Once a busy industrial centre situated along the Vaal River, the Emfuleni Local Municipality is today the poster child of service delivery failure. Here, residents have given up on politicians, instead taking matters into their own hands.
“Across the board, service delivery has been completely dysfunctional in the Emfuleni area,” said Zainul Saley, a resident who heads up the Roshnee Services Crisis Committee (RSCC). “We’re sitting with major electricity cut-offs, water leakages, sewage overspill [and] roads that are completely disintegrating.”
When service delivery failures became unavoidable in 2018, the Gauteng provincial government decided to intervene. Under Section 139 of the Constitution, it placed the municipality under administration.
Any hope of a turnaround quickly evaporated as the municipality’s financial woes exacerbated. With dwindling income from rates and taxes, sewage spilled onto the streets, taps ran dry and residents dwelled in darkness. Neither a subsequent financial recovery plan, imposed in 2020, nor an administrative intervention in 2022 arrested Emfuleni’s decline.
As Dennis Ryder, a member of Parliament affiliated with the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), pointed out in 2023, each intervention failed. They left the main causes of the municipality’s dysfunction untouched: “corruption, lack of financial oversight, and political interference”. In fact, he believed, “each intervention has allowed these issues to fester”.
By the time politicians went from door-to-door looking for votes in 2021, it was too late. Residents blocked their ears and shut their doors. On polling day, the electorate punished the African National Congress (ANC) by dragging its vote share below the 51% needed to govern. An age of coalition politics had dawned.
The ANC turned to New Horizon Movement and two smaller parties for support in the 90-seat council, where it occupied just 38. Councillor Sipho Radebe was installed as mayor. A little while into his tenure, a fallout with coalition partners had the ANC seeking new ones. In came EFF, PAC, CSA, FF+ and VAAL. Collectively, they have failed to turn the tide.
In 2023, irate residents put their hands up. Not to run for office, but to serve their community on the ground. The RSCC was born, and it has been stepping in ever since.
Said Saley: “The only alternative here is the community has to get involved in making sure that our town is kept intact so that we can go forward with this”. So the sentiment goes in a number of collapsing municipalities across South Africa.
In a functional municipality, residents should be able to report faulty street lights via a municipal switchboard. In Emfuleni, they contact RSCC. The organisation, leveraging personal connections within the municipality, gets to work. Whether it is a water outage, electricity outage or sewage overspill, Saley said, “we get it done in a nick of time”. It may not follow proper channels, but it keeps Emfuleni going.
With municipal elections just a few months away, residents of Emfuleni “are living completely with agony”. Will they make their mark on the ballot? Possibly not. “The people are completely disorientated with the whole thing,” he stated.
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Image credit: THULANE MBELE/Business Day
