WeeklySA_AdminDELIVERY: After years of decay, the President rediscovers South Africa’s collapsing municipalities — offering familiar diagnoses, recycled solutions, and little sign that anything will actually change…
By Themba Khumalo
Stop the presses! President Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s perennial optimist-in-chief, has taken a moment to look up from the ever-burning national to-do list and discovered what the rest of us have known since the last millennium: the country’s municipalities are less functional than a chocolate teapot.
The mind boggles that the first citizen has only just realised what everyone else has long known: red tape, an entrenched governing habit, strangles progress; rusty pipes have been leaking hope without fail; and the relentless drip of municipal collapse remains the one thing South Africans have been forced to embrace—and, unfortunately, depend on.
At the past week’s President’s Coordinating Council (which, one suspects, does precious little of either), Ramaphosa delivered a stirring monologue to the assembled mayors and officials, urging them to “deliver” – a radical concept, if only they had heard of it before.
Grand speeches and obvious solutions mean little when the taps
still run dry and the pipes keep leaking…
This is not the first time the President has rediscovered local government woes. His government’s recurring amnesia about municipal collapse has become a running joke, less amusing with every repeat.
One almost hears the collective gasp. Deliver? At local level? In South Africa?
The stuff of fantasy novels. Next, he will be asking for punctual trains and honest procurement officers.
Still, the President soldiers on. Now that the rolling blackouts (Oops, silly me, “load shedding” – I must not stray from official fairy tales) are marginally less apocalyptic, and the country’s logistics have limped from “utterly broken” to “sporadically functional,” Ramaphosa insists these “national gains” must trickle down to actual people—like honey through a sieve.
He wants municipalities to cut red tape, appoint competent officials, and somehow transform themselves from bastions of bureaucratic inertia into engines of economic growth. Perhaps next week he will ask for unicorns to handle refuse collection or elves to fix potholes.
Beneath it all, there is a palpable sense of frustration. Citizens are left to contend with leaking pipes, failing services, and a leadership more adept at convening committees than fixing problems.
Let us not forget the water crisis, which, like a persistent rash, refuses to go away no matter how many blue-ribbon panels are convened or how many sternly worded memos are dispatched. What is a decade or two of neglect, after all?
The President confessed, with the air of a man reading a weather report, that metros now haemorrhage water at such a scale that one imagines municipal pipes are less conduits than leaky buckets.
Thirty-four percent of all water bought by metros disappears before anyone can be billed for it. In some cities, it is nearly half. Do not worry, though – the water boards are only owed three times as much as they were in 2018.
Progress, South African style: the more things leak, the more things stay the same.
It is a diagnosis repeated so often it has lost all power—South Africans have heard these explanations for years, but the pipes keep leaking and the lights keep flickering.
Ramaphosa, ever the champion of the bleeding obvious, diagnosed the problem with surgical insight: ageing infrastructure, illegal connections, poor maintenance, and “institutional instability” (a polite term for the revolving door of the unqualified and the well-connected).
The solution? More meetings, naturally, and the hope that someone, somewhere, might actually train a municipal worker or two. Lifelong learning, he calls it. Lifelong suffering, mutter the residents.
He further proposed that public service appointments be made on merit, not party loyalty. One wonders if the mayors in attendance managed to stifle their laughter, or simply nodded along while mentally updating their CVs.
In South Africa, meritocracy is a quaint notion, wheeled out for speeches and summarily ignored in practice. After all, appointing the competent would risk upsetting the entire delicate ecology of patronage and nepotism.
And, in a final flourish of misplaced faith, the President reminded everyone that economic growth happens at local level – not, as some might believe, in the rarefied air of the Union Buildings.
Quite so. Perhaps, in his next address, he will remind municipalities that water is wet, night follows day, and politicians occasionally bend the truth.
One can almost picture the closing scene: mayors and officials, sated by lunch and lulled by platitudes, return to their fiefdoms to prepare for another stretch of bravely ignoring instructions from above.
The cracks in the pipes gape wider, the red tape thickens, strangling progress like the water hyacinth mat on Hartbeespoort Dam, and the drip-drip of disappointment echoes on—relentless as a leaky tap in a midnight silence.
In the end, the pattern persists: grand speeches, fleeting outrage, and a return to business as usual.
All told, it was a bravura display of statesmanship: acknowledge the crisis, propose the obvious, dodge all mention of accountability, and adjourn for lunch. If only fixing taps and balancing books were as easy as giving speeches. But for now, the country can rest assured that the President is “on it”. As ever. And so it goes: another week, another wake-up call, another dose of déjà vu.
The only thing more dependable than the country’s infrastructure failures is the government’s ability to feign surprise at the consequences.
Sleep well, South Africa: your leaders are wide awake—at least until the lights flicker, the taps cough dust, and the excuses flow like sewage after a summer storm.
