Navigating Service Delivery Turbulence As Coalitions Horse Trading Beckon

Prof. Bheki Mngomezulu

Service delivery remains one of the critical challenges that South Africa continues to face. Ironically, the Freedom Charter, which was adopted in Kliptown, Soweto, on June 26, 1955, gave hope about the envisioned post-apartheid South Africa. Seventy years later, not all the goals of the Freedom Charter have been achieved.

Even the ANC tacitly concedes this reality. The theme of its National General Council (NGC), which began on December 8, 2025, and ended on December 11, 2025, was “The year of renewal to make the ANC a more effective instrument of the people to achieve the vision of the Freedom Charter: The people shall govern! The people shall share in the wealth of the country.” Citing these clauses confirms that the Freedom Charter has not been fully implemented.

As the country prepares for the 2026 Local Government Election (LGE), it is of cardinal importance to assess the state of service delivery in the country under different municipalities. This is important so that after this election, we can see if things have improved, stagnated, or regressed.

Generally, South Africa’s municipalities have not been able to deliver services to the people in a satisfactory manner as expected. This was confirmed by the report of the Public Protector covering the years 2023 and 2024. According to this report, of the 257 municipalities across the country, only 41(16%) obtained a clean audit. This was an indictment of the political parties that led these municipalities.

The observation made by the Public Protector was that there was widespread financial mismanagement, irregular spending, and service delivery failures. Issues such as poor audit outcomes, regression, and disclaimed opinions seemed to dominate. Only some municipalities in the Western Cape showed improvements.

The common challenges enumerated in the report included financial mismanagement (evidenced in weak financial controls, lack of proper planning, and failure to recover operational costs), service delivery failures (evidenced in inefficient provision of basic services to the people such as electricity, sanitation, and water), weak accountability demonstrated by failure to explain how funds were misused as well as poor performance, and performance reporting issues demonstrated by very high numbers of poor-quality performance reports which hinder oversight.

Coalition politics could exacerbate the situation. South African politicians are still struggling to run and maintain functional coalition governments. At the national level, this was clear during the 2025 January 8 Statement. ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa used this opportunity to brag, saying that despite the 2024 general election results, the ANC was still in charge of the country. He buttressed his assertion by stating that the president, deputy-president, and most ministers and their deputies came from the ANC. While this was factually correct, it was politically flawed.

In the context of local government, the DA assumed the “Big Brother” status in various municipalities where it was leading. These included Johannesburg, Tshwane, and Ekurhuleni, among others. The same happened with the ANC and the IFP in various municipalities. Intra and inter-party conflicts negatively affect the proper functioning of municipalities. By extension, this situation leaves the people on the ground with unreliable services or no services at all.

Out of frustration, people take to the streets to protest the lack of service delivery. Recent examples include what we saw in Mpumalanga, Johannesburg, and the Eastern Cape, where people blocked the N2, forcing traffic to be rerouted to R61 via Ngcobo. These service delivery protests paint political parties that are running the affected municipalities in a bad light.

Since the country will hold LGE in 2026, what are our different political parties doing? This question cannot be answered in a single sentence. The reason is that political parties are not a homogeneous group. 

There are those political parties that somehow believe that they will obtain an outright majority in the municipalities they will be contesting. For them, service delivery will be their primary focus. They promise to deliver services uniformly. However, history reminds us that some politicians deliver services along party lines. Where they enjoy large support, more services are rendered. By contrast, where their support base is small, service delivery is either slow or does not come at all. This is political parochialism!

Other political parties are realistic. They have conceded that South Africa has reached the era of coalitions. Therefore, they are already preparing for coalition formations through which they will run municipalities after the election. This is a wise move that paves the way for pre-election coalitions, which have a heightened degree of durability compared to post-election coalitions necessitated by the election outcome.

Depending on the approach each party takes (outright majority or coalition government), plans for service delivery might take a different direction. Conventionally, a party with an outright majority tends to succumb to political arrogance. This hurts service delivery.

By contrast, a party that governs through a coalition has the potential to deliver better services. This is made possible by the fact that office-bearers from different political parties try to outpace one another. On the negative side, politicians could fight turf wars, thereby delaying the approval of budgets and other submissions.

In the 2026 LGE, the nation can expect some political parties to up their game to avoid coalitions. On the other hand, others will begin forging relations now in anticipation of coalition governments.

As for the voters, they must draw lessons from the 2021 LGE and resultant service delivery experiences and vote with their brains (heads), not their hearts. Even if they love certain leaders and/or their political parties, if they have failed to provide services, it would be foolhardy to keep on voting for them simply out of love.

Those who opted not to vote in the previous election should draw lessons from such a decision and vote. Failure to vote gives more chances to the people voters do not like. In a way, by not voting, one inadvertently votes for the opposition.

* Prof. Bheki Mngomezulu is Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy at Nelson Mandela University.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.