Labour federation Cosatu blames the ANC for the crumbling and poor state of local government. (supplied)
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Labour federation Cosatu yesterday laid the blame for the crumbling state of local government squarely at the feet of its ally, the ANC, accusing it of presiding over decay and corruption in municipalities it governs.
In what could be a shift in the political landscape, the federation said it had grown disillusioned with the ANC’s track record in governing most local authorities since the attainment of majority rule in 1994.
Cosatu is holding its national elective congress in Midrand until Thursday.
It comes as the country nears the much-anticipated local government elections on November 4.
Cosatu’s political report, which forms part of the congress documents, said many municipalities across the country were in a poor state.
“[T]he vast majority of ANC-led municipalities are collapsing or on the brink of collapse …” — Cosatu political report
“At the present conjuncture, the vast majority of ANC-led municipalities are collapsing or on the brink of collapse, with many facing collapsing water, electricity, and roads, with municipal services ground to a halt, denying communities basic services and the dignity of citizenship.
“Growing numbers of municipalities cannot even pay municipal workers, with volatile workplace strife across the country,” the report said.
“While the ANC manifesto for the 2021 local government elections provided numerous improvements as proposed commitments to turn around many collapsing municipal governments, approaches taken by the ANC after the elections produced more weaknesses, more decay, and corruption.”
The local government sector is grappling with poor service delivery, maladministration, lack of capacity, corruption, and fruitless, wasteful, unauthorised, and irregular expenditure.
Its worsening state has spurred the government to focus the second phase of Operation Vulindlela on fixing councils. Vulindlela is a joint initiative of the Treasury and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office created in 2020 to address bottlenecks stifling economic growth.
Tabling the local government audit outcomes for the 2024/25 financial year at the co-operative governance and traditional affairs portfolio committee meeting in parliament about two months ago, auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke said that of the 257 municipalities, only 39 achieved clean audits — down from 41 in the previous period (2023/24).
While the City of Cape Town was the only metro in the country to receive a clean audit opinion in 2023/24, with three others achieving unqualified audit opinions with findings and four others qualified with findings, none of the eight metros achieved a clean audit in 2024/25, and the number of metros with qualified audit opinions increased from four to five.
“Besides crises of collapse in municipalities caused by poor governance, the current funding model for local government continues to create conditions that only produce funding challenges for municipalities, especially in poor (mostly historically black) communities,” the report said.
Cosatu said there were serious problems with how money was allocated to municipalities. Resources were not shared fairly, leaving wealthy metropolitan suburbs better developed while black townships and poor rural municipalities continued to struggle with underdevelopment and inequality.
The federation said the revenue crisis at local government was also compounded by “deliberate non-payment of municipal infrastructure by provincial and, at times, national government, with municipal towns being owed billions of rands by provincial and national government departments”.
The crisis in local government, Cosatu said, was also exacerbated by the politics of “thuggery and primitive accumulation, as politically linked and protected tendering syndicates sabotage state infrastructure to induce tenders to provide services that should be provided by the state”.
Much of Cosatu’s conference yesterday was delayed as delegates said they could not allow the gathering to continue without clarity on the membership status of its first deputy president, Mike Shingange.
Shingange was reportedly suspended recently, but the federation has not issued a formal communication confirming this. — Business Day
Source: https://www.sowetan.co.za/news/2026-09-15-cosatu-blames-anc-for-collapsing-municipalities/