Elections 2026: Coalitions didn't break local government, they exposed it
Editor's notes: South Africa keeps treating failing councils as a political story. The deeper problem is that municipalities are organisations with no one clearly in charge.
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A water leak does not care who won the last caucus. It needs a crew, a paid contractor, a working pump, and one person who can say yes without first checking three parties. In too many municipalities, that person does not exist.
Source: UGC
We talk about local government as if the crisis is only political: the wrong party, the wrong coalition, the wrong mayor. Those fights matter, but they do not explain why the same council cannot collect what it bills, keep engineers, close a tender, or own a result from the pothole to the patch. A municipality is a large operating entity. Politics chooses the board and management is whether the board can run the company.
What does the data say?
Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke tabled the 2024-25 local government audit outcomes in June 2026 and was blunt: the outgoing administration made limited progress. Residents still live with unreliable services and deteriorating infrastructure. Only 39 municipalities achieved clean audits. Those councils run about R52.6 billion, or 8% of local government’s spending. Thirty-eight municipalities have gone backwards since 2020/21. They account for 24% of the sector’s budget and include three metros. All eight metropolitan municipalities failed to get clean audits, even though they manage more than half of municipal expenditure and serve close to 25 million people.
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That is not a manifesto problem, it is an operating problem.
In a functioning organisation, someone is accountable for cash, staff and delivery. In many councils the political principal changes, the accounting officer is acting, and the “shareholders” are parties that share a government this month and a stage the next. After 2021, hung councils became normal. The Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa recorded 66 hung councils, more than double 2016, including 21 of KwaZulu-Natal’s 44 municipalities. SALGA has warned that unstable coalitions delay budgets, senior appointments and by-laws. MISTRA’s coalition research found the same pattern: political energy goes to holding the chamber, not to running the administration. Analyst Susan Booysen now expects the number of local coalitions to rise again after these upcoming elections on 4 November, possibly from the high 80s toward 110. More parties at the table can be democratic. It is unmanageable if decision rights are never written down.
Yet the public still expects one institution to fix the lights. Internally, the institution is a joint venture with no operating agreement.
Before smart-city language and vision documents, a municipality has to do four unglamorous things: bill, collect, maintain assets, and keep skilled people. National Treasury’s own figures show how often those fail. By June 2025, consumer debt had reached R427.7 billion, most of it older than 90 days and unlikely to be recovered. Municipalities budgeted as if they would collect 94.8% of billed revenue. They collected 72.9%. Metros budgeted as if they would collect more than they billed, and took in 71.1%. By the end of 2025 the debt stock had climbed further, toward R467 billion, while actual collection sat around 69%. The official benchmark in Treasury’s own circular is 95%. You cannot campaign your way out of that gap.
The money that does arrive is often spent badly. Since 2021/22 municipalities have racked up R145.21 billion in irregular expenditure, including R40.14 billion in 2024-25, most of it tied to procurement. Auditors reviewed thousands of awards and found that 85% of municipalities failed to comply with procurement rules. Water and electricity leak out of the pipes and the books. Creditors wait. Eskom and the water boards wait. Forty-nine municipalities were already in a negative cash position in mid-2025. A going concern that cannot collect, cannot pay, and cannot keep its assets is not a political disagreement. It is insolvency with a crest on the letterhead.
Source: UGC
How does the local government system work?
Section 54A of the Municipal Systems Act says an acting municipal manager may sit for three months, with one MEC extension of another three. In practice, acting city managers, acting CFOs and acting heads of engineering become the model, not the exception. Johannesburg has been a public example; a slice of senior posts occupied on an acting basis while the legal fight over who may lawfully run the administration drags on. You cannot run operations on acting capacity. An organisation that cannot fill its own top jobs is telling you who owns the result: nobody.
The easy objection is that this is just anti-politics, that the real story is corruption and cadre deployment. Both are real. They thrive because the organisation is loose. Acting posts, blurred reporting lines and councils that cannot tell a political mandate from an operational one make theft easier and incompetence look like process. A tight organisation does not abolish politics. It makes failure visible. Maluleke’s office has said the most common outcome is now an unqualified audit with findings: the numbers look cleaner after the auditors have been through them, but compliance, performance reporting and financial control remain weak. Paperwork improved but the pipes did not.
What will the November elections bring?
November will produce more hung councils. That is a fact to work with, not a morality play. Voters did not vote for chaos. Many voted against a single dominant machine. The state then failed to redesign the machine. A coalition can work when the deal is a programme, a budget and a review date. Most local deals are about positions.
The test after election day should not be who formed government. It should be who has the authority to hire, fire, approve, and be removed when the pipes stay dry.
Watch three things in your municipality: who the accounting officer answers to; whether the collection rate moves; whether vacancies in engineering and finance are filled with permanent people. If those do not change, the new coalition is only a new letterhead.
Disclaimer: The writer is Sibusisiwe Lwandle, Head of Current Affairs Desk at Briefly News. Views expressed here are hers and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Briefly News or any other organisation.
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Source: Briefly News
