The IEC commissioned the HSRC to conduct a study on the health of South Africa’s democracy. The picture is as ugly.
Only 36% of the population believe in our democracy today compared to 72% just fifteen or so years ago.
The Lehohla Ledger pin points the collapse at a village, a suburb, a ward and a municipality - from whence you can constitute your own vision of your life and that of your neighbour.
You can be an architect of statecraft and local governance.
You can define beauty not as what is frequently treated as an aesthetic luxury—a coat of paint on a crumbling wall, a well-manicured civic garden in an affluent suburb, or a glowing audit outcome proudly displayed in an annual report.
But as defined by Amilcar Cabral - peaceful future for children, by Morena Mohlomi’s generational value creation, and Ka Iasaka Seme - the regeneration of Africa.
the silly season is on - politicians are now in full drive - the national dialogue has been side stepped by the rush for mayoral chains.
The sewer flows below a lamp post used for hosting a poster of Vote For.
The saying that the drunkard uses the lamp post for support would not be more apt.
The silly season of Say It Even if You Lie Baby that Gives me some consolation is on. The lamp post has stopped to make problems lucid and solutions clearer. Fiction and Facts in this silly season carry the same weight - the spirit has taken over.
But when we strip away the polished rhetoric of political manifestos and subject our local authorities to rigorous socio-spatial diagnostic modeling, a starkly different reality emerges.
We witness what can only be described as the competition of the not-so-beautiful: a race to the bottom where municipalities vie not for excellence, but in the grim contest of systemic dysfunction, infrastructure collapse, and institutional decay.
To understand this phenomenon, one must move past generalized national narratives and descend into the granular reality of the census mesh.
As we trace the historical contours of South African settlements across the 1996, 2001, 2011, and 2022 Censuses, the spatial manifestation of this competition becomes glaringly apparent.
Consider two contrasting nodes that frequently occupy our national discourse: Makana in the Eastern Cape and Drakenstein in the Western Cape.
When municipal presentation slides mistakenly swap their maps—as spatial visualisation errors occasionally threaten to do—they commit a cardinal sin against empirical truth. They conflate two entirely distinct universes of governance capability.
Drakenstein operates within a functional administrative paradigm, maintaining relative structural integrity, robust capital expenditure execution, and clean audit baselines.
It represents an institutional machinery that, while imperfect, manages the pressures of inward migration and agro-industrial urban growth with a degree of systemic resilience.
Makana, conversely, has too often found itself trapped in the trenches of the competition of the not-so-beautiful. Here, the struggle is not merely about service delivery; it is an existential crisis of institutional survival.
Characterised by collapsing water infrastructure, severe financial distress, and fractured spatial meshes where townships like Joza remain starkly disconnected from economic opportunities, Makana serves as a diagnostic warning light for local government across South Africa.
Why do municipalities slide into this unbecoming competition?
The answer lies in the erosion of metadata integrity and the abandonment of evidence-based planning. For decades, the foundational principles laid down by comprehensive data frameworks — epitomised by the Lehohla Ledger — have warned that you cannot manage what you refuse to measure with precision. Enumeration Areas (EAs) do not lie.
When we aggregate contiguous EAs within a ward, the data reveals the unvarnished truth of human experience: the exact depth of water deprivation, the precise spatial concentration of youth unemployment, and the velocity of infrastructural decay.
Yet, many municipal leaders treat these vital statistics with administrative amnesia.
Budgets are drafted in isolation from spatial realities; supply chain management is treated as a patronage distribution mechanism rather than a technical logistics function; and long-term planning is sacrificed on the altar of short-term political expediency.
In this environment, municipalities stop competing on the quality of life they afford their citizens and instead compete on how many excuses they can manufacture for systemic failure.
To break the cycle of the competition of the not-so-beautiful, South Africa must undergo a radical philosophical and administrative pivot.
We must institutionalise diagnostic governance. This requires three non-negotiable interventions:
Relentless Fidelity to Spatial Data: Municipalities must abandon broad-brushstroke budgeting. Every cent of capital expenditure must be mapped directly to specific EAs and placenames within a ward, ensuring that resources follow actual human need rather than political whim.
Technical Meritocracy over Administrative Compliance: Financial management cannot remain a paper-chasing exercise. It must be anchored in operational competence—ensuring that water treatment works, electrical grids, and road networks are maintained with the same rigour applied to financial accounting.
Civic Accountability Anchored in Truth: Communities must be armed with transparent, verifiable data. When citizens can track the exact performance of their ward through empirical indicators, governance shifts from a contest of competing slogans to a measurable delivery of public goods.
Beauty in governance is not about superficial aesthetics; it is the intrinsic elegance of a system that works—where water flows from the tap, streets are lit, refuse is collected, and citizens can map a predictable trajectory of upward mobility for their children.
Until our local authorities universally reject the downward pull of institutional dysfunction, the competition of the not-so-beautiful will continue to define our municipal landscape. It is time to retire this tragic contest, restore the sanctity of our spatial data, and rebuild our local municipalities from the foundational mesh upward.
As the lamp post becomes the host for would be contenders to the mayoral chains, the Lehohla Ledger will be a finger away, as a mirror of your local area - a street, a village, a surbub, a ward and a municipality - from whence you can constitute your own vision of your life and that of your neighbour.
You prepared it and conversed about it over the last thirty two years and November is a moment of judgement of whether the thirty two years have generated value for the next thirty two years. The verdict is clear from both the IEC sponsored HSRC study that democracy has collapsed and you contributed to it.
The question is what are you doing about it? Take the Lehohla Ledger as your mirror of thirty two years and craft your own manifesto and commit through data driven evidence not T-shirt or food parcels to deliver to the next generation.
* Dr Pali Lehohla is the former Statistician General of South Africa, Director of the Pan African Institute for Evidence (PIE), and the founder of the Lehohla Ledger. He is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg and a Research Associate at Oxford University.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.
The National