OPINION | SA’s democracy has grown up, its politicians haven’t

The IEC, the courts, the voters and the wider electoral system have passed every test put to them. The political parties now bargaining over our cities have not.

By Dr Tendai Shephard Mbanje

South Africans made their mark in the local government elections on 4 November and did everything a mature democracy asks of its citizens. More of them voted than last time: turnout rose to about 52%, up from 46% in 2021. The ballots were counted, results were published ward by ward at the National Results Operations Centre for the world to see, and on 8 November the Electoral Commission declared the elections free and fair. There were no protests in the streets, no internet shutdown, no violence and no disputed outcome, only a legitimate and credible election. South Africans can be proud to have witnessed it, and so can the rest of Africa and the world.

Then the politicians took over with their horse-trading for power, and the country was reminded of an awkward truth. South Africa’s democracy is growing up faster than the people who run its parties. The institutions have matured. Too many of the players have not.

The voters sent a clear message: no single party is trusted to govern alone, so work together and deliver. What came back from the politicians within days of the results, in full view of the world, was the familiar language of power brokers positioning themselves: cards, kingmakers, red lines and personal grudges. The electorate spoke in sentences about water, electricity and jobs. The politicians seem to have missed that message. The coalition negotiations are about their interests, not the electorate’s, and about which mayoral post or municipal portfolio they can grab and run with.

The referees passed their test

It is worth reminding ourselves of what is working, because it is easy to forget how unusual it is on this continent. The Independent Electoral Commission has now run two contested cycles in which the governing party’s dominance collapsed, and it has delivered results that losers grumble about but cannot overturn. With 546 political parties contesting this election, the referee still kept the trust of the field. Parties lodged 197 objections; the IEC investigated them in the open, ordered recounts in five wards and finalised them before declaring the results. That is what institutional maturity looks like. The IEC did not bend to pressure. Whatever one thinks of the outcome, the process was handled with credibility. Many democracies far older than South Africa’s would envy that record.

Holding the cards, forgetting the voters: political immaturity

The players are another story. Voters left nearly 140 councils hung, with no party in control, and the parties have 14 days from the declaration of results to form governments. Within hours, the talk was of who “holds the cards”.

ActionSA, now the kingmaker in all three Gauteng metros, has shown how quickly leverage turns into personal terms. Its leadership made keeping its own Tshwane mayor, Nasiphi Moya, a condition of any deal, warning that without it there was no point in talking. It also refused to negotiate with the DA if Helen Zille, the DA’s Johannesburg mayoral candidate, remained at the table, citing a long-running personal grievance between her and ActionSA’s founder, Herman Mashaba. A decision about who governs Johannesburg’s R97 billion budget is being framed around a feud between individuals.

The ANC’s response to what its own leadership called a “catastrophic” result was not humility. Its secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, declared that the party “will not beg for mayorship”. Days later, reports emerged that its national executive would consider ending the national coalition with the DA, with some members blaming the partnership for lost votes. That debate is tangled up with the contest to choose the party’s next leader in 2027. A party that fell to about 31% is weighing the stability of the national government against its own succession politics.

The same instinct shaped the ANC’s campaign. It promised to headhunt capable mayors and name them before polling day, then dropped the plan about two weeks before the vote for fear that naming them would deepen internal divisions. Voters in eight metros were asked to choose a party without knowing who it wanted to run their city, because the party’s internal peace came first. It suggested a party that was not confident in its own candidates.

The pattern is not confined to one side. The EFF’s leadership has called the DA “the enemy”, closing the door before a single conversation about service delivery had begun. MK says it will only talk to parties that are “ideologically aligned” with it. Inside the Government of National Unity, the DA voted against the 2025 fiscal framework its own coalition had tabled. The budget passed by 194 votes to 182 only because parties outside the GNU stepped in. Each move may have been defensible on its own terms. Together they describe a political class that treats coalition as a contest for advantage rather than a shared duty to govern.

The metros already know where this leads

We do not have to guess what happens when coalition politics is played as a game. Johannesburg has had eight people in the mayor’s office since 2016, two of them twice, and five mayors in just 18 months to May 2023. The 2026 Mistra Coalitions Barometer names Johannesburg, alongside Karoo Hoogland, as the most turbulent municipality of the post-2021 era, with six administrations in a single term. Tshwane came close to collapse again in August, three months before the election.

Each collapse resets the city. Programmes stop halfway, senior managers take instructions from a new set of politicians, and budgets become bargaining chips. Residents pay for it in water outages and broken roads. Voters were clear about whom they blame: in Johannesburg, the incumbent mayor, his deputy and a senior committee member all lost their seats.

This is the imbalance at the heart of this moment. The rules are sound, the electoral process is clean and the courts are open. What is missing is political substance: parties with programmes they will put in writing, leaders who can separate a personal agenda from a public mandate, and coalitions built to last a full term.

Growing up is not optional

There is a fair counter-argument. Hard bargaining is normal in coalition democracies, and a party that bargains hard for a mayoralty is doing what its voters elected it to do. The same Mistra study found no statistically reliable link between coalition collapses and municipal audit outcomes. Instability is not the same as failure.

But the test is not whether parties bargain. It is what they bargain over. A demand for a written programme, a public agreement and a service-delivery scorecard is maturity. A demand that a rival leave the room, or a threat to walk away from local government, is not.

What would grown-up politics look like in the next 14 days? Coalition agreements published in full, as some parties have promised for any deal they sign, and as every party should. Mayors chosen for competence and protected for a full term unless they break the agreement. Disputes settled through agreed mechanisms, not motions of no confidence timed for headlines. And leaders who accept that 31%, 25% or 6% of the vote is a mandate to share power, not to dictate terms.

South Africa has built a referee it can trust and courts that will not be bullied. The voters have done their part, in greater numbers than before. The only actors who have not yet grown into this democracy are the ones asking to run it. They should catch up before voters decide that the game itself is not worth playing.

Dr Tendai Shephard Mbanje is a regional governance and elections expert and a postdoctoral fellow in the College of Law at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He served as Deputy Head of Mission of the UNISA Election Observation Mission to South Africa’s 2026 Local Government Elections. He writes in his personal capacity.