Dry taps, sewage spills, power cuts and bad roads haunt South Africa's ANC

Ahead of local elections, voters are angry about poor services provided by many municipalities

Mabolela, a village in the rolling hills of the eastern Free State, is only about 25km from Sterkfontein Dam, one of South Africa's largest reservoirs -- but many residents still have no running water in their homes a decade after it stopped flowing through their taps.

As South Africa heads to local elections on November 4, Maluti-a-Phofung, a mostly rural municipality of about 330,000 people named after the nearby Drakensberg mountains, offers some of the starkest examples of the country's deepening local government crisis - and it is listed as the worst municipality in one ranking by a think-tank.

"For 10 years now, all the people living in the higher-up areas haven't had water. The municipal officers say they'll fix it but we have yet to see that," said Wetsi Moloi, a 46-year-old carpenter, pointing to a scattering of cinder-block homes and tin outhouses rising up the hillside. Emergency water tankers sent by the government could not make it up the crumbling, potholed roads, he said.

Instead, at a public tap beside his shop, two men were filling plastic jerrycans loaded on to a pick-up truck before delivering them to homes for a small fee. "Washing, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, toilets," Moloi said, listing what the water would be used for. "Those people are suffering."

In some places in South Africa, local government has all but collapsed into financial dysfunction and administrative paralysis. Plagued by dry taps, power cuts, sewage spills and crumbling roads, residents and businesses privately bankroll basic services they already pay for through municipal bills and taxes.

Just 39 of South Africa's 257 municipalities achieved clean audits -- meaning their financial statements were accurate and they complied with key laws -- in the past financial year, according to the auditor-general, who warned in June of a "concerning regression" in local governance.

The fallout has far-reaching national consequences. Late-paying councils owe Eskom, the state power company, R120bn ($7.2bn) in overdue debt, placing severe strain on the national treasury -- Maluti-a-Phofung's R8.8bn in arrears makes it one of Eskom's biggest debtors. Meanwhile, municipalities owe water boards R23.77bn, hindering their ability to maintain and expand infrastructure amid worsening water shortages.

"Maluti-a-Phofung is an extreme manifestation of the crisis underlying our local government sphere," said Ismail Joosub, a researcher at the FW de Klerk Foundation, an independent think-tank that ranked the municipality last among 50 in its 2026 performance index.

"Across the country, we see the same pressures interacting in a perfect storm: weak revenue collection, deteriorating infrastructure and political instability in the coalition era."

Growing disillusionment with local government could also weaken confidence in the country's democratic institutions more generally, analysts say.

In July, the government withheld a month's funding from Johannesburg and more than 60 other towns and cities, in an unprecedented attempt to stop wasteful spending and financial mismanagement. The funds were released a few weeks later to avoid "harming local communities".

"The [upcoming local] elections are pivotal because many municipalities and metros, including Johannesburg, are at a place where they can still be turned around without necessarily massive bailouts by the national government," said Nomvuyo Guma, a former Treasury official and research fellow at the Bureau for Economic Research.

"But if you let the situation run unchecked for another term or so, then you're in a completely different place."

While cities such as Johannesburg suffered primarily from governance failures as opposed to structural insolvency typical of rural councils, the two were "mutually reinforcing" in creating "toxic doom loops", Guma said.

When the African National Congress came to power in 1994, it embarked on a vast programme to extend water, electricity, housing and sanitation to the Black majority who had been systematically segregated and deprived of many basic services under apartheid. Millions of households were connected to the grid for the first time, with the share rising from 36 per cent to more than 90 per cent by 2024.

But three decades on, a breakdown in basic services lays bare the distance between the promise of democratic government and the daily reality for millions of South Africans.

Voter anger has fuelled the decline of the ANC, which in 2024 lost its national majority for the first time since the end of apartheid. Polls suggest the party, which now governs in a coalition with 11 others, faces a bruising local contest across major urban centres.

Nowhere is the dysfunction more consequential than in Johannesburg, the crown jewel the ANC is desperate to reclaim after losing control of the economic capital a decade ago.

"We should not mistake disappointment for hostility. Sometimes those who criticise us most strongly are those who have invested the greatest hope in our movement," President Cyril Ramaphosa said this month, addressing voter alienation.

Still, Ramaphosa's patience with the state of local government has also worn thin. Ahead of the G20 summit in Johannesburg last year, he described the city as a "shadow of its former self" and launched a presidential working group to tackle its deterioration.

Despite hosting about 70 per cent of Africa's corporate headquarters, the city's services are collapsing after years of teetering on the edge of bankruptcy amid political infighting, corruption and financial mismanagement.

Nearly seven in 10 respondents said the city had been poorly or extremely badly run during the previous five years, according to an eNCA-MarkData survey published this month.

The same poll put the opposition Democratic Alliance on 35 per cent in Johannesburg, ahead of the ANC on 21.8 per cent. The city has stumbled through 10 mayors in the past decade, in a revolving door of coalition governments that has badly dented long-term planning.

In the Eastern Cape, the ANC's rural heartland, the party's provincial vote share fell from 68.7 per cent in the 2019 national election to 62.2 per cent in 2024.

Yet the erosion of ANC support has not always translated into durable gains for its rivals. Voters' choices are still shaped by longstanding party loyalties, while the rise of coalition politics has blurred accountability for failing services, says Susan Booysen, a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand.

"During campaigning, there is so much cross-blaming that voters can be quite confused, and many of them will fall back on their historical loyalties," she said.

Still, in 2021 Maluti-a-Phofung became an early casualty of slowly shifting voter patterns when the ANC's vote share plunged from 47 council seats out of 70 to 28, the first time the party lost its majority in the province. Power is now split between the ANC and a group of councillors who defected from the party.

Ramaphosa has not just criticised municipal failures but also promised economic renewal. In October he launched a R100bn automotive and manufacturing project, backed by Chinese investors, which is projected to create 6,500 permanent jobs in the Free State.

Many residents remain dubious. Komohelo George, a 23-year-old graphic design student, said he would not be voting in the upcoming elections. "There's really nothing to motivate me to vote and I don't think I'll be able to find a job any time soon," he said, as a private ambulance swerved to avoid a nearby pothole.

As public services deteriorate, households with money are increasingly buying their way out. In Maluti-a-Phofung, a 28-year-old woman standing outside her gold-painted wrought-iron gate said she felt fortunate to be able to afford solar panels and a water tank.

But a manhole outside her property regularly filled with sewage carrying nappies and sanitary products, she said.

"We do call the municipal officials, they come, they look, and then we don't hear from them for weeks again," she said, gesturing towards the trench where an election poster was submerged in brown water.

"All we can do is hope children don't play around there and fall in," she added.

A growing reliance on private fixes risks entrenching a two-tier system in which better-off households pay twice -- once through municipal bills and again for private alternatives -- while poorer residents endure rising bills for increasingly underfunded services.

In a country already marked by deep inequality, that could eventually have serious social consequences, analysts say.

"It would be alarmist to say social stability is at immediate risk," said Guma, the former Treasury official. "But certainly if nothing changes over the next five years, then that risk becomes more material."

Still, state decline is not inevitable, experts say.

"South Africa doesn't need to invent a new model from scratch," said Joosub, noting that municipalities that scored highly in the de Klerk Foundation report had credible budgets, stronger revenue collection, stable professional leadership and functioning oversight.

"What we need now is a rebuilding of the ordinary machinery of government. Competence can also compound."