By BAKANG MOKOTO
20 March 2026- The Chief Director of NWU Business School, Prof Joseph Sekhampu said the South African municipal landscape is not collapsing in a single moment of crisis. Sekhampu said it is eroding in slow motion.
He further said hundreds of local councils operate as if the constitution demanded their existence, but not their viability. Sekhampu added that they table unfunded budgets, default on debt, and preside over the decay of water and electricity networks, and survive largely on fiscal transfusions from the centre.
“The Auditor General’s warnings that only a small fraction of municipalities remain functionally stable no longer sound like outliers, they describe the system.
“In his address to Parliament, the Deputy President struck a familiar tone, emphasising that the government is working to stabilise service delivery, particularly water, through improved coordination and stronger municipal capacity,” he said.
Sekhampu said it is a measured and reasonable response. He said yet, it also reflects a deeper assumption that the system itself remains sound and that the crisis lies primarily in how it is managed.
“With local government elections approaching, the pressure to demonstrate improvement will intensify, but the incentives to confront deeper structural questions may weaken. Yet, beneath this framing, the evidence points to a more complex reality than current policy assumptions allow.
“Our municipal map is a graveyard of political optimism. Designed for a post-1994 vision of community empowerment, it now reflects shrinking tax bases, hollowed out administrations, and territories that cannot anymore carry the institutional load placed upon them,” said Sekhampu.
He said across successive audit cycles and fiscal reviews, a consistent pattern has emerged. Sekhampu said a relatively small group of municipalities operate with some degree of stability, while a much larger share struggle under weak revenue bases, limited economic activity, and persistent governance strain.
“In many cases, particularly in areas with little underlying economic base, the issue is not administrative failure alone, but structural non-viability. The intellectual case for consolidation is clearer than our politics allows.
“After 1994, South Africa consolidated a highly fragmented system of racially defined local authorities and homeland administrations into a unified structure of municipalities, demonstrating that large-scale institutional redesign is neither unprecedented nor unthinkable,” he said.
Sekhampu said local governments only thrive when they have enough revenue, administrative depth, and authority to meet community needs. He said when these conditions collapse, decentralisation becomes a burden rather than a virtue, and South Africa sits precisely in this predicament.
The Guardian 