekly publication in London’s then-tallest and most sought-after address, Canada Square — to now hearing how most newsroom buildings are empty, almost dormant, with teams working remotely and over WhatsApp groups, media as an industry has gone through significant transformation. The advent of AI has changed the game further.

In my civil activism work, I worked for an organisation that took a strategic decision to cut an entire department from its operations. The reason was not entirely financial, but instead focused on not wanting to spread the organisation too thin and lose focus on its core objectives.
In the examples above, management teams took responsibility for the future of their respective organisations and, if they got it wrong, would no doubt face the consequences.

Yet, the ANC’s NEC is just too much of a behemoth to hold any real accountability. Moreover, NEC members do not collect a salary from the ANC but are instead employed in a plethora of positions across government.
The fact that NEC members face no public consequence for poor decisions and poor implementation clearly manifests in the lack of consequence management further down the chain.
It is precisely because of this untenable situation — where failure carries no responsibility or reprisal — that we find countless SOEs, municipalities, and government departments in such massive states of dysfunction.

Taking responsibility for failure is fundamental to any person or organisation’s growth.

They need to make a tectonic internal shift; otherwise, just like the Soviet era, they will chaotically disintegrate and become part of history rather than making it.

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Accountability: Mayor must resign if water isn’t restored.
Budget: City must ensure enough funds to pay contractors.
No Political Interference: Officials must deliver without councillor or board meddling.
Immediate Relief: Sufficient, managed tankers must reach all areas now; throttling only with notice and phased out quickly.
Credibility & Care: Redirect G20 “beautification” funds to essential services.
Responsiveness: Calls must be answered; leaks and outages fixed quickly, not delayed to weekends/nights for overtime.
Transparency: One clear, accurate action plan required, shared with the President’s Working Group and civil society.

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The City of Gold is collapsing before our very eyes. Over the last six years or so, I have travelled to Johannesburg four to six times a year, and on each visit the deterioration is stark. I cannot help but think of Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 and the slums where the aliens lived—areas unworthy of care, attention, or leadership.

From potholed roads in main centres, to stolen streetlights, stripped power cables, growing heaps of refuse, shacks popping up in spruits, hijacked buildings, vendors on nearly every corner trying to eke out a living, and an ever-growing army of bin pickers, the poverty, social decay, and infrastructural collapse are unlike anything I have seen unfold over such a short period of time.

Nearly a year ago, an X account called @Jozi_My_Jozi exposed this collapse using historic images on Google Street View. But a year ago feels like a lifetime in a city now without a sustained water supply. Earlier this year President Cyril Ramaphosa was rightly humiliated when G20 diplomats came face-to-face with the decay, forcing him to implement a Presidential Task Team. The organisation I work for, WaterCAN, has a seat at that table, but the reality is that the President’s embarrassment alone, and his attempt to throw people at the problem, will not solve the crisis.

The G20 will have to be hosted on an island. Again, Blomkamp’s Elysium, starring Matt Damon, perfectly encapsulates what will happen. Global leaders and those connected with the event will enter a bubble of order, opulence, and first-world amenities, while the people who fuel the economy and make such events possible are left outside with broken infrastructure, broken promises, and social contracts in tatters.

While the protest action in Coronationville and nearby suburbs has drawn attention in recent weeks, specifically over water shortages, this is merely another chapter in the crisis. The only difference is that the temperature and violence have escalated. When you have a government that treats you as second-class citizens in your land of birth, violence often becomes the only language they listen to. Our history reminds us of this - the Bambatha Uprising, the Boer Wars, Sharpeville, the Soweto Uprising, and many others.

Right now, the City of Johannesburg has no functional government: cadre deployment, corrupt bureaucrats, and self-serving politicians rule. For years, activists aggressively campaigned to force the city to act and address ongoing issues. But at some point, they realised that merely demanding from outside was insufficient, leading to little, if any, decisive action from a municipality that clearly fits the definition of dysfunctional. So they formed unified structures and began to engage directly with the city hoping to find a constructive middle ground.

Yet despite civil society’s attempts to be civil, unified, and determined to find solutions, the city has mostly failed to act. Just recently, the Johannesburg Water Forum issued one of the most damning statements yet, so severe that it is incredulous that Mayor Dada Morero and his executive team have not already been dismissed by their own political parties. The Forum declared that Johannesburg faces a humanitarian crisis as millions endure dry taps and broken infrastructure, violating their constitutional rights. Water outages, worsening since 2023, threaten public health and education, disproportionately harming disadvantaged communities. They argue that decades of mismanagement and political instability have caused a systemic collapse, with both affluent suburbs and informal settlements crippled by rising tariffs and deteriorating services. Residents are being billed heavily for poor or non-existent delivery, while corruption and neglect force many to rely on unsafe water sources.

