WeeklySA_AdminACCOUNTABILITY: From hotel baths to public insults and missed deadlines, political blunders reveal more than poor judgement. As municipal elections approach, Nhlanhla Mbatha urges voters to remember what those moments say about power…
By Nhlanhla Mbatha
On November 4, we will queue again for local government elections.
Potholes, water cuts, broken streetlights, leaking sewers, billing chaos. Politicians will tell us to vote for service delivery, for stability, for change.
We should also vote with our memory. Why? South African politics is never boring. It is a masterclass in gaffes — moments when the mask slips and leaders say out loud what they really think of us. As we walk into that voting booth, remember the premier who went to a hotel to bathe.
When taps run dry in Soweto, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Ekurhuleni and Sharpeville, mothers carry buckets. Pensioners push wheelbarrows loaded with 25-litre containers. Small businesses close.
Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi told a media briefing that he had gone to a hotel to bathe during a water outage so he could attend a commitment. He probably thought he was being honest. He was. That was the problem. It was a moment of pure, unfiltered disconnect.
The line “Let them eat cake” is famously attributed to Marie Antoinette, although there is no reliable evidence that she said it. But Lesufi’s hotel remark was real, delivered before the cameras, nogal. Let them book hotels.
The issue is not that a premier can access a hotel. It is that he thought this was a relatable answer.
For a family surviving on R3,500 a month, paying for a hotel room just to bathe is hardly a practical solution. The remark suggests a leader who has stopped feeling the crisis and is managing it from a distance.
Lesufi subsequently apologised. But the question his answer raised remains: how closely do those in power understand the lives of the people they govern?
Municipalities carry the responsibility for household water services, his defenders will say. But provincial leaders still have responsibilities for oversight and support. And empathy requires no jurisdiction.
Accountability or insults
On November 4, remember this too: “O bua masepa” — “You are talking shit.”
Johannesburg has endured a revolving door of mayors. At this point, the mayoral chain should be on a rental contract rather than engraved.
Its current mayor, Dada Morero, was filmed during an electricity engagement in Tshepisong. A resident accused him of being a criminal. The mayor’s response, on camera: “You are talking shit!”
Again, brutal honesty. But think about that exchange. A resident — someone you are elected to serve — accuses you of wrongdoing, and your response is profanity.
No figures. No audit. No explanation of where the money went. Just an insult.
Morero later apologised. That matters, but so does the conduct that made an apology necessary.
It is how power speaks when it has run out of patience. When accountability becomes too tiring, it turns into abuse.
Johannesburg’s residents know the consequences of failing services. The streets tell their own story. When a voter accuses his mayor of wrongdoing, even if the accusation is unfair, the mayor’s job is to answer with facts.
That clip is more than a gaffe. To an already frustrated resident, it conveys a governing attitude in eight letters: contempt.
On November 4, remember how power answered when challenged.
Then, in September, Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina was in Loerie, in the Eastern Cape’s Kouga municipality. During an exchange with a resident described in reports as disabled, she responded with the profanity: “Jou ma se p***.”
The video circulated widely. Outrage followed. Six days after the incident, Majodina apologised, accepting responsibility and saying she had responded with the same profane language directed at her.
Notice the pattern. At a community engagement about water and sanitation — her actual portfolio — the exchange descended into insults.
Being sworn at does not make a minister less human. But holding public office demands restraint, especially when dealing with vulnerable residents. This is more than bad manners. It is the state speaking to a citizen as though it were taking part in a tavern brawl.
Sometimes the most revealing political moments are quieter.
In September last year, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that the best-run municipalities were often DA-controlled. He challenged ANC councillors to ask what those municipalities were doing better.
He intended it as a call to improve. But politically, that admission carried weight. When the ANC president acknowledges the opposition’s municipal performance, his own party cannot simply wave it away.
Think of the irony. Campaign rhetoric asks voters to distrust the opposition. Then the party’s president tells councillors there are lessons to learn from how that opposition governs.
You cannot un-ring that bell.
Whatever party voters support, the implication is clear: performance must count. Struggle credentials and campaign slogans cannot repair a sewer.
On November 4, remember that admission. Remember, too, the deadline everyone seemed to know except the ANC.
The most expensive blunder can be the one in which you say nothing because you have missed your turn to speak.
In 2021, the ANC — the party that had governed nationally for 27 years and should have known the IEC timetable by heart — failed to complete candidate submissions in 93 municipalities by the original deadline.
Candidate nominations subsequently reopened, giving the party another opportunity. The feared automatic losses did not materialise. But that reprieve did not erase the administrative embarrassment.
The excuse was chaos in the system. The episode exposed chaos in the party.
Gaffes galore
If an organisation struggles to get its candidates onto the ballot on time, voters are entitled to ask how reliably it will manage the basics of government. Politics is not boring because these gaffes keep happening. Politics is terrifying because we keep forgiving them.
The hotel remark, the public insults and the missed deadline expose three familiar failings: distance, contempt and incompetence.
Distance from how people live. Contempt for what people say. Incompetence in doing the basic job.
“Let them eat cake” was never really about cake. It became shorthand for a governing class that could no longer imagine other people’s hunger.
We do not need to imagine hardship in South Africa. We live it. We live the water cuts, the hours without electricity after a substation fails, the “system offline” at licensing offices, the bill claiming we owe R80 000.
On November 4, do not vote angry. Vote with receipts.
Remember the hotel bath while residents queued for tankers. Remember the insults when citizens challenged their leaders. Remember the party that missed the candidate deadline. Remember the president who acknowledged the opposition’s municipal performance.
Then measure the promises against the record.
Who said politics is boring?
Mbatha is an independent journalist with decades’ experience in mainstream media
