The most interesting story about South Africa’s municipal elections may not be who wins, but what the campaigns reveal about the overall state of South African politics. Of course, the familiar political battles are still there: race, inequality, access to basic services, corruption, unemployment, immigration and the ANC’s declining electoral support. But the build-up to the 2026 elections accentuates issues of immediate relevance for voters, such as whether municipalities can keep water flowing and safely so, collect rubbish, fix roads, keep the lights on and spend public money properly and honestly. Past track records and the aspirations of a “gatvol” public that wants things to get better might count more than ever since the country’s political transition in 1994.
Image: © safary248, published on 26 July 2024 (Pixabay.com)
Since the 2021 local elections, the number of hung councils has increased dramatically. The ANC’s own 2026 Local Government Manifesto states that the party’s national municipal vote fell from 53,9% in 2016 to 45,59% in 2021, while the number of hung councils increased from 27 to 66.1 This led to five years of coalition experiments in many municipalities – some reasonably functional, but many not. This heightened the realisation that local government cannot simply be treated as an extension of national party politics. The permutations do not necessarily echo national trends, and voters are affected more directly by the state of municipal services.
Meanwhile, the ANC is fighting an election against its own record. It knows that it cannot simply campaign as if the past 15 years or so did not happen. Its 2026 manifesto, therefore, explicitly acknowledges the decline from the 2021 result, and it emphasises that the party has undertaken a review of its previous commitments. It has also promised capable, ethical and qualified candidates and says it wants to rebuild confidence in local government.
There is an important difference here from past ANC campaigns. The party can no longer rely purely on its liberation history as political capital, especially not in urban constituencies. Voters may still identify with the historical credential of the ANC as a liberation movement, but increasingly they might pose a more basic question about how municipal services affect them.
In many locations, that could be a very hard question. The ANC's latest manifesto was quite revealing, intending to demonstrate proximity to ordinary communities and to reconnect the organisation with its historical credits of popular mobilisation. But there is a tension between the language of struggle and renewal on the one hand, and the actual experience of municipal governance. Promises to appoint ethical and capable leaders are welcome, but the real issue is whether the party’s leadership at national, provincial and local levels is prepared to discipline or even discard leaders and councillors who fall short of the necessary ethical and/or practical needs of a municipality.
One of the most tantalising campaigns is the one for control of the Johannesburg City Council. The DA’s mayoral candidate Helen Zille’s in-your-face campaign might be questioned or ridiculed by her opponents, but it certainly has drawn attention to itself through her unconventional political campaigning. Swimming in a pothole, travelling along flooded streets in an inflatable boat, visiting hijacked buildings and using social media relentlessly have helped her dramatically highlight the city’s physical failures.
Her critics make her out to be ridiculous, but supporters consider her just downright politically astute. After all, talk of “infrastructure maintenance backlogs”, “revenue collection”, “financial sustainability” and “municipal entities” does not make for compelling election material. But a politician standing in a pothole, exposing her opponents’ failures and implying she would have it fixed, does. Her campaign has also tried to take the election out of conference rooms and into the streets and townships.
She has challenged the City of Johannesburg through the courts and the Public Protector about service delivery failures in affected lower income and vulnerable communities.
Her ANC opponent for the mayorship, former reverend Frank Chikane, is highly respected, but his local government credentials are largely unproven. His credibility, though, makes one see why some Johannesburgers flirt with the prospect of a joint Zille-Chikane leadership as an attractive proposition to achieve a turnaround option for the city. That might prove to be clever politics if it connects the technical issue of municipal competence to people's everyday needs.
Zille’s candidacy draws on a promise that the DA can do for Johannesburg what it says it has done elsewhere. The party’s national manifesto puts the proposition bluntly: Municipalities should become stable, professional governments focused on basic services, clean administration, revenue management and infrastructure development. It specifically proposes ringfencing water revenue and bringing in private investment and technical expertise to help improve service delivery. For many politicians and officials, this may be offensive, but with things having failed so badly over so many years and having affected so many people and areas, the time might be ripe to utilise the corporatisation approach for further progress, whether through private contractors or the public sector.
