Days before South Africa votes, the easiest promise in politics is to fix the municipality.
Every party can point to the burst pipe, the uncollected refuse or the account that bears no relationship to what a household used. The harder question is what happens the morning after the council is elected.
Who will appoint a competent municipal manager? Which project will be repaired before a new one is announced? How will parties that have spent months attacking one another agree on a budget? And when a coalition changes, will the water engineer still be allowed to do the job?
These are not secondary questions to be addressed once the campaigning ends. They are the contest beneath the 4 November local government election. National leaders may dominate the rallies, but residents will judge the result in taps, streets, substations and billing offices.
The scale of the problem
The auditor general’s 2024-25 assessment found that just 39 municipalities, 15% of those audited, achieved clean audits. None of the eight metros did. Municipalities and their entities incurred R40.14 billion in irregular expenditure during that year, bringing the total since 2021-22 to R145.21 billion.
Irregular expenditure does not automatically mean money was stolen. It does mean that rules governing public spending were not followed. The auditor general attributed 87% of the accumulated amount to non-compliance with procurement and contract-management legislation. That is consequential in a sphere where the quality of a tender can determine whether a water treatment plant works.
The cash position is no less troubling. The treasury reported that, by the end of June 2026, consumers owed municipalities R484.5 billion, while municipalities owed their creditors R185.2 billion. Those figures are accumulated balances, not money that can all be recovered tomorrow. But they describe an increasingly dangerous relationship between billing, collection and the ability to pay for electricity, water and other essentials.
The cycle is familiar. A resident disputes an inaccurate bill or stops paying for an unreliable service. The municipality collects less, defers maintenance and falls behind with suppliers. Service deteriorates further. Businesses reconsider investment, while households lose confidence that payment buys anything. At some point, both the municipality and its residents are trapped in an argument over who failed first.
Corruption is part of the story. It is not the whole story. Poor project preparation, vacant technical posts, weak financial controls and political interference can wreck a service without producing one easily identifiable villain. A campaign that promises only to “fight corruption” leaves voters guessing how the institution will actually work.
Show us the team, not just the manifesto
The ANC carries the heaviest burden of proof. It has governed most municipalities for most of the democratic era. Apartheid’s spatial inheritance remains real, but it cannot explain every unfilled post, failed appointment or neglected maintenance schedule three decades later. The party needs to say how it will keep factional interests out of recruitment and procurement and what it will do when its own councillors cross that line.
The DA can point to municipalities with stronger administrative records. The question is whether that experience travels. A model developed in a relatively strong revenue base cannot simply be copied into a rural municipality with dispersed settlements, long infrastructure distances and too few specialists. The DA must also show that its claims about sound administration can survive the compromises of coalition politics.
The EFF and the MK Party have been effective at expressing frustration with the existing order. Anger can reveal a failure that governing parties would rather ignore. It cannot, by itself, run a water network or produce a credible funded budget. If these parties want executive power in councils, voters are entitled to know whom they would put in charge of finance and technical services, and how they would protect those officials from political pressure.
The IFP, ActionSA, independent candidates and other contenders face the same examination. Local roots, a compelling leader or a persuasive account of national politics are not substitutes for an operating plan.
Before election day, serious contenders should be able to answer five questions for each municipality they hope to govern: Which posts are critical and vacant? What is the condition of its main infrastructure? Which bills can realistically be collected? What would be done in the first 100 days? And which promises will have to wait because the money or technical capacity is not there?
That last answer may be the most honest one a politician gives.
Coalitions cannot wait for a new law
More councils may emerge without a majority party. The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection’s 2026 Coalitions Barometer warns that political fragmentation could make post-election agreements more complicated. It also finds a striking gap between national and local cooperation: the ANC and DA govern together nationally but, in the period examined, had not governed together in a municipal coalition.
That does not mean those two parties must join forces locally. It does show why a photograph of leaders shaking hands in Pretoria tells us little about how they will negotiate a mayor, a budget or an infrastructure programme in a particular town.
The proposed Municipal Structures Amendment Bill would introduce a framework for written coalition agreements and the management of municipal office-bearers. It remains a Bill. Parties should not use the absence of enacted rules as an excuse to make opaque deals after 4 November.
They can commit now to publishing any coalition agreement. Voters should be able to see its service priorities, budget commitments, allocation of political responsibilities and process for resolving disputes. A deal that lists positions but says nothing about maintaining water pumps is not a governing programme.
Stability matters, but it is not an end in itself. A mayor who cannot govern must be removable. Equally, repeated motions of no confidence should not become a way to reopen negotiations over posts and contracts. Councillors should be required, politically if not yet by statute, to explain what workable administration will replace the one they propose to bring down.
The test is simple: can parties disagree without making the municipality stop?
One system will not fit every municipality
South Africa also needs a more honest account of what different municipalities can do. A metro managing rapid growth, complex transport networks and large procurement contracts is not the same institution as a rural council with a thin tax base and settlements kilometres apart.
Metros need strong engineering, planning and financial teams, alongside much more transparent oversight of their spending.
Smaller municipalities may need access to shared technical services rather than another instruction to fill posts they struggle to fund or retain. District-level engineering, procurement or legal support could help, but only if responsibility for decisions remains clear. A shared service that leaves everyone able to blame someone else will reproduce the existing failure.
National and provincial support must also be measured by results. An intervention is not a success because a team was dispatched or a recovery plan was written. Did the municipality appoint qualified staff? Did it repair assets? Did it improve collections without punishing indigent households? Can it keep the service running after outside officials leave?
The government has been developing a new local-government policy framework. That debate is necessary, but the incoming councils will not have the luxury of waiting for a redesign of the entire system. They will inherit payrolls, creditors, pipes and contracts on their first day.
Maintenance is a political decision
A newly built facility offers a ribbon-cutting. Fixing a leaking main, servicing a substation or clearing a stormwater drain rarely does. Yet the latter may do more for residents than another capital project whose maintenance costs were never properly budgeted.
Councils should publish plain-language asset and maintenance plans: what exists, what condition it is in, what is due for repair and what has actually been done. They should publish tender awards and contract changes while projects are under way, not leave residents to discover failures in an audit report years later.
They must also repair the bargain around payment. Indigent households need effective protection. People and institutions able to pay should pay, but councils must first make bills credible, correct disputes promptly and show where the money goes. Demanding payment for a service that repeatedly fails is not a recovery strategy.
The 2026 national budget review noted that only 15 of the 71 municipalities participating in the Eskom debt-relief programme had consistently met its conditions. Debt relief may create breathing room. It cannot replace the daily work of collecting current revenue, maintaining distribution infrastructure and preventing new arrears.
On 4 November, South Africans will choose councillors and parties. In many places, they will also choose which parties must learn to govern together. The colour of the mayoral chain will matter less than whether its wearer can protect professional administration from political bargaining.
A functioning municipality is not an abstract ideal. It is a place where a resident can report a leak and receive an answer; where a supplier can be paid for work properly done; and where an engineer’s maintenance plan survives a change of mayor.
South Africa has plenty of political competition. What it needs now is a more exacting competition over the competence to govern.
Wellington Muzengeza is an independent journalist and political-risk analyst specialising in African governance, strategic infrastructure, cross-border risk and sovereignty. He is the founder of BuiltAfrica and author of The Informal State.