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Faced with a local government system that is universally acknowledged to be failing, the African National Congress (ANC) is approaching the upcoming elections with an appeal attempting to combine humility with hubris.

At its manifesto launch in Riverside, Diepsloot on Sunday, President Cyril Ramaphosa claimed that the party had engaged with communities across the country, and “humbly” accepted the verdict that many municipalities were in distress and were not performing their responsibilities properly. “We feel our people’s frustration,” he said.

Nevertheless, he said that the ANC was proud of its record over the past 30 years, and said the party intended to build on it. Very little of what was presented signalled a substantive shift in its mode of governance.  Much of this programme came across less like a new direction than a renewed commitment to objectives it has already placed before voters.

It was strongly reminiscent of the 2021 campaign promises built around the idea of “doing better”. It also uses the slogan “Masakhe” (let us build), which is reminiscent of the “Masakhane” campaign in the 1990s, which encouraged people to contribute to development through paying their accounts. It met with limited success.

The manifesto sets out six priority areas: providing water, electricity, and other basic services; creating jobs and attracting investment; promoting security, cleaner neighbourhoods and healthy communities; ensuring sound municipal finances; building honest and well-led municipalities; and ensuring that municipalities listen and account to residents.

[See our charts later in this piece that track the government’s performance across these areas.]

It also pledges an initial 100-day campaign, during which municipalities would undertake an intensive process of dealing with broken municipal infrastructure, publishing information of their conditions, “ramping up” local economic development, enrolling indigent households for free basic services, setting out development plans, and convening security forums.

Its manifesto recognises that repair and maintenance has been neglected, and promises to commit 8% of asset value to doing so. It also aims to bring down municipal debt to Eskom and the water boards by at least 30% in the coming term of office, and for at least half of municipalities to achieve clean or unqualified audits.

It states that outsourcing and contracting have been used too extensively. This has facilitated corruption, and deprived municipalities of the means to manage and execute their own programmes. The party hopes to address this, by building internal capacity.

Building that capacity requires a professionalised local public administration, and the onboarding of technically skilled personnel – to “rebuild municipal engineering, technical and yellow-fleet capacity”.

It also commits to tackling the corruption that has become associated with local government. It says: “[ANC administrations will] lead with integrity and zero tolerance for corruption by consistently applying the ANC step-aide rule, preventing conflicts of interest, strengthening supply chain governance and conducting lifestyle audits for mayors, MMCs [mayoral committee members], and senior managers in the municipalities. We will drive transparency in pro­curement, eliminate the trend of incomplete projects without consequences, and speed up blacklisting of corrupt and non-performing contractors.”

However, neither the manifesto nor the ANC’s commentary around it addresses the failure of the party to implement such measures in the past.

See, for example, the six charts below that show overall government performance on jobs, government debt, electricity and water provision, fixed investment, and safety over the past 30 years.

The first chart shows the number of people in employment from 1994 to 2026.

The second chart shows government debt levels from 1994, projected to 2028.

The third chart shows the share of households without electricity in South Africa between 1994 and 2025.

The fourth chart shows the share of households without piped water between 1994 and 2025.

The fifth chart shows the rate of fixed investment in South Africa between 1994 and 2026.

The sixth chart shows the murder rate between 1994 and 2025.

What all the charts show is that the 30 years of progress referred to by Ramaphosa was in the main a reference to the first 15 years of ANC rule. Making things more difficult for the ANC is that its own voters do not believe the government’s promises or that their lives are set to improve. See for example the chart below, which shows what share of ANC voters believe that the country is moving in the right direction.

To make matters worse the manifesto does not deal with the political reasons behind the local government crisis, such as the ANC’s conscious programme of politicising administrative systems. Even as government policy has recognised the damage that anti-meritocratic staffing has done and engaged in a “professionalisation” initiative, the ANC has refused to disavow either the “deployment” of its “cadres” to the public service, or the use of race and gender as defining features in employment.

In recent years, government policy has doubled down in its commitment to race-based hiring, adopting a highly punitive framework to force quotas onto the private sector.

Similarly, incentives and support for business development have been driven less by firm potential than by ideological demands.

The very fractiousness of the ANC and an entrenched pattern of extraction from public resources have made local government a prime site of politically linked corruption.

“Public office must never be used for personal enrichment, political protection or access to public resources,” Ramaphosa said. These are, however, the de facto incentives that have been built into the existing system.