The crisis engulfing Ditsobotla Local Municipality, where two councils once ran parallel with duelling mayors and three municipal managers, has laid bare a wider service delivery breakdown affecting municipalities across South Africa as local government elections approach.
The administrator appointed after the national government invoked Section 139 described the situation he inherited as one of “complete destruction” spanning 15 years.
“When we came in, we found two councils running parallel. Everyone claiming to be a mayor—two mayors, two speakers, and three municipal managers,” the administrator said. He revealed that staff had been “shooting each other on the municipal premises” and that competing municipal managers were contesting in court to be signatories to the municipality’s bank account.
The administrator confirmed the municipality is “technically bankrupt” with no funds, relying entirely on national grants and the equitable share, receiving only limited payments from residents.
Since September, the administration has stabilised governance, electing one mayor and one speaker, and appointing a single municipal manager. Five senior manager positions, including technical manager and CFO, remain vacant.
Service delivery has seen modest improvements. The municipality previously went nearly a month without electricity; outages now last one to three days. Water disruptions have also been reduced. The Deputy President’s recent oversight visit brought senior leadership from the Department of Electricity and Energy to help stabilise power provision further.
Regarding local economic development, the administrator said business can only thrive in a conducive environment. He noted that Clover left the area partly because of poor roads, specifically the Dr. Beas Nier road in the industrial zone, which the administration is trying to repair. Three mining houses in the area have made pledges to the Deputy President to strengthen working relationships, citing renewed confidence in municipal management.
“I’m confident this municipality is on an upward trajectory,” the administrator said.
Former Statistician-General and Economic Modelling Academy director Dr. Pali Lehohla provided broader context, citing data from 1996 to 2022 showing access to water rose from 60% to 90%, sanitation from 40% to 85%, and electricity to 90%. However, he warned: “The catch is—are those things now working? That’s where the problem is.”
Lehohla described a “maintenance problem” and “sloppiness” in conducting public affairs, saying: “It is the heights you reach and the heights you keep. Not the heights you reach and then you lose them all.”
Using statistical models drawing from 2,752 instruments across 24 years, Lehohla demonstrated what he called an “extractive siphoning system” concentrating resources in six major city spaces—Johannesburg, Cape Town, and others—leaving smaller municipalities depleted. He presented a labour disappearance index showing dysfunction in Alexandra compared to nearby Sandton, calling the disparity “intolerable.”
On undocumented migrants, Lehohla dismissed claims of overwhelming numbers, stating census data shows approximately four million people born outside South Africa. “Foreigners don’t generate that hierarchy of space. That’s where the fundamental problem is. Foreigners just come and ride on a faulty system, and then we pass the fault to them.”
He labelled claims of 28 million or 90 million foreigners as “nonsense,” “criminal,” and “a crime on democracy.”
Lehohla cited systematic looting of municipalities and what he described as 14 trillion rand siphoned by industry as root causes, promising to present further findings at upcoming dialogues.