WeeklySA_AdminDECAY: Coalition rule has turned local government into a circus of meetings, minutes and excuses. Everyone has a seat at the table, yet no one wants to take responsibility. Services collapse, and communities are left trapped in a system that is more interested in explaining away failure than in simply making things work…
By Themba Khumalo
There is a sound a municipality makes when it is being misgoverned: not the blare of disaster, nor the crash of scandal, but a patient, insidious drip — the hum of authority without courage, the endless cycle of meetings convened and adjourned while nothing decisive is done, the ritual nudging of responsibility further down the road until failure becomes routine, predictable, almost administrative.
Perhaps you have heard it too, late in the evening, when the streets are quieter and the promises fainter.
It is the low, grinding groan of systems sacrificed on the altar of political vanity, of lives belittled by deliberate delay, of streets and homes forced to finance the indulgence of leaders too consumed by ego to govern.
That sound is coalition local government in South Africa: relentless, corrosive and contemptuously indifferent to the people whose votes placed it in office. It does not pause. It does not repent. It simply survives — feeding on the very dysfunction it was elected to fix.
The irony is almost too much, yet it persists.
We were sold the fiction of democratic maturity and told that politics had finally shed its juvenile instincts. Assured that parties stitched together by electoral arithmetic rather than trust would discover the discipline of compromise. We were promised restraint. Responsibility. Adults in the room. What we received were tacticians of survival, mistaking arithmetic for authority.
What followed was a carousel of convenience masquerading as governance — egos sharpened for score-settling, procedure exploited as armour, sabotage perfected into operating doctrine. Every faction clings to its leverage. The town is collateral.
Coalition councils have become breeding grounds for drift and delay. Take Johannesburg, where post-2016 coalitions have repeatedly toppled mayors and fractured the council into warring blocs. Budgets stall not because they are complex, but because they are contested. Policies wither before they are enacted. Decisions are strangled in committee before they see the light of day.
Tshwane echoed the pattern: leadership upheavals triggering administrative whiplash, residents left waiting months for water repairs, resurfaced roads, and electricity connections — while political contests unfolded in plush chambers far removed from the grit of the streets.
Ekurhuleni perfected the revolving door. Coalition allegiances shifted with unnerving ease. Portfolios changed hands. Essential services drifted between factions, more invested in bargaining power than delivery. In smaller councils such as Metsimaholo, the same dysfunction hardened into paralysis, leaving residents to inherit mounting debt, institutional fatigue and crumbling infrastructure.
Through township gutters and gridlocked streets, instability carves itself into daily life. One year, a water project is unveiled with banners, speeches and blaring loudspeakers. The next, taps cough dry, trenches collect rainwater, and residents are told it is “a coalition change” — as if governance were a seating arrangement at a wedding rather than a duty.
Roads fracture into pothole fields. Streetlights blink out one by one. Municipal voicemail becomes the soundtrack of neglect, replaying the same polite indifference while the town waits.
Every promise begins to feel provisional. Every plan is conditional. Delivery becomes a gamble — and the only dependable outcome is delay, dressed up as process. You might call it bureaucracy; others, a slow unravelling nobody dares name aloud.
Planning is treated as fiction. Long-term thinking is quietly ridiculed. Why commit to resurfacing roads or reinforcing drainage systems when the next coalition realignment may dismantle your work for political advantage?
Strategies are launched with ceremony and abandoned without consequence. Projects stall midstream. Streets flood predictably. Communities watch while nothing advances except resentment and rumour.
Inside council chambers, authority is performed with rehearsed solemnity. Words like service delivery, stakeholder engagement, and community consultation are repeated until they lose weight. Decisions are deferred beneath the sacred banner of procedure while the town deteriorates beyond the council windows.
Outside, the consequences are not theoretical. Refuse trucks arrive erratically. Drains remain clogged because they were discussed rather than cleared. Sewage edges towards front doors. Residents memorise the pitch of municipal hold music because nobody ever answers. Life in coalition municipalities becomes an exercise in managed disappointment — a steady lesson that governance is recital, not responsibility.
Officials navigating this terrain adjust swiftly. Insisting on standards is risky. Competence attracts suspicion. Today’s instruction becomes tomorrow’s disciplinary charge. Engineers temper warnings about collapsing pipes. Accountants soften projections that will be ignored. Planners scale back ambition to avoid becoming collateral. Infrastructure decays not only from age, but from timidity enforced from above.
Money in coalition municipalities does not always erupt into scandal; it seeps away through hesitation. Payments are delayed because an agreement cannot be secured. Debts swell because responsibility is diffused. Eskom waits. Water boards wait. Contractors withdraw. Residents are urged to exercise patience, as if patience were a utility.
Audit reports arrive annually like exhausted prophets. The same warnings. The same findings. The same weaknesses. The same irregularities. The same absence of consequence. They are tabled, quoted for political advantage, and quietly shelved — incapable of compelling the reform they diagnose.
When collapse edges closer — when protests ignite, roads are barricaded, and communities finally erupt — coalition partners reach instinctively for diffusion. Everyone is merely one partner. Everything was inherited. Complexity becomes absolution. Responsibility is redistributed until it cannot be located.
Above all of this hovers the kingmaker — that small party with just enough seats to tilt the balance and just enough appetite to demand a ransom…to extract concessions beyond its mandate. Municipal governance becomes a marketplace. Portfolios traded. Positions negotiated. Public interest discounted.
The municipality becomes collateral damage in a political poker game played by men and women who have turned electoral arithmetic into a fork and knife for the feeding frenzy.
The result is not sustained outrage. Rage exhausts itself. What settles instead is fatigue. People stop attending meetings because nothing changes. Stop reading notices because they promise nothing. Stop believing, because belief has proven costly and futile.
Coalition local government has not merely faltered in delivering services; it has eroded its own seriousness. It has normalised fragility. It has turned local governance into an arena for egos — loud at the top, absent where it matters.
Townships hear it daily. That drip. That hum. That slow, humiliating sound of systems faltering while leaders insist they are still negotiating.
The coalition arrangement will not be remembered for its inclusion or maturity. It will be remembered for the grinding indignity of communities forced to endure dysfunction tailored in suits, promises recorded in minutes and the polite pretence that someone, somewhere, is in control. Or perhaps it will not be remembered at all—just felt, day after day, in the quiet ways people lower their expectations.
It will be defined as the era when municipalities were run by individuals too consumed with negotiating their own relevance to notice the lights going off, the taps faltering, and the public withdrawing into silence.
Long after the speeches have faded and the present coalitions have dissolved into footnotes, one fact will remain: while politicians bartered over fragments of power, citizens paid the price — in time, in money, in dignity.
And no invocation of procedure will ever cleanse that reckoning from the conscience of those who presided over it.
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* The writer, Themba Khumalo, is a renowned columnist, political commentator and former editor
