There is something particularly devastating about watching local government fail. These are not distant bureaucrats in Pretoria or Cape Town.
These are the people who control whether your taps run, whether your streets have lights, and whether raw sewage flows past your children’s school. When municipalities collapse, democracy does not just falter in theory. It dies in practice, one burst pipe and one unpaid electricity bill at a time.
The situation in 2025 has moved beyond troubling. South Africa’s municipal crisis represents a structural implosion that threatens social stability itself.
The numbers tell part of the story: only 41 municipalities out of 257 achieved clean audits in the 2023-24 financial year. That translates to a mere 16 percent. The remaining 87 percent could not even provide a credible account of how they spent public money or what they accomplished with it.
What makes this especially alarming is where the rot has spread. The Auditor-General’s reports show that metropolitan municipalities have been sliding backward since the 2020-21 cycle.
These are not small rural towns struggling with limited resources. These are the economic engines of the country, serving nearly half of all South African households. If the metros are failing, the entire system is in jeopardy.
1. Emalahleni Local Municipality, Mpumalanga
Emalahleni owes Eskom 10.114 billion rand as of January 2025, making it the single largest municipal debtor in the country.
The municipality has adopted unfunded budgets for three consecutive years and closed 2023-24 with a 1.14 billion rand deficit. Financial recklessness here is not occasional. It is institutional.
The human cost compounds the financial disaster. Emalahleni sits in the Mpumalanga Highveld, a region dominated by coal mining and power generation. Residents breathe illegally high levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and fine particulate matter.
Respiratory and cardiovascular diseases are endemic. The water treatment system relies on aging infrastructure requiring massive capital investment that the municipality cannot provide.
2. Maluti-A-Phofung Local Municipality, Free State
With 8.783 billion rand owed to Eskom, Maluti-A-Phofung holds second place on the debt list. The Auditor-General issued a disclaimer opinion for 2023-24 due to chronic political and administrative instability.
Service delivery has moved beyond failure into humanitarian catastrophe. Chronic water outages affect entire neighborhoods. Infrastructure leaks waste millions of liters daily. Raw sewage flows through residential areas.
Allegations here move into criminal territory. Reports describe “water tanker mafias” linked to corrupt officials who deliberately vandalize infrastructure to profit from emergency water tenders.
Service denial becomes a business model. Irregular expenditure reached 160.78 million rand in 2023-24, suggesting systematic diversion of resources meant for legitimate services.
3. Emfuleni Local Municipality, Gauteng
Emfuleni owes Eskom 8.168 billion rand despite participating in the National Treasury Debt Relief Programme.
The municipality’s ongoing debt accumulation demonstrates how relief programs fail when underlying governance remains broken.
Emfuleni gained notoriety for infrastructure decay, particularly sewage and sanitation failures that contribute heavily to Vaal River pollution.
The environmental damage radiates beyond municipal boundaries, affecting downstream communities and ecosystems.
4. Matjhabeng Local Municipality, Free State
Matjhabeng’s 6.280 billion rand debt to Eskom operates alongside a Section 139 intervention, indicating provincial government has taken over some municipal functions due to failure.
The municipality ranks among seven nationally that habitually disregard legal requirements by failing to submit financial statements on time or at all. Located in the Free State, which suffers the highest non-revenue water losses nationally,
Matjhabeng requires a 500 million rand grant just to refurbish its Balkfontein and Virginia Water Supply Scheme.
5. City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, Gauteng
Tshwane owes Eskom 6.155 billion rand. As a major metro, this debt should not exist. The city struggles with administrative instability and high senior management turnover, undermining institutional capacity.
Tshwane represents the broader metropolitan regression noted by the Auditor-General, where even large, resource-rich municipalities slide into non-payment and dysfunction.
6. eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, KwaZulu-Natal
The 1.1 billion rand irregular expenditure write-off in 2024/25 reveals how poor financial controls become normalized. The municipality’s sewage management crisis poses immediate public health threats.
Testing in April 2025 found critically high E. coli levels at Westbrook, Bronze, and Virginia beaches, rendering them unsafe for swimming. The contamination threatens both public health and the tourism economy that many coastal communities depend on.
7. Nala Local Municipality, Free State
Provincial government placed Nala under mandatory Section 139(1)(b) intervention in May 2025 due to comprehensive failure encompassing governance collapse, political instability, fiscal non-compliance, and adoption of an unfunded budget.
Nala demonstrates how administrative chaos directly translates into denial of basic services and widespread community protests. The intervention came not as prevention but as reaction after the collapse was complete.
8. Madibeng Local Municipality, North West
Deep-seated corruption defines Madibeng’s crisis. A Section 106 investigation launched in May 2025 followed allegations of fraud and maladministration.
Chronic political infighting has collapsed Council meetings. Key officials face suspension. Fundamental governance no longer functions because different factions spend more energy fighting each other than managing the municipality.
9. Ngwathe Local Municipality, Free State
Ngwathe operates within the Free State’s catastrophic water management environment. The province records 60.59 percent non-revenue water, meaning over half of all treated water disappears through leaks, burst pipes, and theft before reaching consumers or generating revenue.
Stable water supply becomes virtually impossible when you lose more water than you deliver. Ngwathe also carries significant Eskom debt, participating in the provincial pattern of financial collapse.
10. City of Matlosana Local Municipality, North West
Matlosana combines high debt to Eskom with the North West province’s overall pattern of poor audit outcomes and financial statement submission failures.
The municipality represents how provincial systemic dysfunction amplifies local failures, creating environments where basic administrative competence becomes exceptional rather than expected.
Conclusion
The 2025 findings reveal a systemic crisis characterized by dangerous synergy between financial collapse, administrative incompetence, and criminal opportunism. The Auditor-General highlighted how oversight bodies fail to act decisively. Local leaders refuse to enforce consequence management even when officials approve payments for projects that do not exist. This unwillingness to hold anyone accountable is the primary root cause of decline.
Constitutional mechanisms designed to support distressed municipalities exist. Section 139 allows provincial intervention. Section 154 mandates support. These must be utilized rigorously and non-politically, transitioning from being a “political football” to mandatory, sustained constitutional support aimed at achieving stability and genuine accountability.
For residents living under municipal failure, the path forward requires leveraging existing accountability tools. Demanding transparency through PAIA, relentlessly reporting corruption to relevant state agencies, and persistently engaging constitutional oversight bodies can exert necessary pressure to reverse decline. The fate of South Africa’s service delivery hinges on collective action and financial vigilance of its citizenry. Democracy at the local level will either be reclaimed through organized citizen accountability or it will continue disintegrating, one collapsed municipality at a time.