Voters Are Finally Firing the ANC From South Africa's Cities

How do you govern a city where people carry water in buckets and sit in the dark for hours, and then ask them to keep voting for you? For three decades the African National Congress assumed the answer was loyalty. This week, with more than 60 percent of municipal ballots counted, that assumption is collapsing in front of the whole country.

The ANC sits at about 32 percent. The Democratic Alliance is second at 25 percent. Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe party, the MK, is third with 8.5 percent, below what opinion polls had promised. Turnout reached roughly 54.5 percent, with about 15.9 million of 29.2 million registered voters casting ballots, up from 46 percent in the pandemic-hit 2021 local elections. More South Africans showed up, and many of them came to punish the party that has run their cities into the ground.

Consider the trajectory. In 2004 the ANC took close to 70 percent of the national vote. In 2021 it fell below 50 percent for the first time in municipal elections, winning 46 percent. In the 2024 national election it dropped to just over 40 percent and was forced into a unity government with nine other parties, the DA among them. Each election, the party that liberated us from apartheid has lost more of the trust it earned by doing so. That is not a conspiracy. It is a verdict.

And the verdict is written in pipes and cables. Municipal mismanagement has left South Africans without reliable water and facing persistent power cuts, while public services crumble around them. Water does not flow because maintenance was never funded. Lights go out because the grid was never repaired and the wrong people were given the contracts to fix it. Every failed pump and every blackout is a decision someone made, and someone profited from or ignored. Corruption allegations have followed the party for years, and the Zondo Commission's findings on state capture were not a rumour. They were a national inventory of theft, documented in testimony and in public record.

Let us be precise about who bears the cost. It is not the councillors with their official vehicles and their deployment letters. It is the nurse in Soweto who cannot sterilise instruments because the water is off. It is the small business owner in Tshwane who closes early because the power failed for the third time this week. It is the young graduate who votes for the first time and wonders why the city her taxes pay for cannot keep its own lights on. When a government fails its people this consistently, the damage is not abstract. It is measured in lost jobs, lost lives, and a generation told that the ballot is a waste of time.

Now look at the other side of the ledger, because the story is not only about decline. Cape Town, run by the DA, is forecast to retain control with about 56 percent of the vote. Geordin Hill-Lewis has already declared victory there. Whatever one thinks of any party, the lesson is simple: when a municipality delivers, voters reward it. Johannesburg, where the DA is projected at around 34 percent after a campaign led by Helen Zille, shows that the opposition can now compete for the country's financial capital. In Durban, the MK party was tipped as a contender for an outright majority, but projections put its support at about 32 percent. Populism sells well on a campaign stage. It is harder to sell when you have to fix a water main.

Here is the uncomfortable truth for everyone who has ever dismissed South Africa's democracy as a formality. The system is working. Voters are doing exactly what democracy demands of them. They are withdrawing consent from a government that has stopped delivering. That is not a crisis of democracy. It is democracy taking its job seriously. The question now is whether the parties that win these cities will prove they deserve the trust, or whether they will simply replace one patronage machine with another.

Coalition negotiations are next, and this is where the country must be vigilant. With outright majorities far from assured in several metros, parties will bargain to assemble governing alliances, and every bargain carries a price. We have seen what happens when coalitions become auctions for jobs, tenders, and council seats. The answer is not to avoid coalitions. The answer is to make them accountable. Any coalition agreement should be published, should name measurable service-delivery targets for water, electricity, roads, and refuse collection, and should be reviewed publicly every six months. Cadre deployment, the practice of placing party loyalists in municipal posts regardless of competence, must end, and the municipal manager should be appointed through open, merit-based recruitment.

South Africa does not need to invent solutions from scratch. Botswana built one of the most stable and prosperous economies on the continent by insisting on transparent institutions, sound public finance, and an independent civil service. Mauritius has alternated power peacefully for decades and used competitive governance to raise living standards. These are not perfect nations, but they prove that Africans can build institutions that outlast any single party. South Africa has the courts, the press, and an electorate that is now willing to vote out the powerful. What it needs is the discipline to use them.

Concretely, the next metro governments should open water and electricity utilities to competitive, audited private participation where it improves service, while keeping ownership of the public interest in public hands. They should publish monthly dashboards on water losses, outage hours, and tender awards, so that citizens can check the numbers themselves. They should strengthen independent municipal audit committees and give them the power to refer corruption directly to the Special Investigating Unit and the National Prosecuting Authority. And they should protect property rights and small business licensing from the bureaucratic extortion that quietly drives investment out of townships and cities alike.

So what should you demand? Demand that your councillor tell you, in writing, what the coalition agreement says about your water and your power. Demand the audit reports for your municipality, not the press release about them. Demand that your ward committee meet in public and that the minutes be published. Show up to the public participation meetings that the law requires and that most people never attend, because the people who do attend are the ones whose needs get met. Register to vote for the next cycle, and vote on performance, not on the colour of a party flag or the name on a campaign poster.

To the ANC, the message is not that you are finished. It is that the country is watching whether you can be rebuilt around competence and honesty, or whether you will keep treating the state as a private inheritance. To the DA, MK, and the smaller parties now holding the balance of power, the message is that a protest vote is not a plan. You must deliver water, power, and jobs, or you will face the same ballot box that just humbled the ANC.

We fought for the vote because we understood what it could do. Now we must use it with the seriousness it demands. Our cities are not beyond repair. But they will not repair themselves, and they will not be repaired by those who broke them. Hold the coalition talks in the open. Measure every promise against the tap and the switch. And remember that in a democracy, the people's patience is never unlimited, and the people's memory is longer than any party's spin.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA