Where It Started

In the early, heady, and remarkably naïve days of the early 2000s, I found myself sitting as a councillor in the newly minted, grandly consolidated Johannesburg metro chamber. We had been stitched together into a single, sprawling municipality, and the air was thick with the suffocating perfume of unearned optimism. The grand plan was simple: we were going to effortlessly undo the monstrous inequalities of the apartheid city, miraculously usher in pristine services to those long denied them, and probably achieve world peace before the lunch tea-tray arrived.

Naturally, human nature and administrative inertia intervened.

I sat back and watched, with a mixture of fascination and horror, as something far more insidious took root. Deadlines slipped, and nobody in authority suffered so much as a raised eyebrow. Eye-watering budget overruns were quietly nod-nodded into approval over tepid instant coffee. Auditing reports flagging colossal irregular spending were dutifully noted, solemnly stamped, and filed directly into the bureaucratic ether. Each lapse seemed so delightfully small, so forgivably human, and each was promptly absolved. That, I am now thoroughly convinced, was the exact moment the rot began its glorious, unhindered march.

A quarter of a century later, those charming little lapses have metastasised into a fully institutionalised, self-perpetuating apparatus of paralysis. It is precisely why, if you live in Johannesburg, your kitchen taps offer nothing more than a raspy sigh, why neighbourhood potholes expand to the size of municipal swimming pools, and why your monthly rates bills ascend into the stratosphere. The entire circus rests securely upon a single, sacred pillar of local governance: absolute, unadulterated immunity from failure. Nobody ever pays for being incompetent.

Numbers I Could Not Have Imagined

To fully appreciate the sheer scale of this administrative pantomime, one must consult the ledger of catastrophe. Municipalities across our fair republic now carry a staggering R268.13 billion in unauthorised, irregular, fruitless, and wasteful expenditure, according to National Treasury’s 2024/25 Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) Compliance Report. Every single province is merrily affected, though some have elevated financial squander to an outright art form.

The North West’s breathtaking balance is roughly 25 times that of the Western Cape. Treasury, in its usual polite language, attributes the North West’s ruin to vacant finance posts, comatose internal controls, and a total absence of consequence management, while praising stable governance in the Western Cape. It is a marvellous case study: the exact same national laws, yet vastly different appetites for administrative self-destruction. My own home province, Gauteng, proudly sits in second place on this leaderboard of shame.

Adding insult to injury, the Auditor-General discovered that approximately 83% of the R6.36 billion outright wasted in 2024/25 was spent on interest and penalties simply because officials forgot or declined to pay suppliers on time. That is billions of rands spent quite literally on nothing at all. Rather than bothering to recover these squandered fortunes from the responsible pencil-pushers, councils habitually write the losses off with a breezy wave of the hand, while the number of officials facing disciplinary action actually managed to drop from 255 down to 236.

The Payroll That Cannot Say No

National Treasury sensibly suggests that municipal staff costs ought to hover between 25% and 40% of operating expenditure. Statistics South Africa proudly announced a national average figure of 25.2% for 2025, which sounds immensely reassuring right up until you inspect the horrifying spread behind the curtain. Thirty-seven municipalities are floating far above the 40% ceiling. Sedibeng District, sitting right on Johannesburg’s southern doorstep, spends a gob-smacking 76% of its entire operational budget purely on salaries. In the major metros, gargantuan bulk electricity bills artificially dilute the numbers, making the swollen payroll look far smaller than the gluttonous beast it actually is.

The deeper, more comedic tragedy is that salary increases have completely severed all ties with financial reality or affordability. The sweeping five-year South African Local Government Bargaining Council agreement signed in 2024 comfortably guarantees above-inflation increases until June 2029, including a generous 4.75% hike this year for roughly 295 000 workers. A council that is functionally bankrupt and completely unable to pay its bulk bill to Eskom is still legally obligated to shell out these raises, or enter a bureaucratic purgatory to beg for an exemption. Tshwane, for instance, is still groaning under the weight of back-pay for a 2021 increase it couldn’t afford in the first place.

Now, let me be crystal clear: I do not begrudge any honest worker a decent, fair wage. Many municipal employees perform gruelling, dangerous, and utterly thankless work for modest remuneration. But when pay rises are unconditionally guaranteed regardless of whether the water treatment plant actually purifies water or explodes into mud, someone else is forced to pick up the tab. That “someone” is the bewildered resident sitting at home, waiting for a pipe repair crew that will never arrive.

Labour’s Long Shadow

During Johannesburg’s fiery iGoli 2002 restructuring, which birthed entities like City Power and Johannesburg Water, the initiative was savagely opposed by the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU). That baptism of fire taught me early on just how much destructive leverage municipal labour commands over local government.

SAMWU today boasts more than 166 000 members out of roughly 300 000 municipal workers nationwide. While I wholeheartedly support genuine collective bargaining, the structural hazard here is terrifying: the union sits comfortably inside the governing political alliance, a single centralised agreement legally binds every council regardless of its solvency, and the workers who control the levers of electricity, water, and refuse collection can plunge a municipality into darkness at a moment’s notice. When the employer sitting across the negotiating table shares the exact same political bed as the union bosses, enforcement of basic workplace discipline becomes intensely awkward, and in local government, anything awkward is indefinitely postponed.

