The Emfuleni Local Municipality is battling to deal with sewage spillages. As South Africans grapple with dwindling expectations of municipal services, the erosion of reliability goes unnoticed.
Image: Itumeleng English / African News Agency (ANA)
I opened my tap this morning and held my breath. Not because there was a warning. Not because of a protest or a burst pipe trending on social media. I held my breath because that is what the act has quietly become.
You turn the handle. You wait. You listen. And only when water finally comes out doyou relax. That half-second of uncertainty has become routine. It has slipped into daily life socompletely that we barely question it anymore.
But we should. Because in any functioning society, water is not an event. It is a guarantee. And yet across South Africa, that guarantee is fading. Not collapsing overnight. Not dramatically failing in ways that force immediate reaction.
But eroding slowly, unevenly, just enough for people to adjust. We no longer expect things to work. We just hope they do not break completely. Without ever agreeing to it, we have lowered the standard.
We have stopped asking our municipalities to succeed. We have learned to tolerate their gradual decline. Weare not fixing the system.
We are managing its deterioration. And then we argue about coalitions. The dominant political conversation is whether coalition governments are to blame for instability in our metros. It is an appealing argument because coalitions arevisible.
They fight in public. Mayors change. Councils stall. Budgets get delayed. It looks like dysfunction. But that visibility has created a dangerous deception. Coalitions did not break ourmunicipalities.
They exposed the fact that they were already broken. Long before coalition politics became the norm, residents were dealing with unreliable water supply, roads that deteriorated faster than they were repaired, billing systems that produced numbers no one could explain, and audit outcomes that repeated the same warnings year after year.
The dysfunction was already there. It was simply quieter. Under single-party dominance, the system did not work particularly well, but it appeared stable enough to avoid constant scrutiny. Failure was absorbed.
Smoothed over. Managed behindthe scenes. Coalitions changed that. They introduced friction at the political level, and that friction made the underlying weakness impossible to ignore. So now wepoint at the noise and say, “This is the problem. ”It is not. It is the symptom.
The deeper issue is structural. Our municipalities are fragile regardless of who governs them. Change the political arrangement and the administrative machine underneath still stutters. And the evidence for that is no longer anecdotal.
According to the Auditor-General of South Africa, municipalities have accumulated tens of billions of rand in irregular expenditure in recent years, with a majority failingto meet basic financial management and governance standards.
Year after year, the findings repeat. Year after year, the consequences are limited. That is not political instability. That is systemic weakness. You see it most clearly inthe people still trying to make the system work.
A municipal engineer told me recently that he no longer recognises his job. He entered the profession to build infrastructure, to solve problems, to improve systems over time. Today, he spends most of his energy navigating uncertainty.In the past three years, he has reported to four different political principals.
Each transition triggers a reset. Projects are reviewed. Priorities shift. Approvals stall. Work that was already underway is paused, sometimes indefinitely.“I don’t build anymore,” he said. “I wait.” There was no outrage in his voice.
Just resignation. That is not corruption. It issomething more corrosive. It is a system that has lost its ability to act with continuity.Or consider a clerk at a municipal billing office. Every day, he or she deals with residents who come in with the same problem: accounts that do not make sense.Prints corrections. Apologises.
Reprocesses forms already processed. Fixes errors that will likely return. He or She is not failing at his or her job. He or She is trapped inside a system that produces failure faster than it can be corrected. These are not isolated stories.
They are patterns. They are what institutional fatiguelooks like. And this is the shift we have not fully confronted. We are no longer measuring municipalities by whether they work. We are measuring them by how slowly they fail.
A municipality that delivers water most of the time is considered functional. One that collects refuse regularly, but not reliably, is seen as acceptable. A budget that ispassed, even if poorly executed, is treated as progress.
We have redefined success downward. We are not living through municipal failure. We are living through the normalisation of failure. That should alarm us more thanany coalition dispute. Because it changes what we demand.When expectations fall, accountability follows.
When accountability weakens, performance declines further. And the cycle continues, not through dramaticcollapse, but through quiet adjustment. So, what does it take to break that cycle?
Not a return to single-party rule. That is not a solution. It is nostalgia. And nostalgia edits out the very problems that brought us here. Not simply better coalitions either. Even perfectly coordinated political actors would still be operating inside a fragilesystem.
The real work is less visible and far less politically rewarding. It starts with protecting the people who know how to make the system work. Engineers, planners, technicians, and financial managers.
They need stability, not constant disruption. Fixed terms. Clear mandates. Protection from political turnover. Infrastructure cannot be rebuilt every time leadership changes. Continuity is not a luxury. It is the foundation of functionality. Second, accountability must become personal.
Too often, failure dissolves intoabstraction. “The system failed.” “Processes were not followed.” These phrases hide responsibility. When public money is misused or rules are ignored, theconsequences must attach to individuals, not disappear into institutions. Without that, there is no deterrence.
Only repetition. Third, procurement needs to be stripped of unnecessary discretion. Much of the damage happens in routine transactions that attract little attention. Mid-level contracts. Everyday spending.
This is where inefficiency and manipulation thrive. Automating large parts of this process will not eliminate corruption entirely, but it will reduce the space in which it operates. Transparency does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like a system that simply leaves less room to interfere. None of this is new.
None of it is ideologically radical. What is radical is how muchwe have come to accept. We have normalised uncertainty. We have adjusted our expectations. We have learned to live with a version of public service delivery that would have beenunacceptable not long ago.
And we have done it gradually, which makes it harder to resist. It shows up in small, quiet ways. In the pause before the tap runs. In the decision notto report a pothole, because nothing will happen. In the assumption that a municipal bill is probably wrong. In the mental calculations people make, every day about whatthey can rely on and what they cannot.
These are not minor inconveniences. They are signals of a deeper erosion of trust between citizens and the state. So, the question is not whether coalitions are working. The question is whether our municipalities, as systems, are still capable of working at all. Because until that is addressed, the political debate will remain a distraction. You canchange the faces at the top. You can reshuffle alliances.
You can argue endlessly about governance models. But if the machine underneath is fragile, inconsistent, and unable to sustain basic functions, the outcome will not change. Tomorrow morning, millions of South Africans will open their taps.
Some will not thinktwice. Many will hesitate. Not because they are alarmist. Not because they are pessimistic. But because experience has taught them that nothing in this system is guaranteed anymore.
And when a country reaches the point where water is no longer assumed, the problem is no longer political. It is structural. And it is already far more advanced than we are willing to admit.
Qwesha is a trade finance consultant with expertise in global commerce and risk management and regularly contributes to a number of publications