If you want to understand why South African municipalities are broken, don't look at the mayor. Look at ward councillors.
They are the only politicians whose door you can knock on. They are the only politicians with no budget, no trucks and no power to fix your street lights and potholes.
That contradiction is why the coming local government elections on November 4 are a win-win and a lose-lose affair.
Ward councillors are elected by their wards but they report to the municipality. They do not deliver services. The municipality does. And that is where the trap begins.
Take a Ward X councillor elected under Party A in a municipality governed by Party B. He raises a burst pipe issue in Ward X, tables a motion for a road to be tarred and submits a petition with 200 signatures.
The majority party, Party B, in council sees him not as a colleague but as a threat. In practice, his requests move to the bottom of the priority list. Job cards for his ward take three weeks instead of two days.
Integrated Development Plan projects for his area are quietly moved to 2028.
When residents call the councillor, he has no answers. When he calls a community meeting, they call him useless. He is doomed to fail not because he is lazy but because the system allows the governing party to punish wards that they did not win.
The councilor loses credibility and the community loses services. It is a lose-lose affair.
It is even worse for independent candidates. An independent candidate has one vote in a council of 100, no party caucus to defend him, no member of the mayoral committee (MMC) to call and no bargaining power. He may be the most competent and honest and a direct link to the community, but structurally he is the most powerless. The administration knows he has no political cover and he is easily isolated and frustrated.
Now flip the coin. If that is the problem of opposition wards, then governing party wards should be a paradise.
Alexandra township, north of Johannesburg, proves otherwise.
Alexandra has nine municipal wards. All nine councillors are ANC members. For long periods the City of Johannesburg has been governed by the ANC. The executive mayor, Dada Morero, is an ANC member, as are most of the MMCs. There is total political alignment from the street to the mayoral office.
No opposition to blame, no one to frustrate delivery of services. In theory this should be a win-win situation. A comrade councillor calls a comrade MMC who instructs a comrade municipal manager and the work gets done.
Yet Alexandra remains among the worst-serviced townships in South Africa. For decades the township, next to South Africa’s wealthiest economic hub, Sandton, faced severe socio-economic and systemic infrastructure challenges. Overpopulation and housing crisis, environmental degradation, waste management crisis and health hazard, collapsing roads, crime, unstable power supply and housing projects that never end. Not forgetting the 2001 scandal associated with the Alexandra Renewal Project where almost R2 billion was stolen.
How does a politically aligned township fail so badly? Because when everyone is from one party, accountability moves from the community to the party branch. The councillor's survival depends on pleasing the branch, not the residents.
Oversight collapses because no one wants to embarrass a comrade in council. And when a ward is a safe seat, there is no electoral incentive to deliver — the party knows it will win anyway.
Alexandra shows that poor service delivery is not always caused by political interference. It is often caused by corruption, patronage, weak administration and the absence of consequences.
That is the dilemma facing voters on November 4. Vote opposition in your ward and you might get a principled voice but a powerless implementer. Vote for the governing party to align with the municipality and you risk voting for complacency.
Until we ring-fence ward budgets and force municipalities to deliver per ward, regardless of the party, the ward councillor will remain the most loved before elections and the most hated post elections.
Nhlanhla Mbatha is a current affairs analyst