Declining support for the African National Congress can result in more fragmented and unstable coalitions after the 4 November local elections in South Africa. And with metropolitan municipalities accounting for more than half of the country's GDP, how they are governed and how they solve a mounting service delivery crisis will have far-reaching implications.

On the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city and economic powerhouse, a mountain of rubbish rises from an illegal dumpsite in Kya Sands, near a large informal settlement and a decommissioned landfill site. It is part of a wider waste crisis that has left Johannesburg with more than 2,000 recurring illegal dumping spots, while repeated disruptions to municipal waste collection have resulted in backlogs and piles of uncollected rubbish.

As South Africans prepare to elect new local representatives across the country, scenes like these – combined with water outages, broken street lights and other failing public services – have made the ability of municipalities to keep cities functioning an increasingly pressing political and economic issue.

“Most of our public services and infrastructure are delivered at local level and our municipalities have been in such a crisis,” says Professor William Gumede at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Governance in Johannesburg.

Critical elections

Only 39 out of South Africa’s 257 municipalities (15 percent) were given a clean bill of health in the latest Auditor General report, which found widespread failures in municipal services, including major shortcomings in wastewater and landfill management. None of the eight metropolitan municipalities – home to about 40 percent of South Africans and generating more than half of the country’s GDP – were considered well-functioning.

Gumede, who founded Democracy Works Foundation, a non-profit promoting stronger democratic institutions, believes the upcoming elections will be critical for turning the tide of mis-management, political patronage and corruption which he and other analysts blame for South Africa’s municipal failures.

“This is an absolutely critical election. The question is can voters elect new, more competent and capable, leaders at local level to deliver public services?” he says.

“Our democratic system is really not working properly. Parties in opposition are not playing an effective role in holding governing parties responsible,” he adds. “If we can get society to change and say we will not vote for a corrupt individual, and we will hold corrupt people accountable, we’ll go very far.”

Public frustration with municipalities frequently spills onto the streets with hundreds of protests each year.

Stabilising coalitions

Amanda Gouws, Professor of Political Science at Stellenbosch University, says voters are likely to take their frustration out on the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which in 2024 was forced into coalition government when it lost the outright majority it had held in parliament since South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994.

"We already saw this in the 2024 election – the decline of the ANC. And we’re going to see further decline now at the local level,” she argues.

That decline is set to redraw the political landscape, she says, with more fragmented alliances forming weak unstable coalitions.

“What many fear is that most local governments will be governed by coalitions … and they are very unstable: small parties get to be ‘kingmakers’ and when they are unhappy with something, they pull their support and the coalition collapses.”

A bill to stabilise coalitions – reducing the number of parties with less than one percent of the vote and restricting no-confidence motions – is before parliament but is not expected to be passed ahead of the next elections.

Strong civil society

Some communities are taking steps to hold municipal authorities to account. In Nelson Mandela Bay, a metropolitan municipality in the Eastern Cape, a coalition of civil society groups has drawn up measurable targets for services – including water, electricity, roads and waste management – and plans to use a monthly public dashboard to track the incoming administration’s progress.

Election campaigning and media coverage of the election underline the strength of South Africa’s civil society in keeping issues that matter to ordinary people to the fore, says NAI researcher Patience Mususa who researches livelihoods, social inequality and natural resource governance in Southern Africa.

“It is good for democracy in terms of holding the state and state bodies accountable. South African civic space is very active. That is important at a time when globally we see a squeeze on civic participation and voice.”

Far reaching implications

The outcome of the local elections could have far reaching economic and political implications – beyond improving service provision.

“When we talk about the crisis of water, power outages and so on, it is all to do with failures at local level ... And Johannesburg is about 17 percent of South Africa’s GDP with Cape Town close behind it,” says Professor Gumede.

“I don’t think ordinary citizens realise the importance of these big cities and the size of their budgets. If they did, I think they would vote more competent people into power.”

He also sees a longer-term political risk in declining support for the ANC.

“I think in this election we could be looking at the ANC potentially dropping below 30 percent … If that happens it would lose credibility and authority, despite still being the majority party in national government,” he says. “And as the ANC declines, the danger is that the space will be taken over by autocratic forces and ethno-nationalists.”

However, these elections also provide an opportunity for voters to demand better local government, Gumede adds. Initiatives such as the one in Nelson Mandela Bay show how some communities are looking beyond election day, setting measurable expectations for elected representatives and finding new ways to hold them accountable for delivering results.

Whether that engagement also translates into greater participation at the ballot box remains to be seen. Voter turnout fell to a record low of 46 percent in the 2021 local elections, with millions of registered voters not casting a ballot.

For Gumede, that makes turnout another important factor to watch in this election.

“If all the people registered to vote had turned out and chose a particular party, that party would have won the elections.”

Text: Tom Sullivan