As the dust settles on the local government election, it seems that about 40% of the country’s 257 municipalities and nearly all the metros are likely to be hung councils. The likely consequence, according to political analyst Frans Cronje, is that South Africa’s love of enclaves of quasi-state independence is about to go into overdrive. And he thinks this is an outcome to be embraced. But is it?
Coming out of the election, South Africa will have more hung councils than ever. Cronje’s projection is stark: “We estimate that … around 100 are going to be hung.”
In 2016, there were 27. In 2021, the electoral commission published a final list of 70 councils without an outright majority. By either of those comparisons, about 100 would be a dramatic new high.
In an EBnet “In the Moment” webinar, Cronje called the spread of private provision “balkanisation” — but, in his account, this need not mean a country coming apart. The opposite. It may be a way of keeping its people, skills and capital here while the politics sorts itself out.
His example is private security. “In 1997, there was one private security officer for every one police officer,” he says. “Today there are four private security officers for every one police officer.” The comparison is not exact, but the point is that “private actors, businesses, households, have taken from the state responsibility for law and order, and they now enforce it”.
That transfer is visible beyond security. As public rail freight has declined, private operators have carried more freight by road. As Eskom’s share of electricity generation has fallen, private generation has grown. Households and businesses are also finding ways to provide for themselves: solar panels and batteries, backup water, private guards and neighbourhood patrols. In Cronje’s words, “private actors are, at a macro scale, taking charge”.
He calls the resulting communities “enclaves”: “At the narrowest it’s a golf estate; at the broadest it’s an entire region of a city or even a province that’s put under private control or management.” His case for them is both economic and humane. They give people more control over daily life; they allow businesses to keep operating; and they may persuade skilled people to stay.
There is a striking measure of public readiness for this. Cronje says his organisation asked if people agreed with the statement: “In my community we are taking over from the government.” And 80% agreed. “It’s a very positive response to a very difficult political situation,” he says.
A community that secures its streets, keeps the lights on and maintains a public space is not necessarily retreating from the country. It may be investing in the place where it lives, and building resilience while the formal machinery of government struggles. Cronje’s point is that this self-help can buy time, keep capital and expertise inside South Africa and preserve the possibility of a broader recovery.
But the idea is strongest when understood as a bridge, not a destination. The ability to build an enclave depends on money, organisation and access to infrastructure. A household can install solar panels or a borehole only if it can afford them. A gated community’s security may not extend to the surrounding neighbourhood. And the state remains present even in places that appear to have opted out: private systems still depend on public roads, courts, regulation and a functioning wider economy.
That does not make the islands necessarily a bad thing. The more they help communities preserve skills, jobs and confidence, the more valuable they may be to South Africa. But the more they become a substitute for fixing shared services, the more unequal and brittle the country could become. You have to ask who gets left outside.
Coalition politics may be messy, but it can bring parties and constituencies into the same room, with a shared interest in keeping a municipality working. The best outcome would be for private initiative and capable local government to reinforce each other: residents organising where they can, businesses investing where they see a future, and councils doing the essential work that cannot sensibly be subdivided into private islands.
Cronje is right that South Africans are already taking matters into their own hands. The question is whether those islands become lifeboats that keep people and possibility afloat until the state repairs itself, or simply comfortable places from which to watch it drift.
