South Africa’s local government elections on 4 November will once again confront voters with a familiar question: Who should govern our municipalities for the next five years?
But perhaps there is a more fundamental question we should ask before deciding how to vote: Which political parties and candidates have demonstrated the capacity to recognise when circumstances and public expectations have changed — and to adapt responsibly?
It shifts attention from promises to capacity and from the question of who can provide order to the question of who can keep ordering society as the conditions for governing change.
South Africa’s problem is not simply a crisis of order. Our constitutional and democratic institutions remain in place, although they are under strain. Elections continue to take place, political authority is contested and municipalities continue to function, however unevenly. The deeper problem might be a crisis of ordering: the continuing processes through which a society makes decisions, allocates resources, resolves conflict, establishes legitimacy and adjusts to changing circumstances.
If that is so, what should voters look for?
1. The capacity to recognise reality
The first question is whether political leaders can recognise problems before they become crises.
South Africa does not lack information. We know about unemployment, poverty and inequality. We know about failing infrastructure, unreliable services, corruption, crime and weaknesses in public administration. We know that many municipalities struggle to fulfil their responsibilities.
The difficulty is often not knowing that something is wrong but acting on what we know.
This is where what futures scholars call a Manufactured Normalcy Field can become dangerous. When abnormal conditions persist for long enough, they can begin to appear normal. A leaking water system becomes something people simply learn to live with. Violence becomes something people learn to accommodate. Dysfunctional institutions are accepted as inevitable.
Political parties should therefore be judged not only by what they promise to fix but by whether they have demonstrated the capacity to recognise when an arrangement is no longer working.
2. The capacity to interpret
Recognition is not enough. Political leaders must also be able to interpret what they are seeing.
South Africans disagree pro-foundly about how our problems should be understood. Inequality, land reform, immigration, public-sector reform, transformation and constitutional rights all involve competing interpretations of history, justice, rights and opportunity.
This means that political disagreement is not necessarily a sign of democratic failure. A healthy democracy must be able to contain disagreement without allowing it to destroy the possibility of collective action.
But established political movements face a danger here. Ex-planations that were once useful can become habits of thought. Past achievements can become reasons for defending inherited interpretations rather than critically reconsidering them.
A political organisation needs enough confidence to ask: What if the way we have understood this problem is no longer adequate?
3. The capacity to coordinate
Many of South Africa’s problems do not fit neatly into one department, municipality or political portfolio.
Water affects health, education and economic activity. Electricity affects employment and investment. Municipal failure affects housing, transport, business and social stability. Crime cannot be separated entirely from unemployment, education, policing and the functioning of local institutions.
Yet political and administrative systems are often organised in separate compartments.
Coordination therefore matters. A party might have good policies in several areas and fail to produce effective government if the policies cannot be connected.
Voters might ask: Can the people seeking power work across institutional, political and ideological boundaries when problems require it?
4. The capacity to establish legitimacy
Political authority and political legitimacy are not the same thing.
Authority can tell people what must be done. Legitimacy helps persuade them that they should participate in making it work.
A party or government might possess a substantial historical mandate, constitutional authority or electoral support. But legitimacy cannot simply be inherited indefinitely. It has to be renewed through performance, accountability and responsiveness to citizens’ lived experience.
This is particularly important at local level. For many citizens, democracy is encountered not primarily in Parliament but through whether the water runs, rubbish is collected, roads are maintained, electricity is available and municipal officials respond to their concerns.
Past legitimacy cannot indefinitely compensate for declining capacity to govern effectively.
5. The capacity to adapt
Adaptation is perhaps the most important capacity of all.
South Africa’s democratic transition demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to adapt political institutions to radically different circumstances. But adaptation cannot be a one-off achievement. What worked during one period might not work in another.
There is also a difference between resilience and adaptive capacity. Resilience allows a system to absorb shocks and continue functioning. That is valuable. But a society can sometimes be resilient in ways that preserve the conditions that produce repeated crises.
Elections happen. Governments change. Commissions are established. New policies are announced. Yet some underlying problems remain remarkably persistent.
The question is therefore not simply whether a political organisation can survive a crisis. It is whether it can learn from a crisis and change course, including its leadership.
6. The capacity for reflexivity
Finally, there is the capacity to look critically at one’s own responses.
This may be the most difficult capacity of all. It requires political parties, institutions and citizens to ask whether some of their assumptions, practices and leadership are contributing to the problems they are trying to solve.
Polarisation can produce distrust; distrust makes cooperation more difficult; poor cooperation produces ineffective government; ineffective government produces more distrust. Patronage and institutional weakness can similarly reinforce each other.
Reflexivity interrupts such cycles by asking a deceptively simple question: Could some of the ways we are responding to a problem be helping to reproduce it?
The question should apply to everyone – political parties, government, business, civil society and citizens themselves.
But these capacities require more than competence. They also require a moral compass: What guides the way political parties exercise power?
From resilience to responsible change
These six capacities suggest a different way of looking at the election.
A society can remain apparently stable while pressures accumulate beneath the surface.
Eventually, the pressures could exceed the capacity of arrangements to absorb them. When that happens, a burst can occur: a sudden and disruptive rupture in established arrangements.
But change does not have to happen through rupture. There can also be a tilt: a gradual movement towards a different configuration as new ideas, practices and forms of cooperation gain credibility and legitimacy.
The purpose of an election should not be to wait for the burst. It should be an opportunity for a responsible tilt.
South Africa does not simply need more order. It needs the capacity for legitimate, inclusive and adaptive ordering — the ability to maintain what works while having the courage to change what no longer does.
The most important question on 4 November might therefore not be “Who can govern us?” It might be: “Who has demonstrated the capacity to recognise when the existing order no longer works — and to help South Africa tilt, responsibly and democratically, towards something that works better?
Chris Jones is emeritus associate professor in systematic theology and ecclesiology at Stellenbosch University.