Sewage flows in Scotts Farm, Makhanda (2024). Photo: Lucas Nowicki
What we are witnessing in Makhanda is not only a story of potholes, sewage spills and dry taps, but a deeper issue of state capacity itself. Does the South African state still have the ability to fulfil its most basic mandate? The Makana local municipality, encompassing Makhanda (Grahamstown) and other areas, has become emblematic of the crisis of local government in South Africa.
Despite repeated court interventions, oversight hearings by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), and auditor general disclaimers of accountability, the municipality remains unable to deliver the most basic services. Makana municipality has received treasury debt relief, provincial revitalisation funds, smart meter rollouts, and water treatment plant support, yet service delivery remains catastrophic. The issue then cannot be the scarcity of resources but the incapacity and hierarchical structure of municipal governance itself.
The municipality truly stands as a case study to interrogate the concept of state capacity. Drawing on anarchist political theory, it is clear that state capacity is a technocratic illusion and is not merely eroded but becomes a structural problem that directly affects everyone. Rather than repeating cycles of administrative intervention, dissolution orders and technocratic fixes, we need to start to imagine alternatives rooted in decentralised, participatory and directly democratic forms of organisation. Makana municipality is both a microcosm of South African state failure and a site of potential experimentation in community-driven alternatives to statist governance.
Grahamstown, renamed Makhanda in 2018, has long been known as a cultural and educational centre, home to Rhodes University and the biggest festivals in Africa — the National Arts Festival and the Science festival (Scifest). Yet, in stark contrast to its symbolic capital, the town has become infamous for municipal dysfunction. Service delivery protests, crumbling infrastructure and financial collapse have turned Makana municipality into a case study of state incapacity. If a relatively small municipality with substantial symbolic importance cannot be stabilised, what does this suggest about state capacity nationally? State capacity, far from being a neutral resource, is a historically and structurally constrained project bound by hierarchies, centralisation and elite capture. This means that state-led service delivery will always be compromised.
Makana reflects the broader crisis: hollowed-out institutions, endless oversight interventions and no meaningful improvement in the lives of its residents. Scholars of state capacity define it as the ability of public institutions to implement policy, raise and account for revenue, maintain infrastructure and enforce predictable rules. A capable municipality collects revenue, plans capital works, operates basic systems and provides oversight. Makana’s evidence points to systemic erosion of capacity: depleted revenue collection, collapsed procurement controls and repeated audit disclaimers that make planning and service delivery impossible. When capacity fails, rights to water, sanitation and dignity are violated at scale.
The National Development Plan (NDP) explicitly foregrounds “building a capable and developmental state” as a central objective. The discourse of capacity-building has become a technocratic mantra: municipalities must be “capacitated,” officials trained and oversight structures tightened. Yet, despite three decades of capacity-building rhetoric, local government failure persists and, in many places, worsens. Despite this mountain of oversight and litigation, daily life in Makhanda continues to deteriorate. Each new administrator parachuted in from Bhisho or Pretoria arrives with fanfare, but leaves behind the same broken pumps and unpaid contractors. Court rulings demand compliance, but paper judgments do not fix leaking pipes. Even the SAHRC’s hearings, important as they are, cannot deliver water to a resident in Joza or clean sewage from the streets of Alicedale. The state has shown, again and again, that it cannot capacitate itself. The interventions are hierarchical, technocratic and temporary. They do not build local skills, they do not democratise decision-making and they do not make residents any less dependent on the very institution that has failed them.
Recently, the SAHRC again summoned the Makana mayor and municipal manager in a subpoena hearing to answer for service delivery failures. As the SAHRC’s Henk Boshoff noted, this was not the first time the commission has had to call Makana’s leadership to account. Courts have repeatedly intervened, including a dramatic 2020 ruling ordering the dissolution of the municipality. Meanwhile, the auditor general continues to issue disclaimer opinions, unable to verify finances because basic records have collapsed. This is the worst possible outcome for an audit, indicating a pervasive lack of documentation or evidence, often linked to systemic issues like mismanagement and poor governance. The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) has even executed search-and-seizure warrants at municipal offices to probe maladministration.
The SAHRC has framed Makana’s failures as violations of fundamental human rights, a diagnosis that inadvertently affirms the anarchist critique: a state that reproduces dysfunction cannot be the guarantor of the rights it promises. Its recommendation to dissolve the municipal council, on the grounds of a “blatant disregard” for directives, is more than a rebuke; it is an acknowledgment that municipal reform has reached a dead end. This is where anarchist perspectives become instructive, for they shift the focus away from endless cycles of reform and replacement, and toward prefigurative, community-driven forms of organisation already visible in Makhanda.
If even a state institution such as the SAHRC accepts that dissolution is the only remaining option, raising the question, what comes after dissolution? Anarchist theory challenges the very premise of state capacity as a desirable or achievable project. For many working-class people, it is clear the state is not a neutral vessel of service delivery but an inherently hierarchical institution designed to centralise power, extract resources and entrench domination. The state, by its nature, operates as an apparatus of coercion and cannot be democratised in any substantive sense. Focusing on capacity misses the core problem: states are structurally incapable of truly participatory, egalitarian governance. The municipal crisis, from this perspective, is not merely about a lack of skills or corruption but about the inherent dysfunction of centralised, bureaucratic rule.
The solution then lies in prefigurative politics, meaning building the world we want within the shells of what has collapsed. This is not simply aspirational in Makhanda; it intertwines with Makhanda’s rich history of self-organisation and mass mobilisation. The anti-apartheid “people’s power” movement of the 1980s left an indelible imprint locally: in Makhanda/Grahamstown, formations such as the Grahamstown Youth Congress, the Grahamstown African Women’s League and the GRACA residential associations initiated neighbourhood-based organising in defiance of apartheid structures. These formations were part of a broader campaign in the Eastern Cape of building “organs of people’s power” street committees, “people’s courts,” clean-up drives, sports and education structures countering the local government’s failures and crafting new social infrastructures from below. These self-managed structures were both practical and symbolic, showcasing that alternative governance rooted in popular power could build resilience and dignity in the face of state collapse.
Today’s grassroots initiatives in Makhanda demonstrated through the work of the Unemployed People’s Movement, civic-tech platforms such as MobiSAM, mutual aid networks and neighbourhood-led infrastructure interventions are direct echoes of that past. They are more than spontaneous responses to municipal failure; they are historically informed, deliberate efforts to reconstruct public life through people-powered governance. By drawing on a legacy of organising both remembered and ongoing, these contemporary projects reveal that capacity resides not in top-down reform but in communities reclaiming their power to co-produce, manage and defend the services and dignity they deserve.
Leroy Maisiri is a researcher and educator focused on labour, social movements and emancipatory politics in Southern Africa, with teaching and publishing experience in industrial economic sociology.