JUN KAJEE | Civic mutiny in bid to survive the SA state

Driving through the Riemland region of the Free State one passes through towns defined by cracked asphalt, uncollected refuse and dark streetlights.

The Mafube Local Municipality in particular has spent years in institutional failure and disrepair, culminating in a provincial administration takeover and a staggering R200m scandal involving stolen municipal worker pension contributions.

Yet, crossing the Wilge River into Frankfort, the economic heart of this otherwise dying district, the narrative abruptly breaks. The traffic lights work. The substations are clear of weeds. The billing system functions. While the broader municipality collapsed, this single town charted its own survival.

Frankfort’s success is anything but a victory for the state. It is an act of deliberate civic mutiny. Recognising that waiting for a political turnaround meant economic death, local business forums and agricultural unions essentially bypassed the ANC-led council.

Their partnership began out of sheer necessity. By 2012, Mafube’s municipal power management was haemorrhaging cash. Total debt quickly climbed to R45m. Rather than watching the local economy get switched off permanently, the municipality signed a 25-year contract outsourcing its electrical distribution to a private, family-owned business: Rural Maintenance Free State (RMFS).

RMFS not only managed the existing grid, it rebuilt it. The company injected R131m of private capital directly into the area, replacing rotting power poles, upgrading rural transformers and stabilising the local network.

In a country where municipal nonpayment is normalised, RMFS implemented a strict, fair billing ecosystem. Out of roughly 15,000 users across the network, an average of just 62 accounts failed to pay their bills on time.

By restoring a sense of basic fairness and reliable service, the company achieved a revenue collection rate that defies every national municipal statistic. Over the course of the contract the private operator managed to collect and pay more than R1.1bn to Eskom.

The real divergence from the national norm occurred when RMFS and the local community built a private solar farm. The goal was elegant in its simplicity: use daytime solar generation to mitigate national blackouts. The process, locally termed “voiding”, allowed Frankfort to use its own clean energy to effectively opt out of lower stages of load-shedding.

Then, the state intervened. Instead of celebrating Frankfort as a pioneering model for localised energy security, Eskom and the National Treasury launched a relentless legal campaign to crush it. Eskom dragged RMFS to the high court, demanding that the town cease its voiding practices.

The state utility claimed that allowing a private entity to manage load-shedding threatened national grid stability, arguing that everyone must suffer equally under central control. In April 2023 the Gauteng division of the high court ruled in Eskom’s favour on a technicality, forcing the town to dump its excess solar energy into the ground while its residents sat in the dark.

The bureaucratic assault did not stop at the courts. The National Treasury began actively squeezing the Mafube municipality, threatening to withhold vital equitable share grant funding unless the local council tore up its 25-year contract with RMFS.

Could it be that the state would rather preside over a dysfunctional, dark municipality that depends entirely on central grants than tolerate a self-sustaining, privately managed community that functions outside of its control?

The pressure campaign aimed at reining in Frankfort’s success exposes the deep ideological divide in South African governance. On one side is an oppressive state monopoly propped up by political elites. On the other is a community trying to keep its businesses open, its industries running and its children educated.

When the state abdicates its duties, functional infrastructure ceases to be a public right guaranteed by the constitution. It becomes an active operational capability that communities must build, fund and legally defend themselves.

Frankfort proved that local solutions can fix broken systems. The tragedy is that the hardest part of fixing South Africa is not outsmarting the decay. It is surviving the ANC’s attempts to keep things broken.

• Kajee is a lecturer at Southern Utah University, a nonresident research fellow at the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy, and a researcher for the SeaLight maritime transparency initiative at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.