Why ward councillors are set up to fail
· Citizen
If you want to understand why municipalities are broken, don’t look at the mayor. Look at the ward councillor.
He is the only politician whose door you can knock on. He is also the only politician with no budget, no truck and no power to fix your street lights and potholes.
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That contradiction is why the coming local government elections on 4 November are both a win-win and lose-lose affair.
A ward councillor is elected directly by his ward, but he reports to the municipality.
He does not deliver services. The municipality does. And that is where the trap begins.
Take a ward X councillor elected under Party A in a municipality governed by Party B. He or she raises a burst pipe issue in ward X, or tables a motion for a road to be tarred.
The majority party, Party B, sees him not as a colleague but as a threat. In practice, his requests move to the bottom of the priority list.
Job cards for his ward take three weeks, instead of two days. When residents call him, he has no answers.
When he calls a community meeting, they call him useless. He is doomed to fail not because he is lazy, but because the system allows the governing party to punish wards that they did not win.
The councillor loses credibility and the community loses services. It is lose-lose affair.
It is even worse for independent candidates who have one vote in a council of 100, no party caucus to defend them, no MMC to call, no bargaining power.
He may be the most competent and honest and a direct link to the community but, structurally, he is the most powerless.
The administration knows he has no political cover, and he is easily isolated and frustrated.
Now, flip the coin. If that is the problem of opposition wards, then governing party wards should be a paradise.
Alexandra township, north of Johannesburg, proves otherwise.
Alexandra has nine municipal wards. All nine councillors are ANC members.
For long periods the City of Joburg has been governed by the ANC, the mayor, Dada Morero, is an ANC member, most of the MMCs are ANC members.
There is total political alignment from the street to the mayoral office. No opposition to blame, no one to frustrate delivery of services.
In theory, this should be a win-win situation. A comrade councillor calls a comrade MMC, who instructs a comrade municipal manager and the work gets done.
Yet, Alexandra, next to the South Africa’s wealthiest economic hub – Sandton – remains among the worst serviced townships in South Africa.
Overpopulation and environmental degradation, waste management crisis, collapsing roads, crime, unstable power supply and housing projects that never end.
Not forgetting the 2001 scandal associated with the Alexandra Renewal Project, where almost R2 billion was stolen.
How does a politically aligned township fail so badly?
Because when everyone is from one party, accountability moves from the community to the party branch.
The councillor’s survival depends on pleasing the branch, not the residents. Oversight collapses because no one wants to embarrass a comrade in council.
And when a ward is a safe seat, there is no electoral incentive to deliver – the party knows it will win anyway.
Alexandra shows that poor service delivery is not always caused by political interference. It is often caused by corruption, patronage, weak administration and the absence of consequences.
That is the dilemma facing voters. Vote opposition in your ward and you may get a principled voice, but a powerless implementer.
Vote for the governing party to align with the municipality and you risk voting for complacency.
Until we ring-fence ward budgets and force municipalities to deliver per ward regardless of the party, the ward councillor will remain the most loved before elections and the most hated post elections.