RW Johnson: Ramaphosa’s startling conversion to the cause of clean municipal governance

Key topics:ANC launches urgent renewal drive ahead of 2027 municipal pollsRamaphosa warns councillors over corruption and incompetenceRising debt, failing services fuel doubts over ANC credibility.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By RW Johnson.The ANC decision to launch a major campaign of renewal for ANC municipalities is striking evidence that an air of panic has gripped the ruling party. This is, after all, September 2025 and the next municipal elections are at least a year away and may well happen only in January 2027. And historically the ANC has saved its main effort for national elections, tacitly accepting a lower turnout and lesser effort for the municipals. But these are not ordinary times. The party is still absorbing the shock of losing its majority in 2024, is uncomfortably aware that the polls suggest a further decline in the ANC vote and whenever the subject is broached people simply point to the disastrous state of the ANC-run metros and effectively say “Why should anyone vote for that ?”The ANC is far more comfortable busying itself with national-level policy, with ideologising about the NDR, with the deployment of friends and relatives to comfortable sinecures and making declarations about transformation. These are, after all, the key concerns of its national elite and problems to do with local water supplies, sewage spills, power cuts and the delivery of municipal services have normally commanded little of their attention. The party’s national and provincial elites have been preoccupied with their own careers and lining their own pockets while municipal politics has been left to the party’s Third or Fourth XI, the local activists on whom the party ultimately depends but whose role and importance are merely subordinate.Yet here is Cyril Ramaphosa addressing a “roll-call” of the ANC’s 6,000 local councillors at Soweto’s FNB stadium, telling them that their work is absolutely crucial: “Without you doing anything, we are dead. We might as well pack up”. The idea is that the councillors will give an account of what they’ve done since taking office in 2021 and that Ramaphosa will unveil for them an Action Plan – approved by the ANC’s NEC, no less – which “will ensure decisive progress in implementing our commitments in ANC-led municipalities”.There were many curious sides to this gathering. (It should be noted that only 4,600 of the 6,000 councillors actually attended.) First, Ramaphosa inveighed against corruption in local government – “there is no space for self-enrichment or patronage” and he warned councillors that the ANC would shortly set up dedicated teams to expose and crack down on criminal networks operating within local government. “We must dismantle networks that manipulate appointments and municipal contracts”. These teams will “go after those syndicates. We know them and we are going to nab them”. ANC councillors “must reclaim moral authority” and become models of humility, transparency and commitment to public service. .Read more:.Ramaphosa’s National Convention: Vanity project or personality cult? - Isaac Mogotsi.But Ramaphosa also made it clear that he regarded ANC councillors as being guilty of quite opposite behaviour. Having warned about how this crack-down would take place he warned councillors “Free yourself (from criminal networks) before it is too late” – and he warned that only competent and honest officials should be allowed to do municipal work. “Let us allow those who can do the work to do the work. I know it is tempting for us to hold on. Now this must end.” Ramaphosa did not spell out what he inferred by “hold on” but clearly he meant that ANC councillors who had illicitly contrived to get jobs and contracts for themselves and their associates must now cease such behaviour. Another novelty was that Ramaphosa openly alluded to the fact that DA councils all behaved much better and more competently than ANC ones. He said how much it pained him to see “the DA always at the top” and the ANC at the bottom of all the league tables. The ANC, he said, must learn from the DA, from Cape Town and Stellenbosch. This was, of course, to deliberately misconstrue the situation. It is not the case that the DA has learned various clever tricks to make local government work better. We are, instead, talking about two contrasting political cultures. The DA works within the English and Afrikaans traditions of civic affairs as local community service. The reward for good service is seen in the recognition and prestige conferred by the local community which one has served.The ANC, on the other hand, sees local government as part of a spoils system. The ANC’s national and provincial elites help themselves to the fruits of office at their levels, while the local activists plunder local government. None of them, in the famous phrase, joined the ANC in order to stay poor. And throughout the continent African chiefly rule was, down countless centuries, based on patronage so a patronage system is second nature for all African politicians. All of this is perfectly understood by activists and it is because the fruits of local government can be quite rich that so many councillors get assassinated by rivals keen to displace them. One wonders how many of the councillors whom Ramaphosa was addressing had murdered someone to get their job… Ramaphosa might usefully have pointed out that such killings almost invariably have ANC councillors as their victims but that municipal murders don’t happen in DA politics. The FNB stadium meeting heard much about “consequence management”. In particular the ANC warns that there will be serious consequences for those who fail to deliver services to the people. The aim is that “all the councillors will walk away with clear marching orders, anchored round several pillars. One of which is a consistent fight against malfeasance in local government or any form of private corruption, including extortion.”This was a classic piece of ANC management. Although one might have thought local government required local initiative and grass roots politics, instead the FNB meeting was part of the classic democratic centralist style. The message was entirely top down. The Action Plan was approved by the NEC (which had met in Boksburg over the previous weekend) and enunciated by the President. It was accompanied by threats (the dedicated teams cracking down and the “serious consequences” which errant councillors would suffer) and, as we have seen, councillors got their “marching orders”. Ramaphosa proudly announced that the meeting was “a turning