For years, the ANC has had a collection of excuses for SA’s failing municipalities.
Apartheid, coalition instability, insufficient funding, uncaring opposition parties, the national government, the provincial government, load-shedding and global economic conditions have all been blamed.
Now one of its oldest allies is pointing the finger in a rather more uncomfortable direction. At the ANC itself.
Cosatu, the federation that has traditionally put its considerable grassroots machinery at the ANC’s disposal during elections, has delivered an extraordinary indictment of the governing party.
Its political report does not merely acknowledge that municipalities are struggling.
The report comes from its national elective congress in Midrand, Johannesburg, from Monday to Thursday.
It says many ANC-led municipalities are collapsing or on the brink of collapse, with water, electricity and roads deteriorating, services grinding to a halt and municipal workers themselves increasingly going unpaid.
That is a devastating assessment from an organisation that has spent decades campaigning alongside the ANC.
This means the political ground beneath the tripartite alliance is shifting.
South Africans do not need another report to tell them that local government is in trouble.
We see it in sewage running through streets, potholes multiplying, unreliable water supplies, broken infrastructure, dysfunctional billing systems and municipalities unable to pay their own bills.
Just look outside, and you will see problems.
What matters is that Cosatu has now explicitly connected this decay to the ANC’s governance.
The federation says the ANC’s approach after the 2021 local government elections produced more weaknesses, more decay and corruption, despite the party’s manifesto promising to turn around failing municipalities.
Few political verdicts are more damning than an ally telling its partner it promised reform and delivered deterioration.
And yet the political system has become remarkably adept at treating municipal failure as an unavoidable force of nature.
Poor governance is a political choice. Weak consequence management is a political choice. Tolerating politically connected tender networks is a political choice. Failing to appoint competent people is a political choice.
The timing of Cosatu’s criticism could hardly be more politically significant.
South Africans head to the polls for local government elections on November 4.
And Cosatu has put the ANC on notice.
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