Dysfunctional Municipalities, Coalition Governments!

Phillip Rakgwale

CISA, CIA, CFE, RGA, M.Inst.D Chairperson of the SAIGA council

The Constitution stipulates that the purpose of local governments is to provide an accountable government to local communities and promote social and economic development.

The responsibility extends to the provision of essential public services such as water and sanitation, electricity and adequate public health care in a sustainable manner while also encouraging the involvement of communities and community organisations in the issues of local government.

But not many can access basic municipal services, a right enshrined in Section 153 (1) of the Constitution.

This can be attributed to several factors, including the lack of professionalism in local government, unqualified public servants, the state of municipalities and the regular service delivery protests in many communities across the country.

However, the process of professionalising local government involves enhancing the level of professionalism within the local government sector.

The drive to enhance the professionalisation of local government was further propelled by the implementation of restrictions on the political rights of top managers in municipalities, as outlined in the Municipal Systems Amendment Act No. 7 of 2011.

This statute prohibits holding political posts within a political party by individuals who are serving as city administrators or directly reporting to one; this prohibition applies to acting, temporary, and permanent positions.

The proposed revision to the Municipal Systems Act aims to tackle the ongoing problem of governance that results from the political-administrative dynamics between top municipal officials and elected officials belonging to the ruling party. Its specific goal is to lessen political office-bearers' tendency to meddle in day-today operations related to local government.

However, the Constitutional Court declared the laws mentioned above to be invalid because it believed that the parliamentary procedure used to pass this legislation was fundamentally flawed. The information presented above makes it clear that municipalities require coordinated, focused, and nationally guided support and action.

The continuous dysfunctionality of municipalities, their poor financial performance, and the absence of strong political leadership are evident in the ongoing issues in municipal governance that have been present since the dawn of the democratic era.

These issues highlight the need for the national government to reevaluate and reassess the constitutional authority granted to local government entities and consider implementing a practical framework for managing municipal affairs.

This model proposes a possible constitutional amendment that would grant the national government the authority to directly intervene in municipal affairs. This intervention would aim to hold municipal political and administrative executives accountable for the dysfunctional state of their municipalities. Additionally, this model proposes that the salaries and benefits of councillors should be funded through the national fiscus, in coordination with both national and provincial legislative authorities.

Doing so would relieve municipal coffers from the burden of funding these expenses, freeing up funds to provide long-term, basic municipal services.

It is worth noting that many municipalities currently rely entirely on conditional grants, resulting in a significant portion of funds being directed towards salaries and benefits for municipal personnel and political office-bearers.

Coalition Governments

Following the last local government elections, the number of hung councils increased from 27 in 2016 to 67 in 2021. This increase meant coalition governments had to be formed in such councils as there were no outright winners.

The formation of coalition governments is not new in South Africa. However, forming and managing such coalition

governments have not been easy tasks. Two metropolitan municipality coalition governments, the City of Joburg in Gauteng and Eastern Cape’s Nelson Mandela Bay, emerged after the 2016 local government elections and collapsed before their terms of office expired.

Lack of agreements has been cited as one of the primary reasons behind the failure of coalition governments. These findings have important implications for policymakers and politicians who should draw up formal and binding coalition agreements that contain conflict resolution mechanisms. The lack of an outright winner in national or local government elections makes it difficult to form a government that can deliver public services. This complexity often happens when three or more political parties contest an election, and none of them gets more than 50% of the total votes cast. In other cases, the complexity is due to political disputation that yields a narrow win, making it difficult for the winning party to govern alone.

Often there are two solutions to this political conundrum: The first is to rerun the election, and the second is to form a coalition government, the choice depending on the legal provisions of the jurisdiction. In the case of South Africa, the latter has been employed since 1994. The first such case was at the national level and saw the formation of the Government of National Unity under the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), which governed between 1994 and 1999. Since then, coalition governments have also been formed at the subnational and local levels.

The November 2021 local government elections in South Africa produced an unprecedented number of hung municipalities, resulting in more local coalition municipalities than ever before.

While some might view this as a sign of a mature democracy, coalition governments are a fragile marriage of convenience (Bergman, Ilonszki & Müller, 2020). Due to their susceptibility to competing loyalties, divergent views, and the need to appease a wide range of audiences (Matthews, 2019), the capacity of coalition local governments to administer and deliver services is often limited.

To mitigate the adverse effects of coalition municipalities, the South African Local Government Association (Salga) produced a framework for coalitions in local government that hung municipalities can use in forming and running coalition municipalities (Beukes & De Visser, 2021). Such a move has heralded an end to the era of single-party dominance that the ANC has enjoyed since 1994 and marks the beginning of another era of coalition governments. To underscore this, the former and late executive mayor of the 2019 City of Johannesburg coalition government, Councillor Geoff Makhubo, in a presentation to the national parliament, notes that “the future of local government, especially in the metropolitan municipalities, might be decided by various forms of coalition governments”.

The specific goal of the proposed revision to the Municipal Systems Act is to lessen political officebearers' tendency to meddle in day-to-day operations related to local government.

The emergence of coalition governments in South Africa has attracted scholarly attention from various fields and disciplines. There is a growing corpus of literature on coalition governance in South African local government (Beukes & De Visser, 2021; Hanabe & Malinzi, 2019). For instance, Booysen (2021) explores the impact of coalitions on South Africa’s metropolitan administrations in Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane.

Drawing on the Weberian administrative model and Woodrow Wilson’s politics and administration dichotomy, Booysen (2021) argues that the line between politics and administration is blurred. Politics often encroach on the administrative field, adversely impacting service delivery. Like Booysen, Pietersen (2021) assesses the performance of the three coalition governments in Gauteng. While their conclusions on poor performance are similar, Pietersen perceives a lack of coalition agreements as the primary cause.

Nonetheless, Pietersen’s argument is based on conjecture without empirical or theoretical support (Pietersen, 2021). Moreover, while these studies should be applauded for providing a valuable springboard for future research on the government of local unity in South Africa, they are primarily descriptive with a narrow focus on metropolitan municipalities. They, therefore, ignore local and district municipalities. Consequently, such studies have limited applicability outside metropolitan municipalities.

As South Africa looks forward to the 2024 National and Provincial elections, the future seems more uncertain than ever before.