Similarly, the Joburg Crisis Alliance has condemned the city for severe financial mismanagement, reckless overspending, and diverting funds to political projects instead of essential services. They highlight the rapid deterioration of water, electricity, sanitation, refuse removal, and road infrastructure as evidence of deepening urban decay. Corruption, weak leadership, and instability in senior positions, the Alliance argues, have eroded accountability and created a governance crisis. They are calling for urgent audits, investigations, and national intervention, as well as meaningful citizen participation in budgeting and oversight, to restore accountability and rebuild public trust.

In 2023, the Harvard Growth Lab, which has no real skin in the game, released a report stating that South Africa is experiencing a collapse in state capacity, driven by policy failures, mismanagement, patronage, and institutions burdened with mandates beyond their core capabilities. While this was written in rebuke of the national government, it could easily have been written for Johannesburg and at least another 100 municipalities across the country.

If you are unwilling to engage, so be it. But if you care about the future of this country - not just for yourself, but for your family and their future families - being stagnant and hoping for a plane ticket “down under” is not a workable strategy.

We cannot continue to let the canary die. We need to stop the gas of maladministration, corruption, and weak leadership from continuing to poison our economy, our infrastructure, and our country’s institutions. Blomkamp’s dystopian depictions exist on the silver screen as reminders of what we have been and what we could become. Such films remind us that the world falls apart when good people do nothing.

But we are not in a movie. There is no director’s cut or hero character. Our individual acts of rebellion may not be remembered, but the consequences of inaction will last for decades to come, if they are not already upon us.

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But the appetite for and need to take polling data seriously is changing rapidly, especially after recent data placed the once-dominant ANC at a paltry 29% nationally.

A week is often considered long in politics, but we are now witnessing a decade of change - once unimaginable - where the ANC and its various spheres of governmental influence are in rapid decline.

This remarkable shift in the body politic of South Africa, which we are witnessing in real time, contains as many possibilities as the Enigma Machine. Even modern-day Large Language Models - what we know as artificial intelligence - would battle to map the possible outcomes. Because we have not been here before.

And that is precisely why the DA released, or more likely leaked, its internal polling to News24 in mid-August. They need not only to galvanise their own support but to build momentum early on while systematically aiming to demoralise the ANC - not just internally, but more importantly, among its voters.

Without trying to sound too dramatic, the DA is engaging in psychological warfare - and it’s based on science.

They have planted an anchor in the sand - a psychological concept known as the anchoring effect - by positioning the ANC as a “sub-30% party.” All subsequent reporting in the media will now revolve around that key number of 29% until it is disproven by a large variation from a trusted source. This excludes the ANC, which, as far as I can recall, has never released its own polling data.

Having set the narrative, the DA is also banking on another political psychology principle: the Bandwagon Effect. Quite simply, it means people like to jump on the proverbial bandwagon of the group perceived to be winning or carrying momentum. This was the subject of a controlled Danish study (Dahlgaard et al., 2017), which found that voters tend to “float along” with parties perceived as gaining support. The effect is linked to the need for conformity, social belonging, the wisdom of crowds, and a very human trait: not wanting to back a loser.

Furthermore, the DA has a relatively strong record in government - most notably in the Western Cape and in municipalities such as Midvaal in Gauteng and Howick in KwaZulu-Natal. Conversely, the ANC’s record over the last decade has been atrocious, with annual Auditor-General Reports on local government reading like a failing school report card.

And while the DA rises, the ANC — which has been a mainstay of our political discourse for over 30 years - is in rapid decline, unlike anything I ever imagined. Unemployment sits at 33%, only 13% of municipalities received clean audits - most of them DA-run - and South Africa faces a water crisis where nearly 50% of the country’s water systems do not produce safe drinking water.

The ANC’s greatest recent “success” has been the (almost) ending of load-shedding - but they created the problem 20 years ago, so it is difficult to claim this as a victory.

Meanwhile, the proposed National Dialogue that the ANC wing of the coalition government plans to take across the country will likely backfire. Instead of being a platform for the public and government to come closer together, it will likely become months of gruelling meetings where ANC leaders will be forced to apologise for their failures - again. Its inaugural session earlier this month offered a window into the chaos that will follow. I cannot imagine a worse political tactic.

Working with communities and water activists across the country, it is clear to me that while the water crisis is not exclusively the fault of the ANC, they carry the most blame. At a local level - where accountability matters most - roads, water, electricity, and refuse collection, regardless of which sphere of government they fall under, are perceived by the public to be the responsibility of local municipal leadership. ANC leaders at local level are heading into troubled waters.

The DA may be out early with its polling data, but as South Africans, we have more than enough living data around us every day to know that the ANC government has run out of ideas, leadership, and vision. They have failed, not at everything, but the things that matter to modern South Africa - and it will take more than a series of campaigns and mea culpa indabas to turn their fortunes around.

The party of liberation has a serious problem on its hands.

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