Voters must take responsibility for the state of municipalities, says Unisa Professor

On 4 November 2026, South Africans will vote for a political party of their choice.

This point is important to note and emphasise because South African voters sometimes behave as victims instead of acknowledging that they are both participants and accomplices (in case of crime committed by political parties) therefore cannot be entirely exonerated from the problems and failures caused by the political parties they have voted for.

Of course, voters vote based on a promise or a manifesto, but a repeated vote for the same political parties over and over is no longer a valid excuse, especially if that political party(ies) is not fulfilling its promises.

As we go into elections, we are all aware that our municipalities are faced with poverty, unemployment, crime, landlessness, lack of affordable housing, etc and this is nothing new or surprising.

And of course, I agree that poverty did not start in 1994, as it was designed by ,among others, slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, but a democratic South Africa must also account for where it failed.

Beyond this, many municipalities suffer from technical skill deficits, high vacancy rates in key technical positions, the appointment of unqualified personnel, maladministration, corruption, and the slow implementation of consequence management, which undermine public trust.

The Auditor-General of South Africa regularly reports poor audit outcomes across most of the country’s 257 municipalities. There is also an elephant in the room that many political parties are not addressing, and that is anti-immigration.

As if that is not enough, on the eve of elections, there are unreliable water and electricity supplies. Since 1994, the municipality’s problems have been associated with one ruling party.

It has been a common suggestion, assumption, and hypothesis that there is only one political party that remains blamed for coalition municipalities, yet it seems to me that not only one political party should be blamed because the responsibility and accountability must be jointly owned by those in the coalition.

Of course, we come from a history where one political party used to have an outright majority or had enough seats to have the right to run a Council and administer the municipalities. The reality of 2026 is different; some of the municipalities are run by coalition arrangements, and some are run by opposition parties, especially metros.

Coalitions in municipalities have become normal as major political parties have lost outright majorities and political fragmentation increases. It is in this space of coalition municipality where we find; ideological and policy friction, political instability, budget disruption, administrative interference, political instability, compromised service delivery, corruption, questionable and unqualified councillors.

We may agree to a certain point that coalition arrangements ensure broader representation by pooling the power of multiple political parties, but at the same time agree that they create deep structural complications and friction.

It is no secret that forcing a consensus or political convenience between parties with widely divergent political and economic policies and social values makes passing council resolutions extremely difficult and sometimes impossible.

Even worse, we have witnessed that coalition partners often share no common ideological ground, uniting purely to keep a mutual rival out of power. Uniting purely to keep a mutual rival out of power is recognised in theory and sociology as negative loyalty or constructing an “enemy-determined” coalition.

While highly operational for short-term mobilisation, it is a shaky foundation for governance. What then becomes the order of the day is that the moment the mutual rival is successfully overcome or locked out of power, the solitary anchor binding the coalition together fades away.

Without a common enemy to restrain their centre differences, the partners are pressed to face their own contradictory ideologies, policy aspirations, and cultural friction. Because they never created a positive, shared vision, they quickly stall out or fragment.

This then creates a lack of shared policy and implementation vision, therefore making coherent governance and service delivery virtually impossible as partners stall decisions that conflict with their particular parties’ mandates.

What we have learned from coalition politics is that working together out of convenience becomes a problem when it replaces shared alignment with proximity, creating partnerships built on ease rather than compatibility.

While convenience reduces current friction or costs, it introduces severe hidden trade-offs that ultimately erode performance, trust, and long-term sustainability. The “new normal” of coalition politics establishes a complex layer of structural and operational disputes that fundamentally reshape governance.

As I conclude, there is nothing wrong with coalition or even GNU itself; however, my interest was to equally acknowledge the complications that come with a new normal called coalition, even as a Constitutional principle.

Azilime ziyetsheni!

• Professor Boitumelo Senokoane is an Associate Professor in the College of Human Sciences at Unisa. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of South African Daily.