point for the entire movement” as if ANC discipline would do the rest.However, it is difficult to take the entire project seriously. The oddity about the Action Plan was that there was no plan: it was simply exhortation. The assumption seemed to be that an entire generation – nearly thirty years – of ANC municipal corruption could be ended simply by moral suasion. As the Rev. Frank Chikane put it, “This thing of the ANC of thieves must come to an end”. This all seems deeply improbable. Corruption in ANC local government is the norm. The standard of living of councillors and officials and their extended families depend on the fruits of corruption. The notion that such folk can or will suddenly give all this up isd absurd. At most they will feel they must tone things down a bit, and be more discreet. Any move to do more than that will be met with strong resistance from their extended families and from their various “partners” in local government business.Sandile Swana, a sympathetic political analyst, said that “As we have gone through the years we have discovered that there are not enough numeracy (sic) and computer skills and general skills for councillors to consume and process business plans, proposals, reports and budgets. Also our leaders are morally incompetent. As you have seen in the Free State, it has been devastated by this moral incompetence and technical incompetence and the criminality of councillors. We also have the problem of incompetence that will not be addressed by the next election. It may take ten years to get to the correct levels of competence.” This rather makes the point about time. Surely, all this needed to be said and enforced decades ago ?And the fact is that the phenomenon of ANC corruption is a vast, runaway problem. As of 31 March 2025 municipalities, most of them ANC-governed, owed R131.8 billion to their creditors – a figure which has increased from R106.7 billion at the same time last year. A large proportion of this debt is owed to Eskom and the water boards and is now effectively unpayable because all the receipts for electricity and water have been misappropriated and spent on other things – often just straightforward theft. Similarly, there is talk of Jo’burg trying to borrow R100 billion to spend on infrastructure – but that is because for years past almost everything that should have been spent on infrastructure has been misappropriated and stolen. One might start by asking where has all that money gone ? And those who are asked to lend Jo’burg R100 billion are bound to wonder why their money should not get stolen too ?Ramaphosa must know all this and, indeed, the question is whether he is really serious ? After all he continues to appoint dishonest people to his cabinet and seems perfectly happy about that. And sitting next to him at the FNB stadium was Paul Mashatile who personifies many of the things the President was talking about. Mashatile is a township wide boy with no known technical competence and he is also enormously wealthy thanks to an unbroken career of tenderpreneurship in provincial and local government. So while Ramaphosa kept promising future accountability and that “the ANC must get into top gear”, the real question was what about immediately past and present accountability ? And why is the ANC still in a lower gear when it comes to these questions ?And after all, six months ago Ramaphosa announced a “task team” to tackle Jo’burg’s problems but we’ve heard no more of that. And Jo’burg itself set up its own “bomb squad”, advertised as “a high-powered implementation impact team”, but we’ve heard no more of that either. Councillors know that and will wait to see whether these “dedicated teams” actually materialise. If they do, how much do they know and how susceptible are they to bribes ? What if some of their members meet with fatal accidents ?The real question is what the assembled councillors made of all this. They are not fools and they are at least averagely cynical. Once they heard Ramaphosa say that “This failure at local government level feeds into a narrative about a failing and declining ANC” they would have understood: the ANC is losing and is desperate. For thirty years it has allowed us to do as we wish but now they are frightened of losing elections so they want us to behave as if we are quite different people. They want us to become – over night - technically competent and scrupulously honest. That is clearly out of the question, so what are we going to do ? After all, we also don’t want to lose any elections.Undoubtedly one answer is to think of ways of trying to “fix” the elections. Losing the metros is the big worry, so why not bus in voters from the rural areas ? The big problem has been the declining black turnout so we have to make more black people vote, by hook or by crook. It would be nice to bribe people to vote ANC but we’ve all heard that even the employees at Luthuli House are, once again, not getting paid. So the ANC is short of money, as declining parties always are. So we may have to frighten people into voting the right way. It so happens that we know certain gangsters in the townships who are very good at frightening people. We may need to talk to them.Secondly, perhaps we can make some cosmetic changes to make it seem that things are improving in the towns. We will have to work with the comrades at Eskom and the comrades who run water tankers to ensure that there’s enough water and electricity in the last weeks before the election..Read more:.Factional battles in ANC fuel security chaos and foreign policy drift: Kenneth Mokgatlhe.In other words, Ramaphosa’s increased pressure on ANC councillors may well have the effect of driving them into further dependence on local gangsters and the water tanker mafia, and to consider election-rigging. This is not to question the President’s good intentions, merely his naivete. The ANC has allowed the corruption and skulduggery in local government to go on undisturbed for decades. In that time ANC councillors have become deeply enmeshed in all manner of bad practices and unhealthy associations with all manner of unscrupulous characters. And very many of them are unscrupulous characters themselves.In practice the fact that the ANC has turned a blind eye for so long to the nefarious goings-on in ANC local government has convinced most councillors that the ANC has no qualms about municipal corruption and that it is only making a fuss now because it fears losing elections. In that sense Ramaphosa’s death-bed conversion to the cause of clean local government is not only misjudged but may well have exactly opposite results than those he is campaigning for.