JOHANNESBURG, Gauteng — With only nine days remaining before the November 4 local government elections, the question of who is accountable for South Africa’s recurring service delivery failures has moved to the centre of the campaign debate. Communities still facing unreliable water, electricity and basic municipal services are being asked to choose between voting officials out, professionalising the public service or strengthening consequence management — and governance specialists say the three are not mutually exclusive.
Speaking in a discussion on municipal accountability, Professor Alex van den Heever of the Wits School of Governance and Dr Johandri Wright of the Dullah Omar Institute argued that the legal tools already exist, but that political conflicts of interest, weak oversight by councils and stalled prosecutions prevent them from working.
Disasters Without Visible Consequences
Wright was asked whether any individual had been held accountable for the 2023 cholera outbreak in Hammanskraal, Tshwane, which killed just over 40 people.
To her knowledge, none had been. The municipality faced institutional oversight action, with the Department of Water and Sanitation stepping in, but no individual consequences followed, she said.
Van den Heever was then asked about the May 2024 collapse of a five-storey building under construction in George in the Western Cape, in which 34 construction workers died. Public Works Minister Macpherson had described the disaster as completely avoidable, saying the deaths would not have occurred had identified gaps been addressed.
Van den Heever said he could not recall any criminal outcome being made public. His broader point was that attention surges around a disaster, investigations then run for years, and by the time any action is taken public interest has faded — unless someone deliberately tracks the file.
He cited the inner-city Johannesburg building fire that killed 77 people: a commission of inquiry attributed blame, but nothing followed.
He later returned to the George case with an important clarification. The engineers involved had been held accountable professionally, and the Department of Employment and Labour had submitted evidence to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for criminal prosecution. That matter, he said, had effectively disappeared into the NPA despite clear potential for criminal liability.
Where the Oversight Chain Breaks
Wright traced the failure to a combination of missing political will and gaps in legislation.
Municipal managers are accounting officers, with managers directly reporting to them, and a range of statutory offences and disciplinary processes already exist to keep them in line. The municipal council is their immediate oversight body and is meant to use internal audit and other mechanisms to ensure action is taken on financial misconduct.
In practice, councils rarely fulfil that mandate. Crucially, Wright said, there is no corresponding enforcement mechanism allowing a province or another body to act against a council that fails in its oversight role. She described that as one of the cornerstones of the problem.
Van den Heever added that the people closest to a failure are often the least able to act against it. Political structures appoint the managers, which can make them complicit. More distant legislatures and councils then require a vote to intervene, and a complicit majority can simply turn a blind eye.
His proposed remedy is structural: municipal administrations should be appointed and held accountable through a system separate from politicians and members of the executive. Without that insulation, he said, capturing an administration creates the conflicts of interest that allow money to be stolen from municipalities and provincial governments.
Professionalisation, separation of powers and insulated decision-makers would allow consequence management to operate in real time, rather than through delayed commissions of inquiry that address only a small part of a much larger failure after the damage is done.
Tshwane and the Limits of Court Action
The discussion turned to the current Tshwane water contamination crisis, in which just over 400 babies — a figure put at 403 — were affected. The mayor acknowledged that the administration had failed to warn the Bospriet community in time to stop residents drinking, bathing in or washing clothes with the water.
Wright pointed to two routes available to communities.
The first is civil damages. She cited a Supreme Court of Appeal judgment delivered late last year in a matter against the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality. The municipality had failed to replace a stormwater drainage cover; a minor child fell into the opening and drowned. The court found the municipality owed a duty to maintain stormwater infrastructure and prevent harm to community members, and the family was awarded compensation.
While compensation is not the same as imprisonment, Wright said residents who incurred medical expenses after drinking contaminated water have a basis to approach a court.
The second route — prosecuting municipalities as institutions — is more ambivalent. Media outlets and activists have welcomed fines and criminal convictions over poor water quality and service delivery, but Wright warned that institutional liability can also become a shield that lets managers and other officials escape personal criminal responsibility.
Van den Heever acknowledged that damages claims can be run on a contingency basis, with lawyers paid only if they win, but rejected litigation as a systematic accountability tool. Compensation is generally funded by taxpayers rather than the officials responsible, unless personal damages are pursued against individuals — something that rarely happens even though the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) and Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) allow financial penalties to attach to individuals.
Accountability, he argued, must operate concurrently on small and serious matters. Waiting for a child to die in a drain ignores the thousands of poor and corrupt decisions that gradually destroy a service.
He contrasted municipal governance with the private sector: a major financial services business would collapse if run the way municipalities are run, even though bodies such as the City of Johannesburg manage about R95-billion a year. Leadership, he said, is frequently placed in posts occupied by people without the qualifications, competence or integrity the work demands.
Using the Laws Already on the Books
Both specialists returned to the underuse of the MFMA and PFMA.
Wright said the NPA continues to favour common-law fraud and similar charges rather than the offences created by those statutes. That matters because the legislation provides more than fines and imprisonment: it allows for offenders to be barred from serving in certain public institutions for a number of years, depending on the offence.
Van den Heever said the route should be used wherever an accounting officer has allowed irregular, unauthorised, fruitless or wasteful expenditure, or allowed substantial unpaid debts — accruals and payables — to accumulate. Failure to prevent such expenditure can attract criminal liability, alongside internal disciplinary action.
He pointed to the Tembisa matter, where the accounting officer was never held to account and the chief financial officer was reportedly given a payoff, allowed to leave, not debarred from state work, and later resurfaced elsewhere in public administration under a changed name.
Asked about a recent attempt by the IDC to prosecute the national police commissioner under the PFMA — a commissioner now back on duty — van den Heever declined to comment on the specifics, but said the statutory route was valid and should be used.
Charges, he stressed, have in several cases already been laid; the failure comes afterwards. The NPA needs properly investigated and prepared dockets, and the quality of investigative preparation is itself a problem.
He went further, arguing that the appointment of the heads of the NPA and the police lacks a legislative framework governing vetting, selection, nomination, appointment and removal. Those decisions rest with the president’s discretion, a problem he extended to the Special Investigating Unit and policing leadership. Political appointment, he said, helps explain why institutions charged with accountability so often do nothing.
What Voters Can Do
On the ballot question, Wright said citizens can punish failure, but only if they vote — turnout has been declining in both national and local elections over the years.
Voters should assess what their parties delivered in local government over the past five years, support an alternative with demonstrated capacity, and treat the exercise as more than a popularity contest. Candidate information, including qualifications, has been published on the Independent Electoral Commission’s website for a few months and can be checked before polling day.
Viewers participating in the discussion’s poll were offered three options: vote officials out, professionalise the public service, or strengthen consequence management.
The verdict was overwhelming: 82% chose to vote them out.
