SIVENKOSI RASHE

South Africa’s growth ambitions will not be derailed by abstract policy debates. They will be derailed by municipalities.

Water interruptions halt production lines. Road failures raise logistics costs. Sewer spillages depress property values. Licensing delays stall investment. The economy functions through municipal systems.

When President Ramaphosa announced he would chair the national water crisis committee it signalled recognition that co-ordination failure in essential infrastructure can no longer be tolerated.

However, the move exposes a contradiction. If water delivery requires presidential co-ordination, why does municipal governance — the platform through which water, sanitation, roads and electricity are delivered — not receive the same elevation?

Local government is not peripheral. It is foundational. Yet municipal dysfunction is routinely treated as a provincial oversight issue rather than a national economic threat.

That framing is outdated. The electricity crisis demonstrated a simple institutional truth: when co-ordination is centralised and politically prioritised, implementation accelerates. The bottleneck was never purely technical. It was intergovernmental fragmentation.

Municipal governance today reflects similar fragmentation:

weak fiscal controls,
skills deficits in infrastructure management,
political instability,
limited consequence management, and
blurred accountability between spheres.

However, unlike electricity and water, municipal performance rarely triggers presidential oversight until collapse becomes undeniable. This is economically irrational.

Metros account for the majority of GDP contribution. Secondary cities anchor regional growth. Property markets depend on reliable services. Businesses require predictable permitting, water security and road maintenance to operate competitively.

Yet municipal decline has been normalised. Audit outcomes deteriorate. Infrastructure maintenance backlogs expand. Revenue collection weakens. National government expresses concern. Provinces intervene sporadically. The cycle repeats.

The absence of structural escalation is striking. If co-ordination is the tool used to stabilise electricity and water, municipal governance should be the next domain for reform.

This does not require constitutional overreach. It requires clarity. A credible economic reform agenda would include:

nationally benchmarked service delivery indicators tied to fiscal transfers,
automatic escalation when municipalities breach defined thresholds,
a standing national co-ordination council focused on municipal infrastructure performance, and
transparent public dashboards tracking delivery reliability.

The objective is not centralisation for its own sake. It is performance coherence. Without it, the private sector absorbs the cost of public dysfunction. Firms invest in generators, water tanks, private security and internal compliance teams. These are hidden taxes on growth.

South Africa cannot attract long-term capital while local infrastructure remains unpredictable. Presidential leadership has proven capable of accelerating co-ordination when political will aligns. The question is whether that model will be applied selectively — only when crises dominate headlines — or strategically, where economic risk is greatest.

Municipal governance is not a secondary policy arena. It is the operating system of the economy. Treating it as routine administrative decay rather than structural economic risk is a category error.

If electricity and water warrant presidential co-ordination because they threaten economic stability, then municipal performance surely qualifies.

Growth will not be secured in cabinet alone. It will be secured, or lost, in municipalities.

• Rashe is an independent public policy consultant and researcher.