Real Politics: The DA is offering the same plumbing with a different plumber
Scrolla | 10.08.2026 15:10
The DA is promising what the ANC promised and failed to deliver, and the question is whether different hands can fix the same broken system, writes Zukile Majova in Real Politics.
The Democratic Alliance launched its local government election manifesto on Saturday with a promise to rescue South Africa’s collapsing municipalities by bringing in the private sector.
Party leader Geordin Hill-Lewis says private companies will help municipalities provide water, electricity and waste services through transparent tender processes. The model will be introduced in municipalities won by the DA after the 4 November elections. The party promises public-private partnerships, professionally managed utilities, ring-fenced service revenue and performance-based contracts.
It sounds modern, practical and business-friendly. It also sounds remarkably similar to what the ANC has been promising and not implementing.
The ANC’s 2021 manifesto promised professional municipalities, reliable services, partnerships with business and action against corruption. The ANC-led government’s Operation Vulindlela is already promoting professionally managed water and electricity utilities, private-sector participation and the ring-fencing of municipal trading-service revenue.
The DA is therefore not proposing a radically different municipal economic model. It is offering many of the same instruments — private operators, tenders, ring-fenced income and outside expertise — with a promise that it will administer them more efficiently and honestly.
In other words, the DA is offering the same plumbing with a different plumber.
That does not necessarily make it a bad policy. South Africa’s municipalities require more capital and technical expertise than many of them currently possess. Water systems are leaking, electricity networks are collapsing and sewage plants are failing. Years of cadre deployment and the departure of experienced engineers have hollowed out municipal administrations. Private investment may be unavoidable if these systems are to be rebuilt quickly. The question is whether private participation will help municipalities regain their capacity or make them permanently dependent on contractors.
Critics are already saying the DA seeks to replace black tenderpreneurs with white companies. The DA campaigns against race-based procurement and wants to replace BEE preferences with a model based on economic disadvantage, job creation and value for money. But in an economy where established capital and technical capacity remain disproportionately white-owned, removing race-conscious preferences could redirect municipal spending towards established white businesses while being presented as colour-blind professionalism.
A DA municipality cannot simply replace national legislation with party policy. Until BEE laws change, its councils remain bound by the Constitution, procurement legislation and the MFMA. Transparent noncompliance would still be noncompliance.
What the DA says it opposes is tenderpreneurship — contracts inflated to reward political allies, specifications written for preferred bidders, payment for work never completed and officials who face no consequences. Its manifesto promises to publish tender awards, contract prices and premiums paid above the lowest qualifying bid, alongside strict performance agreements and greater disclosure of supplier performance.
These are welcome commitments. But transparency alone does not make a contract affordable or a contractor competent.
Johannesburg offers a sobering warning.
The city already relies extensively on private companies, yet its infrastructure continues to deteriorate. Johannesburg Water awarded a contract worth at least R263-million to two little-known companies to supply 70 water tankers. An amaBhungane investigation raised questions about the bidders and the peculiar calculations used to compare their prices. The High Court subsequently declared the tender invalid, although Johannesburg Water appealed.
The tanker economy reveals the danger of outsourcing municipal failure. When companies earn millions delivering emergency water, broken pipes and empty reservoirs become commercially valuable. The contractor makes money because the municipal system does not work. Failure is no longer merely a crisis. It becomes a business model.
This is the central weakness in the DA’s manifesto. It is easy to promise a partnership with the private sector. It is much harder to ensure that the municipality — and ultimately the resident — receives value for money.
A genuine public-private partnership transfers meaningful financial and operational risk to the private company. The contractor should be paid for delivering measurable outcomes, not simply for supplying equipment or hours. A badly constructed partnership is merely a bigger and longer tender. It can lock a municipality into inflated prices, poor service and dependence on a monopoly provider for decades.
The DA’s proposed pre-approved supplier panels also deserve scrutiny. Panels can reduce delays by allowing municipalities to select contractors from a vetted list. But they can also restrict competition and create a protected circle of companies that receive work repeatedly. A panel is only as clean as the officials who constitute it, allocate the work, approve price increases and verify that services were delivered.
Across Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, the DA’s programme is broadly consistent: stabilise finances, ring-fence water and electricity income, repair infrastructure, appoint skilled officials and bring in private capital where municipal capacity is inadequate.
But the DA cannot campaign as if it has never occupied the mayoral offices in these cities. It led Tshwane for much of the period after 2016 and headed administrations in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni after 2021. Coalition chaos disrupted those governments, but it must explain why its earlier periods in power did not leave these cities with stronger institutions — and how its new partnerships will differ from the outsourcing arrangements already consuming municipal budgets.
The GNU is also blurring the ideological lines between the two parties. The ANC has moved towards private power generation, private participation in rail and ports and private investment in water infrastructure. The DA, now sharing national power with the ANC, is embracing similar partnerships at municipal level. This does not mean the DA has adopted ANC policies. It may instead show that both parties have accepted the scale of the crisis and arrived at the same limited range of solutions.
The real election contest may therefore not be between public provision and privatisation, or even between competing policy models.
It will be a contest over credibility.
The ANC says it can renew itself and finally implement the reforms it has promised for years. The DA says the same tools will work if placed in cleaner and more capable hands.
That is a potentially persuasive offer. But if the DA cannot prevent its private partners from becoming the next tanker barons and tender millionaires, its municipal rescue plan will reproduce the system it claims it has come to replace.
Pictured above: Geordin Hill-Lewis stage now sharing the party’s plan for towns and cities that work for all.
Image source: @Our_DA
