A sharp critique of the ANC’s municipal governance failures highlights how local service delivery crises contributed to the party’s electoral decline in South Africa’s 2024 general election.
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If anyone is still puzzled about why the ANC slipped to just 40% of the national vote at last year’s national general elections for the first time in democratic South Africa, they have not been paying attention to the state of the country’s municipalities.
The ANC did not lose votes because of a sudden surge in opposition support but because South Africans are gatvol.
They are gatvol because of the broken street lights, the taps that run dry, the potholes on the roads that are a nightmare and the rubbish that is not collected.
And this is where the ANC has failed dismally.
The Auditor-General’s latest consolidated report on local government outcomes reads like a post-mortem of the ANC’s electoral performance.
It exposes, in stark numbers, just how deep the crisis of service delivery runs at municipal level, where the ANC governs the majority of councils and metros.
In the 2023–24 financial year, 87% of municipalities failed to comply with procurement and contract management laws. In 63% of cases, these failures were severe enough to materially affect finances. Additionally, 77% of infrastructure projects inspected had serious deficiencies - meaning the roads, clinics, waterworks and housing projects ordinary people are promised are either not being built, or when they are, they are substandard and unfinished.
It gets worse. Fifty-three percent of municipalities flouted laws around consequence management, which means that when officials mismanage funds, they are not fired, prosecuted or even formally disciplined. The result? Repeat offenders and serial incompetents, often politically connected, remain in office while communities suffer.
This is the height of bad governance.
The ANC’s fatal miscalculation has been to believe that local government failures would not tarnish the party’s national brand. But ask any voter in Joburg, Tshwane, Mangaung or the collapsing municipalities of the North West and Eastern Cape whether they make that distinction. They do not. When sewage runs down your street, you blame the government and in most towns, the ANC is the government.
The bread-and-butter issues of water, electricity, refuse collection and functioning infrastructure are the foundation of political credibility. The ANC’s neglect of these basics, detailed year after year by the Auditor-General, has eroded public confidence to breaking point.
Since 2019, 446 material irregularities have been flagged at municipal level, including billions in lost or wasted funds. And while half have been resolved, it is too little, too late. The cumulative effect of that neglect is what finally showed up at the ballot box in 2024, where for the first time since 1994, the ANC fell below 50%, finishing with a bruising 40%.
The collapse of municipalities is not some side issue in national politics. It is where elections are won and lost. The ANC did not lose votes because South Africans suddenly were drawn to what opposition parties were offering, they voted out of frustration and many cases simply stayed at home - effectively denying the ANC their vote.
Because when water stops running, when clinics fall apart and when corruption flourishes unchecked at the local level, it affects people’s lives more immediately than anything debated in Parliament.
The ANC’s hollowing out of municipal governance - replacing skilled officials with politically connected but underqualified cadres - is at the heart of this crisis. It created a system where the consequences of failure were shrugged off until communities pushed back the only way they could - at the ballot box.
If the ANC is serious about rebuilding trust, they need to start with fixing municipalities, professionalising local government and finally holding those responsible for years of mismanagement accountable. Because no party can govern a country if it cannot manage a town.
South Africans voted against sewage in their streets, against empty promises, against councillors who disappear after elections, and against roads that turn to dust while tenders line the pockets of the politically connected.
The ANC dropped to 40% because it failed where it matters most - on the streets, in the suburbs and in the townships of this country.
And if it does not fix that, it will keep falling.
**Lee Rondganger is the deputy editor of IOL
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