South Africa is renowned internationally for its legislation on socio-economic rights, yet its government is also condemned domestically for its persistent failings. South Africans are guaranteed a progressive diversity of rights by both the constitution and the body of international rights frameworks to which the country belongs. Despite this, socio-economic rights have been systematically disregarded. Most recently, Johannesburg has been facing severe water shortages. Some residents have gone without water for almost three months and 86-hour cutoffs were planned over the December 2024 holiday period. Concurrently, Johannesburg is struggling with ongoing sewage contamination issues and increasing service delivery protests.
The responsibility for these failings largely lies with the municipal and national governments. The national government, which plays a key facilitative role, often opts for supervision and overregulation over adequate support. Likewise, the municipal government’s mandate positions it as the practical dissemination point for services. Yet despite their importance, municipalities have been continuously constrained by inadequate human resources, lack of skills, scarce finances, years of neglect and corruption. High rates of vacancies, extensive turnover and short-term contracts plague municipalities. Municipal offices too often lack the staffing necessary to function cohesively, seriously constraining their operations. Moreover, in a survey conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council, 74.6% of municipal workers felt that vacancies strongly affected the performance of the municipality, which was the greatest consensus on any factor. Even among employed workers on long-term contracts, serious skills challenges plague operations. In the same study of municipal workers, many respondents indicated that cadre deployment (the placing of politically connected individuals in key strategic positions) had led bureaucratic leadership to be ineffective, unethical and uncollaborative. When surveyed, one participant said, “You appoint this person. He’s clueless, or she’s clueless. But because of the political mandate, you put that person there.” Moreover, managers routinely lack the skills necessary for effective fiscal management, which leads to overspending an already overstretched budget.
Political leadership fared no better, as municipal workers stated that elected officials tended towards incompetence, irresponsibility, combativeness and selfishness. Researchers have also found a crucial lack of necessary skills for day-to-day operations. Employees are regularly incompetent in hard skills such as engineering, health and safety, office administration or other skillsets necessary for service delivery.
Corruption has also remained a rampant issue in municipal governments, most often manifesting as the maladministration of resources and unequal access to services. Government officers have routinely abused public resources for personal gain, as exemplified by the billions of Rands investigated for corrupt deals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers also found that corruption in municipal offices prevented the provision of public services to informal settlements, amplifying the already present disillusionment and anger. Additionally, the prevalence of clientelism, bribery and nepotism breeds incompetence and favours the socially connected in a system designed to tackle social unevenness. In its totality, corruption strips municipalities of their capacity to provide services, compromises the integrity of the service delivery system and burdens the local government’s already tenuous relationship with the public. Serious as these obstacles are, the cornerstone limitation of service delivery remains the lack of appropriate financing. Proper financing has immense potential to improve service delivery. It could be used to reduce capacity constraints, strengthen accountability measures, create better programmes for public engagement or provide directly for services. By no means would an increase in resources relieve the system of its inefficiencies but greater financing could be the impetus for dramatic reforms in the municipalities most in need.
However, those municipal offices most in need are also least capable of generating their own resources. Municipal governments create revenue either by taxes, payment from services, independent revenue generation (such as loans or investments), or government grants. This system works for the wealthier districts, but in the poorer municipalities constituents cannot sufficiently pay for services and the municipalities rarely qualify for non-governmental financial support. These municipalities are therefore entirely dependent on the national government to fulfil their mandate.
Yet despite the necessity and transformative potential of greater funding, the government has often failed in its duty to provide municipalities with appropriate resources. Rather than support these programmes, economic policymakers have consistently opted for a strategy of fiscal consolidation and debt reduction by reducing public expenditure. This strategy not only unduly burdens municipalities, but also ignores the constitutional obligations put on the government towards service provision and social inequality. This obligation is overtly discussed in the constitution, as the preamble incorporates itself as the supreme law ‘so as to’ ‘improve the quality of life of all citizens.’ Aside from this direct causal intent, the constitution takes a uniquely justiciable approach to socio-economic rights, wherein it guarantees the provision of healthcare, housing, education, water and more. Advocates of cutting public expenditure argue that the government’s economic policy is merely a response to the free market and the inalienable laws of economics. By this logic, the government must place the economic well-being of the state over the fulfilment of public services. But, according to a group of expert economists, economic stability and public expenditure are not incompatible. In fact, public expenditure may well be necessary for a healthy economy and the argument for their incompatibility serves only to insulate policymakers from accountability and prevent open deliberation.
Moreover, the central government’s neglect is often coupled with counter-productive over-regulation. Effective service delivery for municipalities demands open cooperation and respect between the spheres of government. Yet among the more vulnerable municipalities, financial reliance has bled into over-monitoring. Municipalities’ original constitutional powers have been subsumed by the government’s regulatory oversight, eventually compromising the autonomy of the municipal office and preventing effective cooperation. Service delivery will continue to be a problem. Municipalities remain crippled by their capacity constraints and corrupt practices. They are not prepared to fulfil their mandate, and they are not capable of originating the extensive reforms necessary. Municipalities are increasingly becoming neglected subsidiaries of the central government, and until service delivery is properly prioritised by those capable of change, the same issue will persist.
