The ANC Is on Trial and 29 Million Voters Hold the Verdict

Twenty-nine million South Africans registered to vote in local government elections. That is a record. Think about what it means. Millions of people who have been told for years that their votes don't matter, that the system is rigged, that nothing changes, looked at the ballot and decided it was still worth their time. They stood in line. They gave their names, their addresses, and their hope to an electoral commission that has to earn it every single time.

Now the counting is underway, and the question South Africa has been avoiding for a generation is finally being asked out loud: what have you done with our trust?

Let us be precise about what is at stake. This is not a referendum on a single party's slogans. It is a verdict on whether the people who run our towns can keep the water running, the lights on, the roads passable, and the books honest. For thirty years, the African National Congress has governed South Africa, and for most of those years it held an outright majority that let it act as though accountability was optional. The 2024 national election ended that comfort. The ANC fell to roughly 40 percent, its first time below the 50 percent mark since the end of apartheid, and it was forced into a coalition government with parties it once dismissed as enemies. That was a warning. These local elections are where the warning becomes a judgment at the level where ordinary citizens actually live.

Because at the municipal level, the failures are not abstract. They are a mother filling buckets from a stream because the tap in her township has been dry for weeks. They are a shopkeeper who loses stock every time the power goes out, a diesel bill he can't afford, a business that never opens because the municipality never fixed the transformer. They are sewage running into rivers that children swim in. The Auditor-General has returned again and again to the same grim conclusion: a large share of municipalities cannot produce clean audits, cannot account for their spending, and cannot explain where the money went. When a municipal budget disappears into contracts that never deliver, the cost is paid in cholera scares, in burst pipes that flood homes, and in young people who will never trust a government to do the job it was elected to do.

And we know where some of that money went. The Zondo Commission, which spent years examining state capture during the Zuma era, produced a report running to thousands of pages. It documented how public enterprises such as Eskom and Transnet were looted, how well-connected individuals steered contracts toward friends, and how institutions meant to guard the public purse were hollowed out from within. The Commission recommended prosecutions and institutional repair. Too many of those recommendations still sit in files. Every unprosecuted thief is a message to the next official: the public will forgive you, and the public will keep paying.

Let us also be honest about the human scale of the wreckage. South Africa carries unemployment that, by broad measures, sits above 30 percent, and the expanded figure, which counts people who have given up looking, is far higher. Among young South Africans, the picture is worse still. An entire generation has been told to study hard, follow the rules, and wait for the system to reward them. Many have waited for decades. They are not lazy. They are locked out of an economy that is strangled by red tape, by cadre deployment that puts loyalty above competence, and by a regulatory maze that makes it harder to start a business in some townships than in parts of Europe.

Here is the uncomfortable truth that our critics on the left prefer to ignore and our leaders prefer to bury. South Africa has the strongest constitution on the continent. It has a Constitutional Court that has repeatedly stood up to power. It has a free press, an active civil society, and courts that have jailed presidents' allies and ordered officials to answer for their actions. The machinery of accountability exists. What has been missing is the will to use it consistently, without fear or favour, against people wearing the right party colours.

Compare this with the countries we should be measuring ourselves against. Botswana built one of Africa's most prosperous economies by pairing mineral wealth with prudent management, a professional civil service, and institutions that protected property rights and punished corruption. Mauritius, a small island nation with no natural resource windfall, built a high-income economy through open markets, rule of law, and an independent judiciary. Senegal, after years of frustration, proved that a peaceful transfer of power through the ballot box can reset a nation's sense of its own future. These are not perfect places. But they prove that the African story does not have to end in looting and decay. Better is possible, and it is built on the same boring, unglamorous foundations: clean budgets, enforced contracts, competitive markets, and leaders who fear the voter more than they fear the auditor.

So what must happen next? First, every municipality that fails an audit should face automatic consequences, including suspension of officials, referral for criminal investigation, and public release of the findings in plain language that a township resident can understand. Second, the Zondo recommendations must be fully implemented, with prosecutors given the resources and independence to bring cases to trial, and with no one, however senior or well-connected, exempted. Third, municipal procurement must be opened to competition by default, with contracts published online in full, so that every rand can be traced by any citizen with a phone. Fourth, the regulatory burden that suffocates small business must be cut, so that the spaza shop owner, the informal mechanic, and the young coder can build something without paying a bribe to exist. Fifth, service delivery must be ring-fenced from political appointments. Water engineers should be hired for their competence, not their loyalty to a branch chairperson.

Civil society has a role here too. Community organisations, ratepayer associations, and independent media must keep the pressure on, track promises against results, and refuse to accept excuses dressed up as history. The private sector must stop treating the municipal mess as someone else's problem. Businesses that depend on reliable power and water should fund transparent monitoring and back independent oversight, because the cost of inaction is being paid in lost investment that never arrives.

And you, the voter, must demand more than a rally speech. When the results are announced, ask every winning councillor one question: what will you deliver in the next twelve months, and how will we check? Demand a published service-delivery plan with dates and numbers. Demand that your local audit report be read aloud at a public meeting. Refuse to accept "the previous administration" as the answer to everything. Power is borrowed, and the people are the lender.

Twenty-nine million South Africans have spoken, or are about to. The count will tell us who won seats and who lost them. It will not, by itself, fix a single burst pipe or prosecute a single thief. That work belongs to us. The ANC has had thirty years to prove it can deliver a better life for ordinary people, and the evidence is in every neglected township and every auditor's footnote. The voters have been patient. They have been generous. Now they are asking a simple question that every leader should be terrified to answer badly: where is our water, where is our power, and where is our money?

Demand the answer. Then hold them to it, every day, until it is delivered.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA