The ANC Has Left South Africans Without Water, Power, or Safety

What does it take to be a South African mother in 2026? You wake before dawn to check whether the tap runs. You plan your day around the power schedule. You lock the gate, then the second gate, then the window, then you pray. On November 4, nearly 29 million registered voters will carry that exhausted calculation into polling stations. The real question is whether they will keep accepting it.

Start with the one thing a state exists to guarantee: that you will not be killed on your way home. South Africa's police recorded roughly 27,000 murders in the 2023/24 financial year, a rate of about 45 per 100,000 people. That is not a war zone. That is a democracy, one of the most prosperous on the continent, where a woman can be shot at a taxi rank and a family can be robbed in their own driveway with little chance the perpetrators will ever face a courtroom. Every one of those numbers is a child who will not grow up, a father who will not come home, a mother who learned to stop hoping for justice.

Now turn on the tap. Johannesburg, the economic engine of Africa, has endured repeated water outages, while aging pipes leak away enormous volumes of treated water before it reaches a single home. Municipal engineers call this non-revenue water. Ordinary people call it theft, and they are right to. When a pipe bursts in Soweto and the water runs for weeks into the street, the people who suffer are not the politicians who signed the contracts. They are the grandmothers carrying buckets a kilometre from the nearest standpipe.

Then there is the darkness. Eskom's load shedding reached Stage 6 in 2023, meaning rotating blackouts of up to six hours a day across the country. Hospitals ran on generators that were not maintained. Small shop owners watched their freezers and their margins melt together. Students studied by phone light. Traffic lights went dead and intersections became death traps. A country that once boasted some of the cheapest, most reliable power in the developing world was reduced to begging its citizens to use less of it, because those who were supposed to keep the lights on spent years draining the institution from the inside.

We must name what happened. Between the Zuma years and the state capture that the Zondo Commission laid bare, public money was looted from Eskom, Transnet, and municipal coffers, while the people who were supposed to maintain power stations and water systems were replaced by loyalists, not engineers. The Auditor-General has repeatedly documented municipalities that cannot account for their own spending, that receive qualified or disclaimed audits year after year, and that still collect rates from residents who get nothing in return. If you pay for a service and it is not delivered, you are not a customer. You are a victim of a scam with a ballot paper attached.

The context matters. In 2024, the ANC lost its outright parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994, dropping to roughly 40 percent of the national vote. It was forced into a Government of National Unity with its former rivals. That was not a random electoral mood swing. It was the verdict of voters who remembered Nelson Mandela's promise of a better life for all, and who looked at the outcome thirty years later and saw potholes, dead pumps, and a police service that could not stop the killing. The ANC's grip on local government is the next target, and the people most likely to pay the price for its failures are the poor who have no generators, no boreholes, and no private security.

So what should happen? South Africa does not need a messiah. It needs institutions that work whoever is in charge. Look at Botswana, which has kept diamond revenues and public finances under disciplined, transparent management for decades, with independent institutions that can say no to a minister. Look at Mauritius, which built a functioning utility sector and a reputation for rule of law that attracts investors precisely because the rules bind the powerful. South Africa had these instincts once. It can recover them.

For electricity, the answer is competition, not another bailout. Eskom must be unbundled in fact, not just on paper, with generation, transmission, and distribution separated and held to independent performance standards. Independent power producers should be allowed to sell to paying customers through a transparent grid. The Electricity Regulation Amendment Act of 2024 opened that door. Reformers must walk through it and stop the cadres from slamming it shut. Rooftop solar and battery storage, owned by households and small businesses, should be made easy to install, not buried in permits and bribes.

For water, the answer is transparency and private capacity. Every municipality should publish monthly data on water losses, pipe repairs, and billing accuracy, ward by ward, in plain language on the internet. Where local engineering capacity is missing, municipalities should bring in certified private operators under performance contracts with penalties for failure, not rewards for failure. Municipal officials who sign contracts for pipes that never get replaced should be prosecuted, not promoted.

For safety, the answer is accountability and capacity. Detective units must be staffed and funded. Forensic labs must clear backlogs. Metro police forces should be professionalised, vetted, and measured by clearance rates, not by how many roadblocks they can set up to shake down motorists. Crime statistics should be audited independently so that the government cannot quietly redefine its own failure away.

And citizens must stop treating their votes as inheritance. Ask every candidate for a ward, a metro, or a municipality for specific, measurable commitments: how many hours without water per month, how many kilowatt-hours of rooftop solar supported, how many murder cases referred to court, how many contracts cancelled for non-performance. Then hold them to it. A candidate who cannot give you numbers is not a leader. He is a salesman with a flag.

To every South African reading this: you do not owe any party your silence. You owe your children a country where the tap runs, the lights stay on, and the streets are safe enough to walk at night. Go to the polling station on November 4. Bring your neighbours. Bring the documents showing your unpaid water bills and your broken streetlights. Demand that the next council publish its performance in public and face consequences when it fails. The ANC built a movement on the promise of liberation. Liberation without basic services is just another word for abandonment, and we have had enough of it.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24