The ANC’s biggest danger is a government that reacts too late
The ANC should be worried about losing votes in South Africa’s approaching local government elections, but an even greater danger is developing underneath the electoral numbers. A government that repeatedly reacts to crises instead of responding to warning signs eventually teaches citizens that government only listens when something burns, collapses, goes viral or reaches a courtroom.
There is an important difference between being reactive and being responsive. A responsive government identifies problems, listens to communities, monitors its institutions and intervenes while problems can still be managed. A reactive government waits until failure becomes politically expensive. South Africa has become too familiar with the second model.
A community complains about water for months before tankers arrive after a protest. A municipality deteriorates for years before intervention becomes unavoidable. Allegations of corruption circulate until arrests, investigations or media exposure force official action. Immigration concerns grow without sufficiently clear public communication, leaving social media to fill the information vacuum until misinformation, anger and confrontation require ministers and law-enforcement agencies to respond.
Government then arrives with a statement, task team, investigation, intervention or promise. The problem is that citizens remember what happened before the announcement.
The Auditor-General’s latest assessment of local government should concern every political party governing a municipality, but particularly the ANC because of the breadth of its historical responsibility for the state. Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke reported in June that local government had made limited progress during the outgoing administration, with persistent failures in financial management, compliance and accountability continuing to affect services. Municipalities accumulated R40.14 billion in irregular expenditure in 2024/25 alone.
Those numbers are not simply accounting problems. Behind them are broken roads, sewage, unreliable water, uncollected rubbish and infrastructure that citizens encounter before they ever read an audit report.
Afrobarometer found this year that only 17% of South Africans believe local councillors often or always listen to ordinary people. Seventy percent rated their councillor’s performance badly, while trust in local leaders had fallen to 26%, from 42% in 2011.
Another survey found that 85% of South Africans believe elected representatives should prioritise what voters want, yet roughly half said MPs and councillors never try their best to listen to ordinary people. That is the warning the ANC should be reading more carefully than an opinion poll.
The ANC’s historic strength was never simply that millions of people voted for it. Its greater political asset was legitimacy. For generations of South Africans, it represented liberation, political participation and the expectation that democratic government would improve people’s lives.
That inheritance cannot indefinitely compensate for a state that citizens experience as absent until there is a crisis.
The 2024 national election should already have settled that argument. The ANC received 40.18% of the national vote and lost the parliamentary majority it had held since 1994. The formation of the Government of National Unity that followed demonstrated that electoral loyalty can change when citizens conclude that political history is no longer enough.
But losing votes is recoverable. Losing institutional trust is much harder to reverse. This is why responsiveness matters beyond party politics.
When residents believe councillors will not listen, they protest. When businesses believe municipalities cannot maintain infrastructure, they make their own arrangements or reconsider investment. When communities do not trust official information, rumours acquire greater authority. When people believe corruption produces few consequences, every new allegation reinforces what they already suspect.
Eventually government begins losing something more important than popularity: the presumption that official institutions are capable of solving problems.
The consequences can already be seen in public attitudes. Only 49% of South Africans now say democracy is preferable to every other form of government, according to Afrobarometer. Just 29% say they are fairly or very satisfied with the way democracy is working.
These figures should not be interpreted as evidence that South Africans have abandoned democracy. Majorities still reject one-person and one-party rule. They do, however, demonstrate how closely confidence in democracy can become connected to whether democratic institutions actually deliver. That should make responsiveness a democratic priority rather than a communications strategy.
Government should not require a viral video to discover a problem residents have reported repeatedly. Ministers should not learn about failing institutions primarily through headlines. Municipal leaders should not require protests to understand that taps are dry. Audit findings should trigger correction before the same failures return in the following year’s report.
Nor should government communication consist primarily of rebuttals after misinformation has already travelled across thousands of phones. In an environment where migration, crime, unemployment and access to public services are politically combustible, information vacuums are governance failures too. A responsive state communicates early, publishes evidence and addresses legitimate concerns before false narratives become more persuasive than official explanations.
None of this is exclusively an ANC problem. Municipalities governed by opposition parties must meet exactly the same standard, and coalition government makes responsibility increasingly shared. But the ANC carries a different burden because it has governed South Africa nationally for more than three decades and remains deeply embedded across the country’s public institutions. The party therefore faces a choice larger than how it campaigns in the next election.
It can continue governing through intervention after failure, explanation after outrage and promises after public pressure. Or it can rebuild a culture in which government sees complaints as intelligence, audit findings as early warnings, communities as participants and prevention as evidence of competent leadership. South Africans do not expect a government without problems. No government can provide that.
They can reasonably expect one that sees problems coming, listens when they are reported and acts before citizens have to scream to be heard.
If the ANC fails to understand that distinction, the price will certainly appear at the ballot box. But the greater loss will be measured in something no election campaign can easily restore: whether South Africans still believe the institutions governing them will respond when they need them.
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