The 2026 local government elections arrive under heavy symbolism and heavier burdens. They fall a decade after the death of Fidel Castro and half a century after the Soweto student uprising.
These are anniversaries that summon questions about redistribution, dignity and the role of the state. At the same time, municipalities across SA are failing to deliver the basics that make citizenship meaningful such as water, sanitation, electricity and waste removal.
In the Eastern Cape, where history and hardship meet, the coming polls could decide whether memory becomes a spur to accountability or a backdrop to deeper decline.
Municipal failure is no longer a technical glitch; it is a political crisis. When taps run dry, lights stay off and refuse piles up, the social contract frays. Financial mismanagement, weak oversight and patronage have hollowed out many local administrations.
Citizens do not only lose services; they lose faith. That loss of faith is the real danger: it turns local dysfunction into a national narrative of a state that cannot meet its most basic services.
The Soweto uprising and the era of Castro are not museum pieces. They are living vocabularies of political expectation. Soweto taught a generation that youth, moral clarity and mass mobilisation can force the state to answer for its injustices. Castro’s revolutionary rhetoric offered a model (for better and worse) of a state that promises to provide and redistribute. Together these memories shape how some voters interpret failure as either a betrayal of liberation’s promises or as evidence that grand rhetoric never translated into durable institutions.
Imagine many municipalities governed like a Government of National Unity formed by a broad, multi‑party coalitions stitched together to secure majorities. That arrangement can be pragmatic where no single party commands a mandate. But it also creates a political conundrum with interlocking risks such as blurred accountability, political paralysis, patronage baked into governance, fiscal instability and leadership instability.
These risks makes harder for citizens to identify who is responsible for failure because blame becomes a political relay.
Coalitions prioritise compromise over reform, making long‑term fixes — tariff reform, revenue collection, professionalisation — politically costly. On the other side power‑sharing often means portfolios and contracts are traded to keep partners happy, institutionalising clientelism.
On the fiscal side of things, budgets shaped by political deals rather than technical priorities produce underspending, irregular payments and audit failures. Inadvertently, coalition breakdowns may trigger no‑confidence motions and mayoral changes, interrupting projects and demoralising staff.
These are not abstract risks. Instead, they translate into stalled infrastructure, interrupted maintenance and a municipal administration that is always negotiating its way out of crisis rather than managing for the long run.
In metros such as Johannesburg and Tshwane, repeated no‑confidence motions and power struggles have unsettled executive leadership. Another vivid example of coalition fragility is Nelson Mandela Bay Metro on which coalition challenges results stalls projects and procurement decisions. The detrimental result of this is predictable, which leads to lack of accountability and blame game narratives at the expense of service delivery outcomes.
The Eastern Cape’s political geography comprising of a mix of urban metros and sprawling rural districts makes it especially vulnerable. In towns and townships where civic memory runs deep, citizens remember promises and measure them against daily reality.
Where municipal capacity is thin, coalition politics can magnify dysfunction: projects stop midstream, maintenance is deferred, and wards experience wildly unequal service footprints.
At the same time, the province has a strong civic tradition. That is both a resource and a risk. It’s a resource because organised communities can hold councils to account, but repeated failures can also radicalise protest and deepen distrust.
The 2026 elections will therefore be a referendum not only on parties but on governance models. A question needs to be answered whether the voters will accept coalition compromises that preserve political stability, or will they demand clear lines of responsibility and measurable delivery?
If coalitions are unavoidable, they must be designed to deliver. However safeguards that are practical in response to the risks need to be in place for effective service delivery. These include amongst others:
- transparent coalition agreements with public, measurable service commitments and timelines.
- Performance clauses that tie ministerial or mayoral tenure to delivery benchmarks.
- Protected technical roles insulated from political bargaining, with strengthened municipal finance and procurement units.
- Independent oversight and community monitoring mechanisms that make failure visible and costly; and
- Provincial interventions that prioritise service continuity and technical rescue over partisan advantage are very important for effective service delivery.
It should be noted that these safeguards are not magic bullets but can be regarded as institutional choices that make coalitions accountable rather than merely expedient.
If these elections are citizens cannot be passive. From East London to Gqeberha and across the Eastern Cape, organised civic action must combine electoral discipline with continuous oversight. They must:
- attend ward and council meetings;
- demand public, signed coalition agreements with measurable service targets;
- form community budget‑watch groups and social audits;
- document failures and escalate them to provincial oversight and the courts;
- Use public scorecards and ward‑level dashboards to make failure visible and politically costly; and
- Vote with delivery in mind (not only party loyalty) and support candidates who commit to protecting technical municipal roles from political patronage.
These steps turn protest energy into durable accountability rather than episodic outrage.
The anniversaries of Soweto and Castro force questions that are both moral and practical. We need to question whether the promises of liberation be translated into reliable public goods at the municipal level?
We need to ponder whether the current state of local government affairs resonate with what the 1976 generation fought for? We need to introspectively assess whether Hector Pieterson died for us to bargain for seats to enrich ourselves and our families?
What did we learn from the ideas of Castro about state responsibility and redistribution — and how do we avoid reproducing authoritarian or clientelist shortcuts that betray those lessons?
These are not rhetorical flourishes, instead they are moral questions voters in the Eastern Cape must answer at the ballot box and in the streets. The Eastern Cape’s answer will matter far beyond its borders. If coalitions become cover for blame‑shifting and patronage, municipal failure will deepen the crisis of state legitimacy.
If, instead, parties and citizens use the 2026 elections to bind power to performance, the province can model a different path. A path where memory fuels accountability and where the tap is not a political bargaining chip but a basic right. The choice is ours and the consequences will be felt in every household, every school and every clinic.
Tumelo Nkohla is a chief risk officer of the Eastern Cape department of transport. He writes in his personal capacity.
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