The campaign has also demonstrated the danger of making municipal competence the central political brand. There is substantial evidence supporting parts of that argument, but it cannot simply be assumed that every municipality governed by the DA is a model of effective and equitable service delivery, and the poor have paid the price most. For example, a recent Public Protector investigation into service delivery in Cape Town’s Langa Flats and parts of Khayelitsha found failures in sanitation, housing, infrastructure maintenance, high-mast lighting, refuse removal, sewer management and safety measures. The Public Protector attributed this to maladministration and said it pointed to broader governance concerns. That does not erase the DA's record elsewhere, nor does a finding concerning specific communities establish that Cape Town is a failed municipality. But it does puncture the notion that the DA can simply present itself as the party without any municipal skeletons.2
Opponents can now ask whether the DA’s own governing record consistently matches the standard it sets for others. The DA will have to be able to answer this question without abandoning its legitimate claims about better administration in many cases.
Former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba's ActionSA has perhaps been clearer than most parties about the new political market. The party’s latest manifesto describes itself as a “blueprint” for fixing broken municipalities, and it places financial discipline, competent appointments, revenue systems, basic services and professional administration at the centre of its local government agenda. There is also interesting acknowledgement in the manifesto that coalition government is becoming unavoidable. ActionSA says coalition arrangements should be based on a clear programme of government, defined responsibilities and accountability, rather than simply the division of political positions. That may prove to be one of the more important ideas in this election, allowing governing parties to explain not only what they believe, but how they intend to govern when they do not have a majority.
One might ask: What about Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)? The national political identities of these parties might be powerful, but they still lack clear track records in effective service delivery. MK's politics continues to be closely associated with Jacob Zuma, but the party has been preparing for these local elections especially, but not exclusively, in KwaZulu-Natal.
The EFF's manifesto is similarly framed in highly ideological language. It describes the election as a decisive moment, and uses the slogan “Victory or death” while placing land, unemployment, corruption, basic services and economic transformation at the centre of its municipal programme.3 They might well take control in some cases, such as in parts of KwaZulu-Natal, but local elections create a different test. A resident whose sewerage is running down the street may have strong views about land expropriation and national economic policy, but ultimately in these elections will think more about who will offer reliable services.
The Patriotic Alliance represents another strand of populist politics. At its manifesto launch, the minister promised measures including a temporary break from municipal rates payments and debt relief.
Smaller conservative parties face a curious problem. The Freedom Front Plus manifesto contains perfectly recognisable local government propositions: better infrastructure, affordable rates, greater community participation, accountability and more effective municipal administration. The difficulty is not necessarily policy, but political scale: While FFP could win support in communities and municipalities within coalitions, the prospect of becoming a major national alternative to the ANC or DA is much harder to reconcile with South Africa's electoral geography.
What comes after the elections?
There is a broader question for smaller parties on both the left and right. Should they try to govern municipalities, influence coalitions, represent specific communities or simply create a national political brand that could enter issue-based coalitions? Perhaps, therefore, the most important story of the municipal elections is not the campaign at all. It is what comes after it.
In this mode, South Africa has already entered the coalition era. The 2021 election gave us 66 hung councils. Since then, citizens have seen both the possibilities and the pathology of coalition government.
The problem is not that coalitions are inherently bad. A coalition can force parties to compromise, expose them to scrutiny and prevent a single party from treating public institutions as its private property. The immediate problem in this sense is whether coalitions without rules, programmes or accountability could make much of a difference, and function effectively. A coalition that exists mainly to divide mayoral positions, committee chairmanships and political patronage is simply another route to dysfunction.
This is where the current campaign could become more intense. The parties should be telling voters not merely what they will do if they win an outright majority, but what they will do if they do not. Among the major sensitive issues is whether the ringfencing of water and electricity revenues would be more assertively pursued. And, perhaps most importantly, will they walk away from a coalition that cannot deliver?
Chris Heymans is an independent governance and political economy advisor, based in Cape Town.
Endnotes:
1 https://www.anc1912.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/ANC-2026-Local-Government-Manifesto.pdf
2 Report on an Investigation into Allegations of Service Delivery Failures by the City of Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality to the Residents of Langa Flats and Parts of Khayelitsha (commonly referred to as the Khayelitsha Langa Report); Report number 12 of 2026/27; 7 July 2026.
3 https://effonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/A5-EFF-2026-Local-Manifesto-24.07.2026.pdf.
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