The City of Tshwane in 2023 offered a rare, shining glimpse that consequences are, in fact, technically possible. The Labour Court declared an aggressive SAMWU strike unprotected, 15 workers were promptly arrested for public violence, and more than 100 were summarily dismissed. Yet this remains a startling anomaly. In the vast majority of councils, disciplinary proceedings drift aimlessly for years while suspended officials relax comfortably at home on full pay.

Loyalty Over Ability

Even during my tenure in the chamber, it was blindingly obvious that political loyalty was worth tenfold more than a stellar CV. The mountains of evidence accumulated since demonstrate that political reliability and personal connections, not race, are the true, undisputed currencies of municipal patronage.

In the landmark case of Mlokoti v Amathole District Municipality in 2008, the High Court rightfully threw out a senior municipal manager’s appointment because it had been puppeteered behind closed doors by an African National Congress deployment committee. Years later, the Zondo Commission emphatically recommended burying cadre deployment once and for all, even though the Pretoria High Court subsequently dismissed the Democratic Alliance’s legal attempt to declare the practice unconstitutional. In 2025, the Constitutional Court confirmed that only municipal managers and their immediate executive reports may be legally barred from holding political party office. Below that elite tier, union membership, political party loyalty, and municipal administration remain hopelessly, incestuously intertwined.

Nepotism possesses an equally impressive paper trail. Way back in 2013/14, the Auditor-General uncovered a staggering R781 million in lucrative council tenders awarded directly to undeclared relatives of municipal employees and elected councillors.

When municipal appointments are made on the basis of political sycophancy, when equity targets are weaponised as a convenient excuse not to hire rather than a tool to aggressively recruit and develop talent, and when no one is ever held accountable for catastrophic outcomes, citizens of every colour suffer. It is the poorest communities, those who rely entirely on public services and lack the financial means to buy private alternatives, who pay the heaviest price.

Who Pays?

Who pays for this magnificent administrative circus? Never the responsible official, mind you.

It is paid for by the elderly pensioner dutifully shelling out rates for a dark street lamp that hasn’t flickered in six months. It is paid for by the struggling small manufacturer forced to burn thousands in diesel running a generator because the local substation keeps blowing up. And it is paid for by every single taxpayer in South Africa, as municipal debt owed to Eskom ballooned to a terrifying R111.6 billion by March 2026, compounding by roughly R3 billion every single month. Eskom ominously projects this mountain of bad debt will reach R358 billion by 2031, a colossal liability that the national fiscus will ultimately have to swallow.

Predictably, the poorest suffer the most. Wealthier households construct private fortresses outfitted with boreholes, solar arrays, and private security forces; impoverished households have no such luxury. Every time an audit report detailing billions in waste is released and absolutely nothing happens, another chunk of public trust evaporates. With local government elections looming on 4 November 2026, citizens are handed a rare chance to finally demand something different.

What I Would Tell My Younger Self

If I could step into a time machine and whisper into the ear of my idealistic younger self sitting in that Johannesburg council chamber, I would say this: Never, ever let the small lapse slide.

The statutory tools to fix this madness already exist; they are simply gathering dust in corner offices. Councils must be legally forced to recover wasted funds from negligent officials under Section 32 of the MFMA rather than writing them off with a nonchalant stroke of a pen. The Auditor-General’s power to issue binding certificates of debt against delinquent managers must become a routine, terrifying reality. Wage agreements must include mandatory affordability clauses for financially distressed municipalities. Senior appointments must be governed by completely independent panels with published scoring sheets. And every single municipal supplier must be cross-checked against the employee payroll to stop the gravy train in its tracks.

Chaotic

We did not deliberately set out decades ago to construct a chaotic, consequence-free bureaucratic paradise. It grew incrementally, one excused failure, one overlooked overrun, and one forgiven lapse at a time. And I was sitting right there in the room when the first seeds were planted.

Yet we consistently refuse to name the real monster lurking in the executive corridors. We treat this systemic ruin as though it were merely an unfortunate administrative accident or a harmless case of bureaucratic clumsiness. It is nothing of the sort. What we are witnessing is rampant, institutionalised criminality perpetrated by executive managers who have turned municipal offices into private syndicates.

The systematic appointment of unqualified cadres, the shameless insertion of useless relatives onto the payroll, and the deliberate sabotaging of municipal infrastructure to justify emergency tenders are not mere governance slip-ups; they are unmitigated criminal offenses.

The tragic comedy of asking local government or the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) to police itself has run its course. Asking the very arsonists who torched the building to serve as the fire brigade is a farce that only South African bureaucracy could invent. COGTA and municipal councils are far too deeply entangled in political patronage networks, regional party fiefdoms, and union alliances to ever deliver an honest, ruthless assessment of their own decay.

If we genuinely wish to save what remains of our municipalities, we must completely strip local government and COGTA of their self-auditing privileges.

What is desperately needed is a total shift toward independent, external evaluation. We must mandate fully autonomous assessment panels, stripped of local political contamination and composed of independent subject-matter experts, including international forensic auditors, municipal engineering specialists, and uncorrupted governance experts.

These panels must operate entirely outside the jurisdiction of local politics, with the explicit mandate to bypass internal council whitewashing, expose nepotistic hiring schemes, and directly refer executive management for criminal prosecution.

The remedy is not to launch broadsides against working-class labourers or to indulge in racially charged finger-pointing. It is to recognise executive criminality for what it is and strip away the protective cover of internal oversight. Until we subject our municipal executives to independent, uncompromising, and legally binding external scrutiny, every single South African will go on paying dearly for the spectacular, criminal blunders of officials who belong in dock rather than in the boardroom.