South Africans do not debate local government in the abstract. They live it – in the three hours they spend filling buckets of water before dawn. In the sewage running down the street in a neighbourhood that has lodged the same complaint for two years. In the darkness after yet another substation failure that a municipality had been warned about and chose to ignore.
This is the local government in too many parts of SA. Not a policy failure, but a daily, grinding betrayal of communities that were promised something better and have waited, with diminishing patience, for far too long.
The failures in our municipalities are not random. They’re the predictable consequence of weak governance, hollowed-out technical capacity and, in too many cases, outright mismanagement of public resources.
Ageing infrastructure has been neglected for decades. Revenue collection has collapsed in municipalities that then plead poverty while sitting on unspent conditional grants. The result is a local government system that is, in too many places, not fit for purpose.
As the national government, we’re confronting this directly. In the water and sanitation sector, we’re investing in bulk infrastructure, rebuilding technical capacity at the municipal level, and tightening coordination across all spheres of the government.
We’re moving with urgency away from the cycle of emergency interventions and patch-up repairs toward sustainable infrastructure that can meet growing demand and withstand the pressures of climate, population growth, and time.
These investments are real, necessary, and ongoing. But I will not pretend that the national investment alone can fix what’s broken at the local level. It cannot. And any politician who tells you otherwise is not being honest.
The hard truth is that service delivery lives or dies at the municipal level. It depends on a mayor who takes the 3am call about a burst main. Where that leadership exists, municipalities work. Water flows. Potholes get fixed. Indigent households receive the support they are entitled to, and communities grow.
Where that leadership is absent or where it has been captured by factional interests and personal enrichment, communities suffer. And they have been suffering for long enough.
Accountability cannot be optional. Municipalities must perform, and where they do not, there must be real consequences. Not shuffled officials, not relocated cadres, not quietly buried audit findings. Real consequences management must take effect.
Public resources must be managed with integrity, and those who abuse that trust must answer for it.
The national government will continue to use every tool available in this regard. Financial oversight, administrative intervention, technical support, and where necessary, the full weight of the law. We are not passive observers of municipal dysfunction. We are obligated to act and we will.
But there’s a limit to what any intervention from above can achieve without something equally powerful from below. We’re approaching the local government elections. The quality of governance at the municipal level will not change unless the choices made at the ballot box change. This is not political rhetoric but a constitutional logic.
Voters elect councils. Councils elect mayors. Mayors appoint administrations. The chain of accountability runs directly from the voting booth to the tap in your kitchen.
When communities return the same leadership that has failed them, because of habit or loyalty, or because they were not given enough information to choose differently, they absorb the cost of that choice in their daily lives.
When communities demand better and vote accordingly, municipalities feel it. Leadership feels it. The system responds. Voting, in this context, is not symbolic. It is the most powerful service delivery intervention available to all South Africans.
It is how you signal what you will accept. It is how you enforce accountability in a way that no policy directive, no audit report and no ministerial statement, including this one, can replicate.
SA does not lack the capacity to build municipalities that work. We have the technical knowledge, the legislative framework, the financial resources and, critically, the people. What has been missing, in too many places, is the leadership that will put those things to use in service of communities rather than in service of themselves.
The upcoming elections are an opportunity to change that. Not gradually. Not eventually. But immediately. Elect leaders with credible records or credible plans, or even both. Demand answers about water, sanitation, financial management, and infrastructure maintenance before the elections, not after. Hold candidates to specific commitments. And when those commitments are broken, use the next election the same way.
The government will continue to invest, to support and to intervene where necessary. That is our obligation, and we take it seriously. But the most powerful vote cast in favour of functional local government will not come from a cabinet meeting or a policy review. It will come from a citizen in a voting booth.
Use your vote to change your life. Use it wisely and decisively. Most importantly, use it!
- Seitlholo is an MP and deputy minister of water and sanitation
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